PANTHEON, JANUARY 2016We have a tendency to judge craziness at face value. Why do people scream at invisible entities, eat dirt and paper, or loiter on street corners muttering about the Devil? Well, because they’re crazy, right?
But what if we didn’t accept that answer so easily and instead asked the question: Why is that person acting so bizarrely? For neurologists, “crazy” isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a symptom. The key is to look into the brain and pinpoint the cause of that symptom. What I have found, time after time, is that once we discover that underlying cause, abnormal behavior can be viewed as a reasonable, even logical, form of compensation.
I discuss this perspective on mental illness in my latest book, NeuroLogic: The Brain’s Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior.
Consider the following two people, each of whom exhibits a unique form of mental illness. The first is convinced she’s dead, and won’t believe anyone who tells her otherwise. She carries ...
