Anosognosia, the brain's inability to recognize its own illness, can leave the sufferer the last to know.

Medication can steady the brain's storms but, research suggests, cannot by itself rebuild a disrupted life.

Decades of research point to connection as a condition of recovery, not just a supplement to treatment.

The most dangerous thing about losing your mind is that, from the inside, it can feel like finally finding it.

In the autumn of 2024, I moved through the world with a certainty I had chased my whole intellectual life. I am a historian by training. The grievances I had accumulated against my family, against former colleagues, against a mental health system that had failed me for the better part of a decade all fit together with an elegance that felt, in the moment, not like madness but like clarity. I was not unraveling. I was, I believed, finally seeing.

In fact, I was in the grip of a manic psychotic episode that would end with felony charges, four months in a county jail, and commitment to a state forensic psychiatric hospital. The clarity was the illness. That is the first thing I want this column to take seriously: severe mental illness does not always announce itself as suffering. Sometimes it arrives wearing the face of insight, and the person living inside it is the last to know.

I am qualified to write about this in two ways that rarely occupy the same person.

The first is that I am a scholar. I hold a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago, and my first book was about state violence and the institutions societies build to contain it. I understood confinement as a subject.

The second is that I became its object. The institutions I had........

© Psychology Today