What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.

I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama.

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don’t know why, because they’re not being paid.

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those...

This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, ‘USA!’ someone else ironically chants back, ‘Mother Russia.

sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more,...

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone...

Shall we go?’ he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.

We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true,...

Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being “pursued or declared a failure.” All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down...

The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,’ Poe said, ‘but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have...

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99…There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book…and leafed through it…I closed the manual. “I wonder if I’ve...

I didn’t realize he was a drunk driver,’ I said. ‘The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still’ – I indicate the...

‎I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t?...

It’s not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is the exact typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘2001’.’It’s Futura...

I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.

A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: ‘A huge group of people are fighting and there’s pepper spray and superheroes and I don’t know.

Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.

There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of...

The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t,...

The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—

Psychopaths [make] the world go around…society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness…I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on...