As someone who doesn’t want to go insane, I find it useful to read accounts of people going insane (especially from people who passed through madness and out the other side).
For people who are curious and want to read a more detailed account of someone’s psychotic break, what delusions felt like for them from the inside, the misadventures they had during it, and the lessons they took from it, Peter Welch wrote about his here: https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1
This story is the pivotal narrative turning point that it’s easy to blame for me being the person I am instead of someone else. The summer of my twentieth year on the planet obliterated every measure of good, evil, truth, beauty, reality, and fantasy I’d had before and makes everything that’s happened since seem banal. It’s the reason I will never believe in anything again, the reason I play music, and the reason the Acadia Hospital nursing staff thinks I’m a crackhead. There are probably three or four dozen people that won’t talk to me to this day because of these events, and I am an local legend in Bar Harbor, Maine.
As someone who doesn’t want to go insane, I find it useful to read accounts of people going insane (especially from people who passed through madness and out the other side).
For people who are curious and want to read a more detailed account of someone’s psychotic break, what delusions felt like for them from the inside, the misadventures they had during it, and the lessons they took from it, Peter Welch wrote about his here: https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1