I have a small comfort zone, therefore I must be normal

If normal is becoming a shrunken pool due to overdiagnosis of mental illness, and alarming clinical psychologists like Til Wykes, I actually find this shock and horror rather amusing (especially coming from a psychologist.) Let me explain.

When you are on the outside looking in, in terms of what "normal" people call schizophrenia, you assume the person is mentally ill, because, really, the behavior can be off the charts weird. So "normal" people run away. They are so horror struck that they assume whatever it they are seeing and hearing can't possibly be normal and they ask that someone (a psychiatrist) put a stop to this behavior immediately. This almost always involves using medications to solve the problem. However, medications don't actually fix the problem, they just sedate the person and more often than not, those pesky abnormal thoughts are just waiting around to break through once more.

Just because you or I think we would never react so strangely to a problem, doesn't mean that doing so is abnormal. Psychosis is a well-trod path. Venture out beyond your comfort zone of normal and you will begin to understand.

I wish to thank Beyond Meds for bringing this wonderful quote to my attention.

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. — Carl Jung