This is a book that tries to feel the world from the perspective of mental patients. The author spends a lot of time ingeniously to talk with various mental patients, understand their ideas, record their stories, and narrate them from the perspective of a bystander.
This is a magic book, which makes people think deeply about the difference between us and these neurotics?
To be honest, I admire everyone in the story. I don't know if it's my innocence. I think some of them are really awesome. Their theories, their understanding of the world, their attitude to life, and their positioning of themselves are almost clear. I cherish those paranoid people. I envy them. Even though they are not recognized by common values, they still persist in believing in themselves. Maybe it is this so-called obsession that makes them appear abnormal in our eyes.
However, from a different perspective, there may be no normal people in this world. Everyone's spirit is different, so it is impossible to be unified. Seeing the world from different perspectives will lead to different results. So, what is normal and what is abnormal?
There are some strange and ironic cases in the book, such as a man who believes that women are the most horrible creatures in the world and has always feared them, a woman who claims to have been kidnapped by aliens, and a maniac who has performed craniotomy in order to obtain the ability. But the cases that attract my most attention are those that echo the title of this book - the lunatics who are on the verge of genius!
These people can't be too crazy. They have incredible ideas and persistence, and some characteristics can almost be described as absurd. Some of them are like demagogues of evil cults, some are like people crouching on the roadside thinking they are mushrooms, some are like dreamers immersed in their own world, and some have abilities that no one believes they will have. Except for the last kind of people who are difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood, the rest of them have a strong and unbreakable world view. You can't even refute his seemingly absurd but closely logical reasoning with the theory now known, which is also the reason why many people are taken to the wrong way to treat other people's mental diseases. Many such cases have shocked me. I admit that their views are absurd and divorced from reality, but I have to admit that they have created a world that belongs to them and is different from ours. The world has strict logic, and even connects with the real world. You can't argue and correct it. After reading this book, you will have deep sympathy and awe for them, as if to prevent such an outrageous worldview from spreading in the world. We separate them, deny their views, and call them crazy if we want to deny their world and everything.
Yes, we denied them, but they insisted on their own views, so they could only be there, a place isolated. The most painful thing for me is the case of two children. Both of them are geniuses, but the ingredients of genius are mixed with supernatural. A child with talent in physics claimed that he could feel the four-dimensional worm, so he kept exploring in physics, hoping to explore this kind of immaterial creature beyond three dimensions. Another child has a very high IQ, but can see the color of good luck and bad luck, and often does something that is not understood by parents. In fact, this is not the case. After trying to communicate with her, the author found that these actions seemed unreasonable, but actually had more thinking than adults.
There is always a point throughout the book, that is, what we do not understand should not be concluded easily. What the author is exploring is the true face of the world. He thought that the world that human beings had known so far was just a blind man touching an elephant, but that the blind man was still blind, and even if he touched it again, the elephant in his imagination might just be a wall or an old hemp rope. Human beings also have their own thinking limitations, but breaking through conventional thinking - or pathological thinking, may be able to break through difficulties. Essentially, organism is a process of pathological changes. It is hard to say that the pathological changes considered are not another kind of pathological changes.
The mental patients are different from the world in our eyes, but they have their own happiness and sadness, and their own psychological activities. Please give them some respect, respect their thoughts, and respect their beliefs!