This really
is somewhat unrelated to the o.p. on this thread, but I've always found this chapter of Chesterton's
Orthodoxy to be thought-provoking and insightful. It doesn't necessarily touch on the medical issue, but it does give poignant insights into the mind of madness. Here's the link:
The Maniac
Obviously I'm not giving a blanket endorsement to Chesterton, what with his Catholicism and anti-Calvinism. But that chapter is worth reading. His last paragraph is more insightful as to the utter fear and dread of a solipsistic prison, and I've never seen anything written that equals it:
Quote:
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Of course it is not only of the materialist that all this is true. The same would apply to the other extreme of speculative logic. There is a sceptic far more terrible than he who believes that everything began in matter. It is possible to meet the sceptic who believes that everything began in himself. He doubts not the existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows. For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. He created his own father and his own mother. This horrible fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of our day. That publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the Superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass, those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead of creating life for the world, all these people have really only an inch between them and this awful emptiness. Then when this kindly world all round the man has been blackened out like a lie; when friends fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the world fail; then when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare, then the great individualistic motto shall be written over him in avenging irony. The stars will be only dots in the blackness of his own brain; his mother’s face will be only a sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls of his cell. But over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, “He believes in himself.”
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That's the mindset I was in at one point in life, and I believe that is the "end-game" that Nietzsche and Eastern philosophy, along with other things, can eventually evoke.