More from the same essay. This bit is from before the first segment I posted.

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So one day I decided to trash my bedroom. It was a way of saying without words: "You see, I can't live in the real world. I can't get a job. I can't realize my dream. I think you're absolutely right. I am mad, and I want to go back to the mental hospital!"

Fate can be so ironic. When I had finished wrecking my room I was relieved to see my parents were phoning the psychiatric hospital. However, the doctor that usually dealt with me was on vacation. The nurses arrived with a junior doctor in two. He saw me sitting there surrounded by torn-up books, broken records, and ripped curtains, and asked my family and the nurses to leave the room.

"What's going on?" he asked.

I didn't reply. A madman should always behave like someone not of this world.

"Stop playing around," he said. "I've been reading your case history. You're not mad at all and I won't admit you to the hospital."

He left the room, wrote a prescription for some tranquillizers, and (I found out later) told my parents that I was suffering from "admission syndrome." Normal people who at some point find themselves in abnormal situation - such as depression, panic, etc - occasionally use illness as an alternative to life. That is, they choose to be ill because being "normal" is too much like hard work. My parents listened to his advice and never again had me admitted to a mental institution.

From then on I could no longer seek comfort in madness. I had to lick my wounds alone. I had to lose some battles and win others. I often had to abandon my impossible dream and work in offices instead, until one day I gave it all up for the nth time and I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. There I realized that I could not keep refusing to face up to the fate of "being an artist," which in my case meant being a writer. So at thirty-eight I decided to write my first book and risk entering into a battle which I had always subconsciously feared: the battle for a dream.

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I wonder what would have happened if Paulo Coelho was readmitted and was continuously treated as "ill." Carl Jung had an idea that no matter what, someone had to be pushed to their very limits out of their comfort zone in the real world.