The Dragon: That's some of the ideas that Paulo Coelho is getting at. The division between "madness" and "sanity" and the lines between normality, functionality, and simply being different.

This speaks directly to my habit of placing labels in quotes. In some cases, merely "being different" is enough to get you labelled as "mad". Much as "madness" is presented as being a disease like diabetes, there is no lab test that can be done to determine who is and who isn't. A diagnosis is based entirely on the interpretation of what are otherwise known as symptoms, but how those symptoms are interpreted can vary dramatically between clinicians, culture, setting, expectations, training, etc. This was equally well demonstrated by the doctor who pronounced Coehlo to be "un-mad".

I see this myself in numerous discussions over the years with those who have been given the label of "schizophrenic". While there is no doubt that many of them are undergoing extreme states of despair, confusion, loss of ego boundaries, etc. it's questionable as to whether all of them are truly schizophrenic. It's further highly questionable as to whether or not they will recover. Those who are told they won't are less likely to do so however, if those same individuals can shift their label from "mad" to "unmad", this may increase their odds of recovery.

Incidentally, there is a very high rate of trauma among those diagnosed as schizophrenic, much higher even than any genetic links that have been determined. In spite of this, we still present "schizophrenics" as people who have been biologically and genetically flawed from birth. We give them medications but rarely do we acknowledge the trauma that may well have contributed to their fragmented state.