The Dragon [quoting Paulo]: And madness? Madness is the inability to communicate.

I would go further than Paulo might have. I would say that one of the factors that creates and fuels "madness" is the inability to communicate our life experience and have it understood. As a result, not only is it related to a lack of authentic communication, it also creates a lack of authentic connection to other people.

I've looked at the issue of "schizophrenia" from a primarily psychological angle and from that perspective, I deem it to be a crisis of such overwhelming proportion, it produces a collapse of the ego (one's sense of self-identity). The only way to rebuild that ego is by, once more, connecting to other people and roles in the external world. However, this can be very difficult for an individual in a fragmented state to do -- all the more so if those people and larger society do not understand.