Chapter 21: Everyone Is Crazy

Jennette McCurdy spent a fourteen-hour flight to Sydney in a single loop of eating and vomiting, unable to keep anything down for more than a few minutes at a time. There was no moment on that flight when she wasn't eating, throwing up, or plotting how to get to the bathroom for the fourteenth time without the businessman in the toupee next to her noticing. By the final round, her mouth sour and raw, she shoved her fingers down her throat, and as the chunky fluid poured into the toilet bowl like an ugly waterfall, she spotted something small, white, and hard: a molar, worn loose by stomach acid.

Alfred Adler had a rule for this: "The only normal people are the ones that you don't know very well."

Flip through any list of admired CEOs and you find backdated stock options (Steve Jobs), affairs with subordinates (Bill Gates), SEC violations (Elon Musk), a flight from prosecution (Carlos Ghosn), and scandal-driven ousters (John Browne of BP). Competence and chaos live in the same skull.

Jeffrey Skilling, who ran Enron Capital & Trade Resources, led all-male executive expeditions built around genuine physical risk. Ken Rice said Skilling wanted an adventure "where someone could actually get killed." On a 1,200-mile Baja road race, only three of the group finished: Rice punched a tooth through his own lip, one executive nearly died in a flipped Jeep, another broke his ribs, and Andy Fastow tumbled into a cactus while rushing to help. They flew home on a chartered jet and handed out photo albums. The trips became company lore, monuments to Enron's macho, risk-hungry culture.

Not all of it is performance. Larry Ellison, who sat on the boards of both Apple and Tesla, argued that the founders he watched up close shared a useful strain of obsessive-compulsive disorder: "OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did." What a clinic would treat, a board rewards.

"It is rare indeed for the evil side of a creator to be so all-pervasive as it was in Picasso," Paul Johnson wrote in Creators, "who seems to have been without redeeming qualities of any kind." Picasso himself said it plainly: "I do not give. I take." Everyone who helped him eventually got dropped, betrayed, or verbally abused. Psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig studied more than a thousand eminent lives across music, art, science, and politics and found that writers and artists carried the highest rates of depression and alcoholism of any group.

You Are Crazy

Freud named the source directly: "Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if attacked. A powerful desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment." We know criminals, tyrants, and predators exist, and we draw a hard line between them and us, as though aggression were a trait some people have and others don't. Solzhenitsyn drew the boundary where it belongs: "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

The evidence for this runs old and consistent. Julius Caesar, once ransomed from pirates, raised an army and hunted down every one of his captors. Nixon kept an enemies list and used the IRS to, in his own aide's words, "screw" his political opposition. A friend from college, rejected by someone they'd barely started dating, told me that they wanted to key the other person's car. None of these people would call themselves violent. Jung warned that fully knowing your own shadow may be beyond human capacity, "an almost superhuman task." A more realistic goal is smaller: write down who wronged you instead of acting on it. Come back in a year and see how few of those entries still have any heat in them. Most grievances don't get resolved; they get outlived. Forgiveness research points the same direction: what lifts mood is letting go, and time does most of that work for you.

None of this is an argument for becoming Jeffrey Skilling. It's a reminder that the composed, professional people on your screen are performing a role, and that the impulse behind their worst moments lives in you too. You don't need to feel abnormal for being a little crazy. Everyone is. The question worth asking is what it is costing you.

The Forms It Takes

Fear Is Universal

Tom Aspinall, a UFC heavyweight champion, has said he gets so nervous before fights that he has nearly wet himself walking out, and that the fear never fades no matter how many times he steps into the cage. This recognition is useful, not just comforting. Once you see that the interviewer, the director, the executive across the table is just as afraid of failing as you are, their authority loses its edge. You are overestimating them and they are overestimating you.

Meg LeFauve's childhood anxiety spun ordinary worries into catastrophic stories. It was only when she began writing that she recognized the connection: her anxiety and her imagination were the same faculty, pointed in different directions. "Anxiety can use your imagination too," she said, and once she stopped condemning that part of herself, she redirected it into the Pixar films Inside Out and Inside Out 2, built around the idea that even fear has a purpose in moving a life forward. The goal is not to eliminate anxiety but to reroute it.

An Inescapable Life

Depression often takes root not in isolated crisis but in a life someone feels trapped inside. Doris Kearns Goodwin documents this in Leadership in Turbulent Times. Lincoln's collapse came in the winter of 1840, at thirty-one, when an infrastructure program he had championed for Illinois fell apart under recession; his depression grew so severe that friends removed the knives, razors, and scissors from his room, and he did not seek another term, convinced he lacked what the work required.

McCurdy's memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died renders that entrapment from the inside. In the aftermath of her mother's death, she admitted part of her hoped a bulimia-induced heart attack would end it for her: "The disappointments in my life are piling up, and with each added disappointment, so grows my misery." In therapy, she confronted the scale of what she'd been avoiding: bingeing and purging up to ten times a day, drinking eight or nine shots of liquor a night, grief she called insurmountable.

When Control Becomes the Disorder

Eating disorders often masquerade as control at the moment when everything else in a life feels ungovernable. McCurdy moved through anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia, eventually admitting she envied the "regal, in control, all-powerful" image of anorexia over what she experienced as the "chaotic, pathetic" cycle of bulimia. The specifics mattered less than the illusion of governance the disorders offered over a life where, as she wrote, "most things are out of my control, but this? This I can control."

Causes of Neurosis

Joseph Stalin's father beat him so severely as a child that he pissed blood for a week. The boy who would go on to cause the deaths of millions learned early that the world was a place of arbitrary violence, and he rebuilt the world in that image. The uncomfortable truth at the heart of neurosis is that it rarely begins with the person who suffers from it. It begins earlier, in rooms they couldn't leave, at the hands of people they couldn't escape.

Childhood Trauma

Dr. Gabor Maté, in The Myth of Normal, argues that what society calls normal—chronic stress, emotional repression, disconnection—is often the thing making us sick. Trauma doesn't have to be dramatic to be damaging; it can be the slow accumulation of small denials, and it surfaces later as anxiety, addiction, depression, even autoimmune disease.

One common response to that damage is self-soothing that curdles into addiction. Another is compensation through excessive agreeableness, the making of a people pleaser. Maté experienced the second firsthand. Born a Jewish infant under the Nazis, he absorbed the message early that the world didn't want him, that he wasn't good enough. "So you spend the rest of your life compensating," he explains, "taking on too much, and stressing yourself. And those stresses don't just stay in your mind, they have an impact on your physiology." The child who learns they're unworthy doesn't stop needing love; they learn to earn it through relentless usefulness, silence about their own needs, and the suppression of anger whenever their boundaries are crossed.

McCurdy learned that second response before she was old enough to name it. Her mother raised her to be "a good sport," believing it would win her more roles and build her career. For years she took it as a compliment: she was the good one, the easy one, the teacher's pet. But the compliment was a leash. "If I wasn't such a good sport to begin with," she later wrote, "I wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place." The niceness that was supposed to protect her instead trapped her.

Carl Jung located the source further upstream, in the parents themselves. "The psychic disorders of children," he wrote, "are more often than not causally connected with the psychology of the parents." A child's mind, left undisturbed, would function correctly; it's the parent's own fear of life, transmitted without words, that teaches the child to evade rather than face difficulty. Jung identified a second failure mode as well: the adult who never fully separates from their family. To grow up in body while remaining a child in mind guarantees neurosis. "An excessively strong attachment to the parents is a severe handicap in his later adaptation to the world," he warned, "for a growing human being is not destined to remain forever the child of his parents."

Unmet Desires and Shame

Some of what looks like neurosis is nothing more than an ordinary desire someone was taught to be ashamed of. Our desires are natural. They are not, in themselves, shameful. The suppression is the sickness, not the desire.

McCurdy's upbringing shows exactly how this operates. When McCurdy got her first boyfriend at eighteen, her mother wrote to her: "I am so disappointed in you. You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT. Thinking of you with his ding dong inside of you makes me sick. You look pudgier, too. It's clear you're EATING YOUR GUILT." An ordinary desire, wanting a boyfriend at eighteen, was recast as evidence of moral collapse. The effect was total. When TMZ later published bikini photos of her, her reaction wasn't confidence but revulsion: "I think boobs are hideous. I hate them. I wish I was flat-chested and curve-less. I wish there was nothing sexual or suggestive about my body." Her tears, she wrote, had been replaced by venomous self-loathing. This is what shame manufactures: not restraint, but self-hatred aimed at parts of oneself that were never wrong to begin with.

The deeper danger of this framework is what it does to self-perception. Anyone convinced that goodness is their defining virtue will struggle to admit fault, because fault threatens the entire identity. Nietzsche caught the mechanism exactly: "'I did that,' says my memory. 'I could not have done that,' says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, the memory yields." The person who needs to see themselves as good will, eventually, simply stop remembering the ways they weren't.

Treatment of Neurosis

Universal is not the same as harmless. Everyone carries some of this, and most of it costs nothing. But when it starts taking things from you—work you won't attempt, people you can't stay close to, years that narrow instead of widen—it has stopped being a quirk and become something to treat.

What follows is calibrated for the ordinary end of that range. If what you are carrying involves thoughts of ending your life, a break from reality, or a disorder already doing physical damage, self-directed work is not the right tool and waiting it out is not a plan. That is the point to involve a doctor or a crisis line.

There is no shame in this. As Carl Jung wrote, "a neurosis is not a disgrace. It is not a fatal disease, but it does grow worse to the degree that one is determined to ignore it." The problem is never the neurosis itself; it is the refusal to see it. One of the fastest ways to break through denial is to ask someone who knows you well to describe you honestly, ideally through a structured tool like the Big Five personality assessment. Jung understood this decades before modern psychology confirmed it: "one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting yourself to the objective judgment of others."

Every neurosis, in Jung's model, follows the same sequence. First, life presents a real challenge. Second, out of cowardice, laziness, or self-doubt, the person evades it: "if we follow the history of a neurosis with attention, we regularly find a critical moment when some problem emerged that was evaded." Whatever planted the thing in childhood is not what keeps it alive now; the problem you refuse to look at today is. An evaded problem alone does not create neurosis; what does is the deployment of defense mechanisms to push that problem out of awareness entirely. Jung was specific on this point: "there is a marked difference between the two in that the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems." Repression, displacement, projection, compulsive busyness, self-medication, and avoidance are the usual tools, and each one is purchased at the price of rising anxiety.

Outer Problems and Inner Problems

Jung divided evaded problems into two categories: those in the outer world and those in the inner one. Outer problems are collective, the basic tasks any functioning adult must complete: forming friendships, building intimacy, holding a job, contributing to a community, developing a workable social persona. Jung called neurosis rooted in these failures a case of "atrophied collective adaptation," and the cure is straightforward, if not easy: the neglected duties have to be taken up again.

But some people clear every collective hurdle—spouse, family, career, income—and remain miserable. Jung encountered this repeatedly: "psychotherapists are familiar with the collectively adapted person who has everything and does everything that could reasonably be required as a guarantee of health, but yet is ill." For these people, the unmet challenge is not social but internal. They fear their own individuality and ignore the call to develop what is idiosyncratic in them, becoming, in Jung's phrase, "incapable of living his own life and finding the character that belongs to him." As psychologist Jonathan Shedler put it, "for most people most of the time, depression is a message. That message is: we must change something about ourselves."

Facing It Head-On

Most people wait for their symptoms to disappear before they begin living. That is backward. Doing what frightens you is often what weakens the symptom, and waiting to feel ready only allows the avoidance to sustain itself. This is one of the clearest and best-supported principles of treatment: through gradual exposure, action comes first, and the feeling follows. Seneca described the same trap two thousand years ago: "The fool, with all his other faults, has this also: he is always getting ready to live."

The Limits of Medication

Modern psychiatry too often treats the symptom and leaves the disease alone. Bessel van der Kolk, after years studying trauma, concluded that psychiatric medication "may deflect attention from dealing with the underlying issues," shifting control "out of their own hands and puts doctors and insurance companies in charge." The trend line is at least suggestive: antidepressant use has climbed for decades, yet, as van der Kolk notes, "it has not made a dent in hospital admissions for depression," even as the number of Americans treated for it has tripled. Profitability helps explain why the imbalance persists. As van der Kolk observed, "because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments," and any therapist who explores alternatives risks being dismissed as fringe.

Medication has its place, particularly in the short term or for genuine neurochemical dysregulation, and for some people it is what makes the rest of the work possible at all. If you are taking something now, none of this is a reason to stop; coming off a psychiatric drug without a prescriber involved carries its own risks. But for most people, van der Kolk's own research points elsewhere: he found yoga produced larger reductions in PTSD symptoms than any medication he had studied. Meditation, breathwork, psychotherapy, EMDR, movement, and—under clinical supervision—psychedelics all address what a pill cannot.

Therapy

Therapy is overrated mainly because the average therapist is average, and outcomes vary enormously from one practitioner to the next. A therapist can only take a patient as far as the therapist has gone. Jung was blunt about this: "only if the psychotherapist knows how to cope with himself and his own problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the same. Only then." The practical consequence is that you should shop around. Treat the opening sessions as your evaluation of the therapist and not only theirs of you, and if nothing has moved after a couple of months, change practitioners rather than concluding the whole enterprise is useless. And even short of a great fit, simply having someone to talk to, or a relationship that models healthy interaction, has value on its own.

Nothing here works without buy-in from the patient. They must first admit a problem exists and be willing to do the work of fixing it. A line often attributed to Hippocrates makes the condition explicit: "before you heal someone, ask him if he's willing to give up the things that make him sick." And even full cooperation has limits. Some conditions, schizophrenia among them, are managed rather than cured.

Group Therapy

Much of what keeps people sick is the private conviction that they are uniquely shameful or broken. Group therapy dismantles that belief directly: hearing another person voice the same fear, and normalize it, can do more than any individual session. That validation often lands harder coming from a peer than from a paid professional, precisely because it isn't the peer's job to say it. For those without access to therapy or a group, reading is a reasonable substitute: encountering someone else's honest account of a struggle like your own produces a similar, if quieter, effect.

Understanding Yourself

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung argued that sufficiently self-aware individuals can perform psychoanalysis on themselves. It's the ideal path, though a difficult one: only a small fraction of people will read the literature closely enough, and fewer still are honest enough with themselves to apply it.

Oprah Winfrey has described the moment this kind of self-confrontation became unavoidable for her. On her show in 1991, counselor John Bradshaw led her through an exercise: close your eyes, return to the house you grew up in, look through the window, and find yourself inside. "What I felt at almost every stage of my development was lonely," she recalled. "Not alone, because there were always people around, but I knew that my soul's survival depended on me." That single exercise surfaced something she had spent years running from. It costs nothing to run that exercise on yourself, and the word that arrives before you have time to edit it is usually the honest one. She later connected it to a broader truth: "healing the wounds of the past is one of the biggest and most worthwhile challenges of life… you must be fearless enough to give yourself the love you didn't receive."

Neurosis thrives on being unexamined. The moment it's named, it starts to lose its grip.