I recently listened to the audiobook of Girl, interrupted, a memoir written by Susanne Kaysen about her 18-month stay at a mental hospital, and I absolutely loved it.

Going into it, I thought I was going to explore uncharted territory. However, it didn't take me long to discover that Susanne and I had a lot in common.

"People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy."

There are certain instances in my life when clinging to sanity seemed like something that was entirely out of my control, and losing it seemed like a very probable outcome.

Reading that part, I felt like she was talking about me as if I was the one to ask her how she got in there. I felt like she could see how afraid I was of ending up like her.

You see, mental hospitals are filled with people who were once as normal as you and me. It took something to bring the crazy out of them, some only needed to cling to a thought to the brink of insanity and some required extreme traumatic events to completely lose it.

what's terrifying is that you'll only know how much it takes when it's already too late, and what if it doesn't take that much for me to end up like Daisy or Polly?

"My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated - for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.

And after that? I asked her.

A lot of darkness, she said."

This part made me wonder, were there any signs before that indicated that it might happen? Or, is it actually plausible that one would one day just turn mad?

Scientifically, yes.

You could catch a physical disease that alters your psychological state or you could have a psychotic episode and find yourself in what Georgina calls darkness.

I once saw a headline of a woman who, in a psychotic state, after giving birth, was convinced that her newborn was the devil’s child, so in an act of what she might have believed in her hazy state as self-defense or protection, she murdered her child.

Postpartum psychosis is, fortunately, a rare condition, but its close relative postpartum depression affects around one out of seven mothers. Meaning that if you are a woman and you are thinking of having a child, you might get an even deeper understanding of what Susanne went through.

"But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down."

I believe that every one of us has flirted with madness at some point or another. Most of us come out of it unscathed, sometimes like in the cases of people who went through extremely traumatic experiences, it's a way for their brains to cope with the shock, grief, or confusion they might be dealing with.

most people spring back to our reality whereas some just can't handle it.

"Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, aspin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted.

Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco."

Reading this book I felt like in a parallel universe I could have been Susanne. I think that if more people cared less about the branding they’d get if they get help, or if help was accessible to more people, we’d recognize that we have a lot more Susannes male or female than we know. The line between sanity and insanity isn’t just thin, it’s blurry and confusing and is trespassed again and again throughout our lives.

Every madman is a human being, who might have been more genetically predisposed than us to have hallucinations. I can’t forbid people or myself from fearing mental illness, but we as the fortunate ones whose limits weren’t as tested as others shouldn’t think ourselves to be of a completely superior breed than that of the mentally ill.