When you have an hour or two, please read or listen to “The Touch of Madness,” an essay by journalist David Dobbs in Pacific Standard. The essay chronicles the life and scholarship of psychologist Nev Jones (shown at left). Jones, now on the faculty of the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences at the University of South Florida, is changing how Western culture responds to and “treats” schizophrenics, routing them through a medical system that marks them as part of an invisible caste exiled and devalued in public life.

Jones reveals to Dobbs her own bewildering spiral into psychosis as a philosophy student in the graduate school of Depaul University, and about the range of people — friends, family, mentors, counselors, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, hospital workers — who shaped her experience, for good or for naught. Dobbs writes:

Jones stands out because she so effectively represents two things. First, she conveys, as few do, the fullness and urgency of the intellectual and evidence-based arguments for change. And second, she makes uniquely vivid the human stakes involved, both in the destruction of people’s lives—to say nothing of their suffering—and in what the rest of us lose when culture casts them aside. For it happens that Jones herself was once deemed unreachable and flung into her own pit of despair. She re-emerged only because she found a therapist who listened, and a few strands of culture she wove into a lifeline.

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Read or listen to “The Touch of Madness” here.

Discover the research of Nev Jones.

Photograph of Nev Jones via Twitter.