Purple teeth

The idea of schizophrenia as an excess of self-consciousness suggests the separation of normality and psychopathology is a question of degree. Ultimately, the analogy of the mind as a machine, mechanism or a computer evokes the feeling, or image, that if something goes wrong, something malfunctions or breaks down, that normal functioning is separated from that which is broken in a much more dramatic fashion than it really is. On the other hand, when things are only separated by degree, they are not separated by an unbridgeable gulf; indeed, the borders between them are blurred and indistinct. Consequently, it becomes difficult to define what belongs to normality and what belongs to the mad.