I heard someone say that a physical handicap is not a physical defect, but that the world expects something from the body that it is not. If you enter a building and face stairs, it is the building that expects you to have feet to climb it. I think that mental illness is also relational, that it is not soley an anomaly of the soul. Though, in the case of madness, it is not the world that expects something from the mind, but the mind that expects the world to be something that it is not. This is the source of our suffering. The voices in my head does not cause me to suffer, if the voices were simply real, then I would be sane and there would be no problem. What causes my endless anxieties is to be confronted by a world where there is no voice. There is a discrepancy between what I think I hear, and thus what I think there is in the world, and the world that I am forced to live in. This can be very confusing, and often frightning. - lindus