Faulks: We’ll all be deemed ‘relatively mad’ in 20 years

SEBASTIAN Faulks has said he believes terms such as schizophrenia will soon become obsolete and all humans will be described as ‘relatively mad’.

Best known for his First World War love story Birdsong, the author explores psychiatry in his latest novel Snow Country.

Faulks, 69, told the Chalke Valley History Festival during a discussion about madness and psychiatry of a theory that human mental health problems are ‘connected to the evolutionary event that caused us to become homo sapiens’. ‘An inclination to being mentally unstable in a way that other creatures on Earth are not is simply the human tragedy,’ he said.

‘Increasingly psychiatrists now believe that in 20 years’ time we won’t even use terms like schizophrenia. Basically we will say, “You are all relatively mad, from the least suffering to the most extreme suffering”.

‘Mental illness can be the most extreme suffering imaginable but it is our legacy as homo sapiens.’