AS A BOY, especially while lying in bed or suffering a fever, I was periodically troubled by harshly critical voices that vaguely charged me with misconduct and failures of character. As I grew up, the murmuring Greek chorus was replaced by a single voice, which by then I recognized as my own.
If those seemingly external voices had persisted into adolescence and adulthood, I might have qualified for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Instead, I became a garden-variety neurotic, assailed by self-recriminations that undermined my confidence and interfered with my happiness.
Are these two states of mind categorically distinct, or do they occupy different spots on a continuum of mental health? Is one properly classified as a brain disease requiring biomedical treatment while the other is a psychological condition amenable to talk therapy? Or are we talking about a difference in degree rather than
