The prospect of a genetic diagnosis for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder thus involves confronting fundamental questions about the nature of uncertainty, risk, and choice. We want to eliminate suffering, but we also want to “keep those sufferings.” It is easy to understand Susan Sontag’s formulation of illness as the “night-side of life.” That conception works for many forms of illness—but not all. The difficulty lies in defining where twilight ends or where daybreak begins. It does not help that the very definition of illness in one circumstance becomes the definition of exceptional ability
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