I practice octane-fueled word-of-mouth all the time, especially when someone I love or admire (or both) launches a successful venture, takes a creative leap or publishes a book. In this case, it’s the latter.

My amazing, bubbly, beyond-inspirational friend Nancy Coste was recently commissioned to shoot the artwork for a cookbook based on Belgium and Holland’s pet-biscuit, the beloved speculoos. Nancy is an inordinately talented photographer who hails from New York. She has lived in Paris, Santiago, Rome and now, as fate would have it, in Brussels, right around the corner from me.

For the book, Nancy was to schlep around the country and shoot an array of dishes (mostly deserts) integrating speculoos in some form or another, including some oeuvres created by major Belgian chefs. The publisher held her to a tight budget which was barely enough to pay for her food stylist (flown in special from Italy) and Nancy was worried about the cost of renting interesting plates and platters for the shoot. I volunteered the use of all my vintage dishes, cake stands and canisters and, voila, no more budgetary headaches!

The book came out just before Christmas and, beyond delighting in Nancy’s beeeyyyoootiful photos, I derive no end of pleasure admiring my babies shown to great advantage in so many delicious pages. All my platters, cake stands, cocktail glasses come from a decade of scanning flea markets and churchyard sales. Not one piece cost more than €5, most set me back less than €1. Ironically, I have a soft spot for cake stands, despite the fact that I really don’t bake.

And so for the plug. If you are a speculoos fan, buy Nancy’s book now (you’ll get to see my vintage dishes)! And if you’ve never heard of speculoos, time to come and sample them in Belgium.

It has taken me this long to calm down enough to collect my thoughts and, even now, as I attempt to post something about this, I’m already seizing up with the same rush of rage and bewilderment.

This “discovery” is the result of a study at the VU University hospital in Amsterdam, which “measured” the medical cost of 5,500 adults diagnosed with a range of mental illnesses, calculated days they were absent from work, and drew some damning conclusions. Reuters disseminated the results of the study (would be interesting to find out what the study itself cost) and dozens of papers across the world blindly reprinted it.

The head-shaking, tut-tutting, dismayed hand-on-hip-tone of the article is not just astounding, it’s scary. Throwing around the term “neurotics” in such a vague, unassuming yet loaded manner is pretty shocking too.

Am I overreacting?

Could it be that, in our evolved, 21st century Europe, there is still a publicly-held belief that mainstreamed mindsets, normalcy-uber-ales, and don’t-rock-the-boat-behaviors are what one should be striving for? That having less neurotics (whatever that means) will make society a better place?

I mean really, think of how much simpler, easier and convenient life would be if we didn’t have these neurotics plaguing our workplace and public health systems? While we’re at it: why do we need people with bad eyesight, people who eat too much, drive badly or use too many adjectives? And what about the physically disabled, the infertile, those that are slow at arithmetic? Don’t you shudder to think of the cost of them?!

To calm myself down I surfed over to the AMA website to see how they defined neurotic. It’s worth knowing, for the record, that “the word neurosis means ‘nerve disorder,’ and was first coined in the late eighteenth century by William Cullen, a Scottish physician. Cullen’s concept of neurosis encompassed those nervous disorders and symptoms that do not have a clear organic cause. Sigmund Freud later used the term anxiety neurosis to describe mental illness or distress with extreme anxiety as a defining feature. There is a difference of opinion over the clinical use of the term neurosis today. It is not generally used as a diagnostic category by American psychologists and psychiatrists any longer, and was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.”

The night before my banana-dropping episode I had dinner with a Dutch friend who told me his daughter had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorrder. In Holland, he explained, this is a social stigma that can hang like a billboard on your back, condemning you to a lifetime of alienation and disapproval. I was stunned. In New York City everyone is borderline. Being even-keeled and emotionally stable is highly abnormal. In fact, it will scare the hell out of most people.

And now, astonished at the international recognition received by this you-see-how-awful-they-really-are-and-someone-really-should-do-something-about-it study, I realised what he was talking about: being normal is key!

I defy anyone out there to define normal.

I toyed briefly with writing to the authors of the study (and the two Reuters journalists who made this “news”) to ask them if our world would indeed be better off without (among others) Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Woody Allen and of course Van Gogh, that neurotic Dutchman.

I spent my university years studying some of the greatest British and French neurotics. Their genius is a huge part of what made me the person I am. The works of many neurotics (including dozens of borderline people) continue to expand my mind, soul and heart. I hope my children and many generations to come will be able to enjoy the immense wealth that “neurotics” contribute to society. Call me crazy.

Schulz describes the links between the physiological and the emotional and invites us to tune into our emotions and bodies at all times, or else. The complaints in attention and memory deficit and chronic mood swings I witness in my (balanced and objectively healthy) female friends is indication enough that we could stand to pay more attention to what the emotions coursing through us are signaling, and to what our body is trying to tell us.

This may seem obvious, it does to me, yet this book takes “being aware” to a deeper level. Don’t worry, nothing new-agey or voodoo here, Schulz simply melds her insights with medical research and with her clinical experience as a neuropsychiatrist. Her book is filled with expert health advice and self-help tips namely, cool ‘brain rewiring’ exercises, herbal and nutritional supplement recommendations, and even a generous amount of common sense. If you want to get a better handle on why you or are sad, angry, tired or restless this book could well provide the Aha’s you need.