Years ago, when I first started my career, I worked in the child and adolescent wing of a large psychiatric hospital. One of the patients I was tasked with supervising was a 12-year-old young boy named Michael. He was part of the half-day treatment program. Michael thought he was a dragon. This idea took hold of him when he was 6, and he quickly became completely convinced of it. Through years of imaginative mental creation and psychological gymnastics, he’d constructed an en