Mental Illness

I was talking to Carter last night about something which has stayed with me till this morning. What if people who have "mental illnesses" are actually people who are aware of a different reality? What if they have a heightened sensory perception which allows them to experience, "sense" as it were, the facets of life which we have conditioned ourselves out of believing? By that I mean that normal people have dubbed "psychotic" people as abnormal for seeing or feeling things that normal people do not see or feel. What if the things abnormal people see are just as real? How do we know that what they experience -- ESP, ghosts, spirits, nature talking -- is not real? Carter said that it was because majority rules -- 99% of people don't experience it, so it's not real. But 99% of people didn't believe that the earth was round until Galileo Galilei, and 99% of people didn't believe humans could walk on the moon until the late 1960s... and, and, and... yet those things happened. So why not think of people with mental illnesses as people who are aware of a world of which we are not? Why maintain the stereotypes and attempt to explain everything through the study of chemical imbalance? Surely scientists are the first to admit that what we know is only the tiniest fraction of what is knowable. Many of these questions are rhetorical, of course... but my main question remains. Is mental illness just a fabrication of the "normal" mind?