For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

If you give coffee to hyperactive kids to drink, you can sometimes make them calm. There are tests and proof. There are similar arguments against it.

If you try to drive a crazy person crazy, he or she may become sane. I'm sure this can be proved somehow.

In the book night by A. Alvarez, page 48, he makes the point that under insane conditions, the insane function normally.

"Bruno Bettelheim, who had been a prisoner at Dachau and Buchenwald, pointed out that seriously disturbed people- especially paranoids- seem to lose their symptoms, and even to cope quite well in the concentration camps because the horrors of everyday life effortlessly outstripped those of their internal worlds. Maybe this was also true for me, on a miniature scale: when every night brought violence and the threat of death, without any intervention on my part, there was no longer any need for me to be afraid of my own night within the night."

There is no end of ways to cope.