Silence is Deadly

I find the following entry of my father's agonizingly captivating.  His journal entries serve as a vivid lens by which one can get an idea of what it must be like to live with a major mental illness.  Often, the passages wrench the gut.  You can feel the pain, desperation and fear with each entry.  As his daughter, I often read them with a particularly strong variety of sorrow, yet I feel obligated to do so.  I feel that if he had to endure the pain firsthand, the least I can do is suffer through it in the name of awareness.  Giving readers not just the sense of what it must be like to be schizophrenic, but also to provide humanity to the illness.  He was someone's son, father, brother, uncle, cousin and friend.  He loved and was loved by many in return.  His disease has a face and it was indeed tragic.  While it did not physically take his life, it certainly captured the quality of his life.  He lived each and every day painfully aware of what schizophrenia had stolen from him.

These days everybody and their brother is a victim.  Every family is dysfunctional.  Everybody’s inner child has been violated and wounded.  Criminals are victims of urban stress syndrome and hence not culpable.  Alcoholics are the victims of a disease.  Child abusers were abused as children themselves.  Murderers plead insanity.  White collar criminals are victims of greed.  And on and on it goes. Schizophrenics on the other hand really are victims.  True, classic victims.  They have been struck down in their prime by a disease so unspeakably insidious that it rarely comes up in comes up in casual conversation.  Most people don’t know much about schizophrenia, and for the most part are content to remain in ignorance.  The stigma about mental illness is so pervasive because everybody has wondered about their sanity at one time or another and nobody wants to talk about it.  Thinking it a weakness of character.  But unlike neurosis, which afflicts virtually everyone, and is merely a conflict of ideas, schizophrenia is a biological disease of the brain.  Consequently, schizophrenics are victims, real victims.   Just as much as a person who is a victim of diabetes or cancer.  Yet schizophrenics do not spend a lot of time trying to gain sympathy from others.  Generally, they try to hide their disease.  They are embarrassed and ashamed and only want to pass for normal by concealing their affliction from the prying of the mentally healthy.  There is a great deal of denial among schizophrenics about their disease because it is so misunderstood by the preponderance of the healthy population.  No one wants to be a lunatic.  The mentally ill, except possibly to their families, are the objects of derision and fear.  Or else they are regarded, to put it blandly, peculiar and subject to curiosity.  This is only as long as a sufficient distance is maintained to prevent actually sharing in the frustration and pain of the scourged.  The tears of bitterness are best shed in private.   We have become a culture of comedy and it is surpassingly difficult to find much funny about insanity.  In the movies the mentally ill are often depicted as harmless comic idiots.  This is a far cry from the real picture of schizophrenics’ who are routinely incapacitated by their disease and who have great trouble in finding the humor in their delusions and hallucinations.  As much as we would like it to be otherwise, insanity is deadly serious business.  A patient can’t just laugh off the malaise that afflicts him or her.  There is nothing very funny, for instance, of hearing voices telling you to kill your infant daughter because she is of the devil.  I was in the hospital with a man who did just this, and he wasn’t laughing about it.  Out of the respect of mutual hardship often displayed by mental patients for each other, no one teased this unfortunate man about his undoing either.  We all knew how easily it could have been one of us.  I met this man in a public psychiatric facility that accepted patients regardless of their ability to pay.  It was a kind of warehouse of patients who had nowhere else to go.  This man was pointed out to me by another patient, who I sensed was relieved that there was someone on earth who had it harder than he did.  I was not so comforted.  My second daughter had been born only three months prior to this hospitalization.  I tried to imagine how I would feel, how I would always feel, if desperately ill, I had done just what this man had done. My self-control was gone when I was committed.  I was capable of anything.  I grew morose just thinking about it.  I felt a compassion for this man of such profound depth that even in my wretched state, when I would have traded places with virtually anyone, I knew I would not want to trade places with this man.  The things I was having trouble living with paled in comparison and I was thanking my lucky stars I had been spared such a fate.  My youngest daughter, who had just been born, is twelve now.  Healthy, happy and full of life.  To think, to just stop for a moment and think the unthinkable I am filled with fear and dread.  There is no cure for schizophrenia, which means that at any time, I could again find myself thinking the unthinkable.  I am frighteningly vulnerable to the vagaries of my disease.  At any time I could start howling at the moon.  Security is an illusion enjoyed at the expense of prudence.  If I had lost my grip for even a second.  I know what would have happened.  I would not be able to live with myself.    

The Early Years

Especially in the early years of my Dad’s diagnosis it would be unlikely that one could pick him out of a lineup as being Schizophrenic or even mentally ill of any variety.  He was handsome and well-kept with hair combed, teeth brushed, clean clothing, and a fit athletic build.  The remnants of his athletic days as a marathon runner, boxer and rock climber still visible in his build.  He was a husband.  He was a father.  However, keeping up this facade of normalcy was extremely trying in social situations and at work.  It took all he could muster to appear “normal”.  It was in these years that I did not see my father much, I wasn't able to.  He was too sick.  Mom took me with her one time to visit him in the hospital, but the crying and screaming that ensued as she left with me was more than she thought I could handle, more than she could bear and perhaps more than he should have to endure as well.  She would never take me to the hospital to visit him after that.  Luckily, I have no recollection of his despair and the heartbreak my exit caused.  

My grandmother, in what I assume was an effort to describe my father’s love for me, would tell me about times early in his diagnosis when he was living at home with his mom and dad.   She described listening to him scream and cry my name over and over as he tried to fall asleep at night.  This was a ritual that continued for some time and tore my grandmother’s heart into pieces.  She didn't tell me this until I was in my teenage years and I would suppose some might feel she shouldn't have shared it.  I, on the other hand, am very glad she did.  Long after my Dad’s affect had become flat and his show of emotion few and far between, I had this to cling to.  This knowledge that he loved me deeply before his illness stripped him of the depth of emotion he once possessed.  I clang to this.  My Daddy loved me, loved me so deeply he hurt.  Not yet understanding the love between a parent and their child I had questioned his love for me often.  This story of my grandmother’s played in my head, illuminating the depths of his love when I was in doubt.

I reluctantly agreed to commit myself.  Naturally I hated being locked up, and wanted out, but I did not attempt to sign myself out because I didn’t want to risk being committed involuntarily.  I was hospitalized for three weeks and miraculously went into spontaneous remission without medication.  But when I got out, I will tell you, I was sore and feeling abused.  It was to be another year before my second commitment, this time to a welfare hospital.  Slowly but surely my resistance was being eroded.  My second commitment was not as traumatic as the first.  I still procrastinated about going in, but eventually did go.  This time I was stabilized on Navane and released in three weeks, which is what they figure it takes for the medication to work.  While I was in, being completely miserable, I did try to sign myself out. As a result the doctor’s got a hold order and I was committed involuntarily at a hearing before a judge. I had visions of being warehoused in a back ward somewhere.  I was as scared as I was mad.  I questioned whether I would ever get out.  Fortunately, the medication worked like a charm, and like I said, I was out in three weeks.  If I had kept taking my meds once I got out, I probably would have never seen the inside of another psyche hospital.  Unfortunately, this was not my fate.  Within a year, this time far from home, I was hospitalized a third time.  My condition was chronic and the symptoms were more intense than ever.  I despaired I would never recover.  While I was in Austin State Hospital I got my hands on a piece of broken glass and proceeded to lacerate my feet in five or six places.  This succeeded in getting me off the ward for a few hours in medical, but I was put right back in stir, only now with an attendant with me at all times on suicide watch.  This lasted for a day and provided me with ample reason not to make a second attempt.  I became a model patient after that in order to get discharged.  About the same time I started to stabilize on Mellaril this time, so I was not so desperately ill.  I was released like clockwork in three weeks.  As bad as this hospitalization had been, and as much as I didn’t want to repeat the experience in the future, feeling fine within a month, I again quit taking the Mellaril.  Just about a year later I was again whacko, this time there was a different approach to my recovery.  I was put in a residential facility in the community where I was put back on Navane, and here I stayed for three months.  This was 1984 and I have been taking medication ever since.  Interestingly, after three years, I was still in denial.  I still thought my life was being monitored, but now I was convinced that what I was supposed to do, what this was all about, was taking the medication.  My resolve to take the medicine was not a rational decision on my part.  Instead, still paranoid, my delusions led me to believe that taking the Navane was the key that would deliver me.  And I would have stayed out of the hospital if it had not been for my drinking and drugging.