Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [35]
Schizophrenia meant split personality, didn't it? I had heard about schizophrenia, and I had seen some movies about it. To me, schizophrenia was The Three Faces of Eve , the film starring Joanne Woodward about a woman who had three different personalities that came and went without warning.
How many personalities did they think Lori had? Was the girl who told us she could fly a different personality from the personality of the Lori we knew and loved? Where had this other person come from and how could we make her go away and get our Lori back?
I didn't think to ask those questions. And the doctors just seemed to assume we would understand what they were talking about, or at least accept it without understanding.
Who could I turn to? Marvin was still locked inside himself, and wouldn't talk to anyone. So he couldn't solve problems the way he usually did, by calling around to his friends and colleagues and seeking the best possible advice and information. He was a psychologist. Surely he understood what schizophrenia was. But he was too tormented to explain it to me clearly. Or perhaps he was shielding me from the truth. Once again I felt alone and confused.
I went to the Doubleday bookstore at lunchtime and bought three books on mental illness. To me, mental illness was tragic and upsetting, but the kinds of mental illness I was imagining for Lori had still been rather commonplace. Marvin and I had been devastated by Lori's breakdown, but that's all we had thought it was—a breakdown. People like Lori had nervous breakdowns. She had been under too much stress. She had been depressed. She had been unhappy. Even saying she could fly—it was awful, but if we thought about it as mental confusion caused by stress, we could still understand it. When the stress went away, and her symptoms were treated by drugs, the confusion would go away.
But schizophrenia? The word itself was horrifying.
I started skimming the books while I was standing in line, read as much as I could before I went back to the office, and the rest on the train on the way home.
All my ideas had been wrong. Schizophrenia wasn't a split personality. It was a brain disease, a chemical imbalance. People with schizophrenia did hallucinate. They heard voices commanding them to do things. They heard voices talking about them. Sometimes they had delusions, like that they were the Prophet Elijah, or Moses. People with schizophrenia were very sick. Mostly the disease started in people who were very young, just starting their lives. Sometimes drugs helped get their hallucinations under control. Sometimes drugs didn't help at all. Very often people with schizophrenia didn't get better. Some of them spent their whole lives in institutions.
Suddenly I seemed to understand why they would want to transfer her out of Payne Whitney, to turn her over to some other hospital. All my suspicions were correct. They were telling us there was no hope.
9
New York Hospital, Westchester Division, White Plains, New York, September 1982–October 1982
HOSPITAL RECORDS
Schiller, Miss Lori
Admitted: September 24, 1982
Unit: 3 North
PSYCHIATRIC CASE HISTORY
IDENTIFYING DATA
Date of Birth: 4/26/59
Age: 23
Sex: Female
Race: White
Religion: Jewish
Marital Status: Single
Cultural Background: White, upper middle class, Jewish
Current Living Situation: Alone in apartment in Manhattan
Usual Employment: Insurance Salesperson
INFORMANTS
Patient, unreliable. Parents, reliable.
PRESENTING PROBLEMS
The patient was transferred from New York Hospital—Payne Whitney Clinic for long-term hospital treatment of depression, agitation, auditory hallucinations and confusion. Patient's complaint is that she is very confused, which she attributes to Electro-Convulsive Therapy that she received at the Payne Whitney Clinic and that she is hearing voices that tell her to hurt herself and criticize her.
DESCRIPTION