Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [4]
She had a lot of support—loving parents, good hospital care, the best possible treatments available. But she would never have been able to return to the kind of life she is living now if it had not been for her own willpower and determination. In a very real way she herself helped conquer her own illness.
Lori's story offers important messages for all of us. For psychiatrists and medical professionals, it is a look at the inner world of a psychiatric patient, a world that we sometimes forget to take into account. It is a reminder that our traditional therapies that aim to reach past the illness to the person inside should not be thrown out even in this era of high-tech medication. In my own experience a connection with another person is a powerful tool for healing in a curing arsenal that also includes drugs.
For the mentally ill themselves, Lori's story offers a glimpse at the possibility that this medication or some other can offer them the same chance at a new life that Lori has had and that they too have a chance of overcoming their illnesses as she did.
For all the rest of us, Lori's story is a moving account of a very personal journey. It is a story not just of mental illness, but of a human being. It is a story of personal determination, courage and hope.
—Jane Doller, M.D.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Cornell University Medical College
New York Hospital, Westchester Division
Part I
I Hear Something You Can't Hear
1
Lori Roscoe, New York, August 1976
It was a hot night in August 1976, the summer of my seventeenth year, when, uninvited and unannounced, the Voices took over my life.
I was going into my senior year in high school, so this was to be my last time at summer camp. College, a job, adulthood, responsibility—they were all just around the corner. But for the moment I wasn't prepared for anything more than a summer of fun. I certainly wasn't prepared to have my life change forever.
I had been coming to Lincoln Farm for several years, first as a camper, later as a counselor. By day, I shepherded the nine- and ten-year-olds through sailing, canoeing and archery.
At night after the little kids were safely in bed, the counselors would hang out together in the long, low wooden bungalows we called “motels,” playing cards, eating cookies and drinking a Kool-Aid type of concoction we called bug juice. Some nights the older counselors drove us into town to the Roscoe diner. We laughed, told jokes and fooled around.
It was just an ordinary summer, and I was just an ordinary girl. Except that sometime during that summer things began to change.
At first, the change was pleasant. Somehow, without my quite knowing why, everything seemed much nicer than it had been before. The lake seemed more blue, the paddlewheels bigger and the sailboats more graceful than ever before. The trees of the Catskill Mountains that ringed our camp took on a deeper green than I remembered, and all at once the whole camp seemed to be the most wonderful place in the world.
I was overwhelmed by what life had to offer. It seemed that I could not run fast enough, could not swim far enough, could not stay up late enough into the night to take in everything I wanted to experience. I was energetic and active, happy and bubbly, a friend to everyone. Everything around me was bright, clean and clear. And as for me, it seemed that I too was a part of this beauty. I was strong and attractive, powerful and exciting. It seemed that everyone around me had only to look at me to love me the way I loved them.
What's more, my memories became more vivid than ever before. It had been here at Lincoln Farm two years earlier that I had fallen in love. As I thought back to that summer, it too seemed wild and bright and wonderful. I had been in love as no one had been in love before. And the man I fell for was like no one I had ever