The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (31 page)

While I was hospitalized, they took me off antidepressants; with
all the other sedatives I was taking, the doctors believed that an
antidepressant would be too much for my system. So in the midst of
being poked and prodded and having medical personnel standing
around going "hmmmm" and "well, on the other hand, it could be thus
and so," I was incredibly sad and frightened. And, inevitably,
psychotic.

One night, I came to believe that I was the so-called "wood chip
murderer," a man then on trial in Connecticut for dismembering his
wife with a chain saw and putting her body parts through a wood
chipper. Hooked up to the IV pole, I wandered down to the nurse's
station and told the nurses there that they needed to call the police
and tell them my whereabouts. Very gently, they walked me back to
my room and put me back to bed.

The next day during rounds, one of the resident doctors asked me
about what had happened. "I heard you were upset last night, what
was that about?"

"Actually, I thought I was the wood chip murderer," I told him.
"I'm still not sure whether I am or not. In any case, I'm a very bad
person—evil, in fact."

The doctor's response was a burst of laughter so loud that the
nurses down the hall could hear him, and it immediately made me feel
ashamed.
He thinks I'm crazy.

It was summer, and Dr. White was out of town on vacation;

luckily, he'd asked a colleague, a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at
the hospital, to stop by and see me. Dr. Feinstein came by my room
almost every day, and was very gentle and soothing, which was exactly
what I needed.

"I'm really scared," I told him. "I see now that life can be snatched
away just like
that"
and I snapped my fingers in the air.

He nodded. "That's true. And it's very sad. But you know, Elyn,
most people come to that realization when they're in their
fifties—you've just learned it early."

Feinstein's visits, along with the frequent presence of my parents,
who came to visit each day for the three weeks I was in the hospital,
helped immensely. My New York brother and his family came up to
spend a little time with me as well; we all went together to the
cafeteria for an occasional snack or for meals. Late at night, after
everyone had gone, I'd wander down to the lounge while hooked to
the portable IV pole. There, I'd have a cigarette and listen to classical
music on the music channel on the lounge TV. My parents tacked a
sign on my door that read, "AWOL risk," and while it made us laugh,
the doctors were obviously annoyed. We were treated as though we
weren't taking this hospitalization, and the event that had caused it,
with sufficient seriousness, when in fact we'd been terrified, and jokes
were our way of protecting ourselves from that terror.

As the days went by, the memory impairment lifted somewhat, but
it lingered, as did the headaches, so the hospital ordered some
psychological testing—the results were handwritten in my chart and
quite easy for me to read. Several people, from different disciplines,
weighed in on my condition and status, and the variety of opinions
fascinated me. According to one, the testing suggested that I "may be
bothered by consistently delusional thought and self-persecutory
processes." No news there.

Another tester, who gave me a lengthy memory test, a
master's-level psychologist who signed "MA" after his name, came up
with an odd formulation: The results suggested I was deliberately
intending to
appear
impaired, particularly around memory loss. His
supervisor noted that rather than suggesting that I was trying to
look
impaired, the test results might also be read to suggest that I was
indeed
impaired. The MA also suggested that my headaches could be
due to poor nutrition, while another person opined that the headaches
were due to my "disturbed thought processes." So: I was either faking,
or crazy, or not eating properly. Somehow, the existence of an actual
brain hemorrhage had disappeared in its importance.

The MA also questioned my ability to care for myself in my own
apartment, "nutritionally and hygienically"; a third person kindly
referred me to the social sendees department "for assistance with
long-range care needs." I would have
loved
assistance with my
long-range care needs, since my long-range plan was to publish many
books with major presses, write a dozen or so law review articles, and
obtain a tenured faculty position at a major university's law school.
Even under the best of conditions, and in the best of health, anybody
setting out to do that could probably use all the help they could get.

At the end of three weeks, I was finally discharged from the
hospital, without any clear conclusion about what had caused my
bleed. Although my memory never filled in the blanks of the days
before the hospital, the headaches receded. My parents returned to
Miami; I returned to my life, as flawed and confounding and
mysterious and promising as it was. I felt fragile for a while; I knew
that what had happened had been genuinely frightening, even
threatening. But the fact is, I didn't die; I survived, and I told myself
that fact every single day. It's a little like having a meteor land in your
backyard without hitting the house. You can either focus on the

meteor, and what almost happened, or you can focus on the fortunate
miss and what didn't happen. I decided to do my best to focus on the
miss.

chapter eighteen

I
N
SEPTEMBER, I went back to my second year of teaching at the
small law school and prepared my application for a tenure-track
teaching position elsewhere. In spite of my not having gone the
traditional law-school route to an academic position—clerking for a
judge and working as a summer associate at a large law firm—I was
gratified when the reaction to my applications was overwhelmingly
positive, with over 35 law schools responding with interest.

I wanted to be optimistic—and on paper, there was every reason to
be
optimistic—but there was a small biochemical obstacle. Since my
hospital adventure, I still hadn't resumed my usual drug regimen.
Within days, I'd gone from feeling a little blue to being seriously
depressed, and then I started sliding toward suicidal. White

recommended that I immediately go back on the amitriptyline (Prozac
was still a few years away), and Steve gave me a stern lecture on the
phone about the stress I'd encounter during the job hunt, and how I
needed to be focused and steady. "I know you, I know what you're
thinking," he said. "But this is no time to fool around with your meds."
As much as I longed to be totally drug-free, I had to accept that he was
right.

It was too easy for me to slip up in other ways, though. On the brief
trip to the University of Miami for a day-long interview, for example, I
was so distracted and stressed out that I didn't eat well, and during
the interview and job-talk I did very poorly. "Practically comatose"
again. Even worse, I fainted as I tried to leave the plane when it
landed in New York, and had to be taken out in a wheelchair. Horribly
embarrassed, I filed the experience under "poor self-care—Elyn, pay
more attention!"

The rest of the interviews went considerably better, and ultimately
I received a number of attractive offers. The one that appealed to me
most came from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Academically, USC's law school had a wonderful reputation, ranked
among the top fifteen to twenty in the country. My interview visit
there was comfortable and surprisingly tension-free; the faculty I
spoke with were friendly and easygoing, given how brilliant they were
(I'd done my research—I knew to the person what each one had
published, and in what journals). And (no small factor), the campus
was lovely, sunny and warm, and kind to my body. So when the offer
came from USC, it was a quick and easy decision—I accepted.

But the actual move remained months away. In the meantime, I
still had teaching responsibilities in New Haven, and the ongoing case
of Jefferson, whom I'd continued to represent as he made his way
through the state system.

I tried to visit him about once a week—we'd meet at his group
home and go off to a local soda shop for ice cream and a good talk. As
a big man with obvious impairments and limited judgment, he often
scared people, but with me, he was always gentle and soft-spoken. He
was doing well, and he was happy.

In fact, he'd been making such good progress in his group home
and with his schooling that the staff in both places thought he was
now able to move to a higher-functioning group home. Since it would
take a while for there to be an opening for him, I had ample time for
some due diligence on his behalf, with many long and hard
conversations with the staff at both houses and at his school. I also
spoke with his mother, who'd recently come back into his life. And I
had serious conversations as well with Jefferson, who'd not only come
to trust me, but saw me as friend and confidante. He'd had a few
successful overnight and weekend visits to his potential new home; he
liked it. Yes, he told me, he wanted to make the move.

On paper, it looked good. Nevertheless, I had to battle
skepticism—my own. Mentally retarded adults with the same
behavioral dysfunctions as Jefferson's are well known for trying to
please others, especially those who carry some power in their lives;
basically, they want desperately to say the right thing and make
everyone around them happy. He seemed preoccupied with what
would please me, and please the staff as well. So I worried: Was I
seeing the situation in its true light? Was this really the right thing for
him to do? Was it the right time, and was that the right place? Yes,
yes, yes, everyone kept saying. Finally, I agreed—OK, it's the right
thing to do. And so we moved him.

Things went well for a few weeks; everyone began to relax. And
then, something set him off. It was never quite clear what the trigger
was, but in any case, it made him mad. He began shouting and
screaming, and making threats to his housemates and staff. The police
were called—and when confronted with a large angry black man,
inarticulate and out of control, the cops forcibly subdued him and
hauled him off to the local mental hospital. There, the worst-case
scenario actually happened: restraints, forced medication, and
isolated confinement—everything we'd managed to spare him since
Steve and I acted to move him out of the state mental hospital.
Everything in my own experience that had terrified me had now
happened to Jefferson.

Sadly, it set off a chain reaction and downward momentum that
for a while seemed irreversible. His stay in the hospital was brief that
first time, but it wasn't his last. He couldn't go back to the old group
home; his spot had been taken by someone else. And he couldn't
return to the new one—it clearly hadn't worked and they didn't want
him back. The word "violent" started showing up in his chart; he
bounced from group home to group home, until something would go
wrong and he'd have to be hospitalized again. By the time I moved to
Los Angeles to begin my new teaching job, Jefferson still wasn't
stabilized.

Eventually, things settled down somewhat—a few years later,
when I visited him, he was in a group home situation that appeared to
be working. But for a while it was as though some kind of switch had
been tripped in him, and he would never again do as well as he'd done
in that first group home. All of us do-gooders—had we let him down?
"Did I do this?" I asked Steve. "Did we do this, is it our fault?"

No, no, he said. We'd used our best judgment and done what
seemed right at the time. But I feared we'd fought for what seemed
best from our point of view, not necessarily from Jefferson's. Maybe
what happened with Jefferson would have happened anyway, there's
no way to know. Once again, a hard lesson for fledgling lawyers to
learn.

As spring came and my time in Connecticut was coming to an end, I
scheduled a trip to Los Angeles for April spring break, to meet with my
future colleagues, familiarize myself with the campus and the city, and
find someplace to live. In addition, I had some names of
psychoanalysts on the West Coast, so that I could continue my
treatment with no interruption. I was determined to build a good solid
structure for what would be my new life.

Just before I was to leave for the trip, a phone call came from my
father. "Your uncle Norm has passed away, he's taken his own life," he
said. Uncle Norm, my mother's younger brother, was just forty-seven
when he died. It was no secret that he'd had psychiatric problems for
much of his life—seriously depressed, he'd spent a year in the
Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. At one point, at my
recommendation, he also spent some months at the Institute of
Pennsylvania Hospital with my doctor there, Dr. Miller; when he left,
it was Against Medical Advice. And now, it had come to this—death by
his own hand, from an overdose of pills.

I was stunned and sad, yet somehow not surprised. And as calm as
my father had been, my mother was another story. She was
overwhelmed with grief—her own father had also died not long before,
but this loss of her brother, after so many years of struggle, was worse.
My handsome, sweet young uncle, gone. Just like
that.
But I couldn't
go to Florida to mourn him; I was scheduled to leave the very next
morning for Los Angeles, booked solid with appointments there, and
had only this small window of time to get everything done. I wanted to
go to his funeral; I regretted (and continue to regret) not being there
for my mother, and to honor my uncle's fight.

Suicide almost always leaves shipwrecked survivors in its wake,
feeling as though there were something else they could have done,
should
have done, to keep the one they loved alive. "If only I'd said
this, if only I'd done that...What did we miss, how did we fail?" In
those first awful days, there's nothing anyone can say or do to ease
that kind of sorrow, and any suggestion that it was "inevitable" gets
pushed away.