The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (37 page)

      Oddly (but happily), being in the hospital and watching patients
being interviewed on the
SCID-D
did not get me all stirred up, nor did
it awaken any of my demons. I didn't have much in common with
these patients, although I observed a few who obviously had MPD and
completely denied it (now
that
behavior I was intimately familiar
with). Watching the process really opened my eyes to some
commonalities shared by most mental illnesses; it turns out that we all
overlap with one another a little bit.

I did have a very funny telephone conversation with one of my
nephews while I was working on the MPD book. He was about ten at
the time, and asked what I was doing in my office that day.

"Writing a book about multiple personalities," I told him.

"What is that?" he asked.

Oh dear
, I thought;
how do I get out of this one?
"Well, some
people think they have lots of other people inside themselves," I said.
"And if one of those other people does something wrong, should all of
the people have to go to jail?"

He mulled that over a bit, we chatted a little more, and then we
said good-bye.

A few days later, my brother called. "What have you been telling
this kid?" he asked, and he didn't sound very happy with me. "He was
misbehaving the other day, and his mom told him to stop it. He just
wouldn't settle down, and finally she asked, 'What on earth is wrong
with you today!' And he told her, 'I didn't do anything, it was someone
else inside of me!'"

In the fall of my fifth year at USC, I submitted my tenure packet: five
long articles, four shorter articles, and a lengthy book proposal. Ed
and Michael were both very encouraging. A subcommittee of three
would read my work and send it out to a dozen or so reviewers; when
the reviews came back, the subcommittee would meet and then vote;
then it would go before the entire tenured faculty of the law school.
The faculty would be given a ballot and a week to return the ballot to
the dean's office. The ballot would decide whether I would be made
professor.

The year went by quietly, even smoothly. I taught class and I
wrote. I spent time with friends. I visited Steve in Ann Arbor, where he
was finishing up his doctorate in clinical psychology. I stayed on my
medication, on a dose Kaplan found acceptable. Although there were
no more dates, someone else did catch my eye, a librarian in the law
library. He was blond and attractive, in an open, unprepossessing
way—flannel shirts, a ponytail. He wasn't as intense as many
students; he wasn't as businesslike as many faculty. He was
someplace in between, and seemed calmly at home there. His name
was Will, I discovered. He'd been around awhile. He made furniture
and gardened in his spare time, somebody told me. After a time or
two, he smiled when he saw me. It was a very nice smile.
Well,
I
thought. I might have blushed. I'm pretty sure I blushed.

I'd once complained to Kaplan that at lunch earlier that day, I'd been
the most senior person at the table and I didn't much like it.

"Oh," he said. "You mean you're a duckling who doesn't want to
become a duck!" I told some of my friends this story. Getting tenure
around USC then became known as "becoming a duck."

The tenure ballots went out from the dean's office on a Friday in
February, four-and-a-half years after I had arrived at USC Law
School. A full week passed. The following Friday I sat in my
office—
somebody knock, please.
Or call me. Or e-mail me. Or send a
carrier pigeon through the window. Something, anything. Midway
through that afternoon, the phone finally rang. Shaking, I answered it.

"Congratulations, Professor Saks," replied our dean.

Professor Saks.
I'd made it; I was a tenured professor at the
University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I'd become a
duck at last. A colleague gave me a Mighty Ducks T-shirt to show for it.

At which point, I did what by now had become predictable: I
became psychotic. Change, good or bad, is never my best thing. "A
jumbo jet can sail smoothly through strong and gusty currents," says
Steve. "But a small plane bounces in a small breeze." Mine was a very
small plane; getting tenure was a big, albeit pleasant, wind, and for a
few weeks, it threatened to blow me right over.

That night, my colleagues took me out to dinner to celebrate. I
didn't want to disturb them with the news that beings in the sky were
using my brain to spread death and destruction across the earth—that
would have put a damper on the evening (not to mention making
them second-guess their votes). I talked to Kaplan, willingly went up
on my meds, and bounced around for a while, while the demons
danced at the edge of every room I was in. Then everything settled
back down again. The Lady of the Charts withdrew; Professor Saks
had tenure. Time to turn my attention back to the most needy member
of the trio, Elyn.

"With tenure," Kaplan told me, "the central issue in one's life
moves from survival to desire."

OK, I'd survived. Now, then—what did I desire?

It had taken five years to learn how to use my time with Kaplan
well. At first, I'd brought my psychosis into our sessions, as I'd done
with Mrs. Jones and White. In the meantime, I worked to keep my
symptoms out of view from all but a few of my LA friends—even with
them, I shared my psychotic thoughts sparingly, or when I was at my
worst and simply couldn't help myself. But with Kaplan, I could let my
guard down, much the way one would rest on a shady bench during a
long, uphill walk.

But as he'd stated over and over, Kaplan had come to believe that
I'd grown too comfortable on that bench, and he finally issued an
ultimatum: I couldn't sit there any longer. Filling our hours with
nothing other than my psychotic ramblings was no longer an option.
Instead, we'd talk about the life I wanted, and how my illness had so
often gotten in the way of my having it.

It was a hard line for Kaplan to take, and at first I was frightened.
If I couldn't bring my psychosis into that room, where could I bring it?
But he helped me through it; he'd interrupt the ramblings, stop them,
and then redirect my thoughts—to my teaching, my students, my
WTiting, my friends. Less and less, our sessions revolved around
psychosis; more and more, they were about my "real" life. By our sixth
year together—the year following my tenure—the Lady of the Charts
made only sporadic cameo appearances and no longer held center
stage. It was time to take care of other things.

For the most part, schizophrenia is an illness that strikes young
people, in their late teens and early-to mid-twenties—a time when
we're supposed to be learning to make friends, keep them, and
navigate our way through the world. But schizophrenia can knock you
out of the loop for as long as three or four years—and for some,
forever. In fact, as far as we've progressed in research and treatment,
recent statistics indicate that only one in five people with
schizophrenia can ever be expected to live independently and hold a
job.

Dropping in and out of your own life (for psychotic breaks, or
treatment in a hospital) isn't like getting off a train at one stop and
later getting back on at another. Even if you can get back on (and the
odds are not in your favor), you're lonely there. The people you
boarded with originally are far, far ahead of you, and now you're stuck
playing catch-up.

A key part of forming a friendship is sharing personal histories,
which can be a precarious rite when you're schizophrenic. The gaps in
your life—how do you explain them? You can always make up stories,
but beginning a friendship with a lie about your life doesn't feel very
good. Or you can say nothing about how you've spent the last few
years, which strikes people as odd. Or you can choose to tell them
about your illness, and find out the hard way that most people aren't
ready to hear about it. Mental illness comes with stigma attached to it,
and that stigma can set off a negative reaction, even from the nicest
people, with good intentions and kind hearts. Even for many of these
people, those with mental illness are
other;
they're not like "us."

Sometime
late in my fifth year at
USC, I
was on my way to dinner
with an administrator at the law school and telling her about an article
I was WTiting, on the right to refuse psychiatric medication.

"I'm afraid of mentally ill people," Leslie said. "They can be violent
and end up hurting lots of people."

Somewhat taken aback, I patiently explained what the research
told us. "The vast majority of mentally ill people are no more
dangerous than anyone else," I said, "and less prone to violence than
many."

"I don't know," Leslie said. "I can't help believing that they're
capable of who knows what. Maybe I'm prejudiced. I mean, I've never
known anyone who had a mental illness."

I smiled mischievously and said, "You mean you've never known
anyone you
knew
had a mental illness."

Leslie returned a mock look of nervousness and shot back, "Could
you please take me to my own car now?" We both laughed.

"Crazy people" don't make the evening news for successfully
managing their lives; we only hear about them when something
horrible happens. The woman who drowned her kids; the man who
parked his car on the train track in order to kill himself, but jumped
out and watched people on the oncoming train die in the collision
instead. The man who shot John Lennon; the man who shot President
Reagan. John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose
life was told in the film
A Beautiful Mind
, is the exception that proves
the rule.

There's a powerful urge in each of us to talk about our traumas. "A
psychotic episode is like experiencing trauma," Steve says. I think
Steve's right when he talks about psychosis as being like a trauma.

Psychosis does traumatize you, in much the same way that ducking
gunfire in a war zone or having a terrible car crash traumatizes you.
And the best way to take away the power of trauma is to talk about
what happened.

If and when they can, people who have been traumatized wall tell
what happened to them, over and over. The telling and retelling may
become tedious for friends, but it's healthy and important, and good
friends encourage it. With psychosis, however, you must carefully
balance the urge to tell with the inevitable consequences of telling.
Revealing your truth, even to someone you've come to know and trust,
brings its own complications. People with schizophrenia—people like
me—read the papers and watch the evening news. We see how the
illness is portrayed and how a friend-in-the making is likely to
perceive us, once they hear the truth. We move forward with great
caution because we must. We'd have to be...well, crazy to do
otherwise.

To bring this point home, fast-forward to September 11, 2001.
Steve called me early in the morning from Washington, D.C., to tell me
about the horrific attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. It was
three hours earlier in Los Angeles. He knew I'd still be in bed, and he
wanted me to hear the news as gently as possible, rather than be
blindsided by a blaring clock radio or someone in the school parking
lot.

That day, I had an early morning appointment with Kaplan; it was
still too early for him to have heard the news. I started the session in a
high emotional state, talking about how the nation was under siege by
terrorists and thousands of people were dead or dying. Carefully,
Kaplan began to steer the conversation in another direction—at which
point it was announced on the loudspeaker system that we needed to
evacuate the building. Until that moment, I am convinced Kaplan
believed I was in the middle of a psychotic episode.

Aside from those two years of isolation in Oxford, I'd managed against
the odds to make and hang onto some good friends, who'd stayed in
touch, loyal and loving. But my romantic life, such as it was, wasn't. I
could count on the fingers of one hand the number of dates I'd had
since freshman year at Vanderbilt. I had no clue about getting
someone's attention. I didn't know how to flirt; I didn't know how to
show someone that I was interested; I didn't know how to figure out if
he was interested in me. It was as though I'd been absent from class
when they were teaching "how to be a girl."

For instance, there was Will, the nice librarian. His smile when he
saw me was genuine, but I wasn't sure how to respond to it. So,
tentatively, I smiled back. The next time I came into the library, I
swallowed, took a breath, and said, "Hi."

He said, "Hi" back.

OK, now what do I do? What's supposed to happen next? A few
days pass. I go back to the library. I smile, he smiles. "Hi," I say. "Hi,"
he says.

"I, er, I heard you build furniture," I managed to stutter one day.
"I'd really like to see it sometime. I barely have any furniture in my
apartment at all; maybe that's because I mostly live in my office."
Shut
up, Elyn. Just shut up.

"Sure," he said. "I'd be happy to show you. It's not much, but I like
doing it."

I nodded. "Oh, well, fine," I said. "Maybe we can have lunch
sometime."

"OK, great," he said. "Let's do that."

I left the law school library as though the building were on fire.

Time went by, and eventually Will left his position at the law
library. But we occasionally ran into each other, and one day my office
phone rang.

"Hi," said a man's voice on the other end. "This is Will. From the
library? I was wondering if you had a day free for lunch this week."

We went to a small Italian restaurant near campus, and I actually
managed to swallow some food. He told me about the furniture, how
much he loved working on it, how he used the best woods and stains,
and took days and days to design and finish a piece. And he had a
parrot that he'd trained and loved. And then there was gardening, too,
a source of great pleasure to him. Entranced, I think I mostly nodded.