“It's nothing,” I said. “I'm just tired.”
But mostly I did fine. So well, in fact, that after I had been working there for about a year, I decided to apply for a job at New York Hospital. That would be the ultimate, I decided, the real proof that I was okay. After all, if I were a mental health worker in the same hospital where I had once been a patient, I must be all better, right?
Meanwhile, Rye Psychiatric, which had been sending patients out for electroshock treatments, had just begun doing them themselves, and I volunteered to assist. It was something new to learn, of course. I had another motivation too. I knew, because people had told me, that I had had twenty electroshock treatments at Payne Whitney. But I couldn't remember any of it. And of course I blamed the electroshock for my loss of memory. I wanted to see the treatment used on other patients to see what had happened to me.
I found it very upsetting.
First we had to make sure the patient ate and drank nothing after midnight. Then, around the time of the scheduled treatment, I would help connect the electrodes to their temples, and watch while the doctor gave anesthesia. The patient lay, covered, on a bed. Then the doctor would administer the current by flipping a switch. The whole thing reminded me of the scene in
The Wizard of Oz
where Dorothy and her three friends find the little man behind the curtain flipping switches to make thunder and lightning go off.
My job was to help hold the patient down. For when the jolt of electricity went off, the patient would have a seizure, and arch up from the bed. Then, as the seizure subsided, their toes would curl. That was a sign that everything had gone well.
I couldn't stand watching it happen. I couldn't stand thinking this had happened to me, not once, but many times. It made me feel so helpless and out of control.
So pretty quickly I moved to the recovery room, where I found the job less scary. As the patients revived from the anesthesia, their faces were flushed and they were disoriented. It was my job to reorient them.
“You are in Rye Psychiatric Hospital,” I told them softly. “You've just had ECT. You're fine. Today is Tuesday.” I would keep talking to them in a low voice as they gradually came to. Then, because they had already gone so long without eating, I would feed them snacks, first juice, then half a sandwich. As they gradually began to feel better, I would help them with their shoes and escort them back to the main building.
I enjoyed helping the patients, but I hated mentally putting myself in their shoes. Every time I thought about it, I got upset.
Still, in many ways, my own experience had made me empathetic with patients in a way that many other people weren't able to be. I knew I wasn't a trained therapist. But I was a good listener, and I gave good feedback.
I found myself growing close to some special patients. Carla was a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl, very sweet and likable. She seemed like the kind of girl who should have been excited about just starting out on her life. But instead, she seemed kind of lost, as if she didn't know where her place in the world was. For some reason she clung to me, following me around, seeking me out, wanting to talk to me whenever she was able. And I in turn got swooped up by her. She seemed so innocent, so sad. I could see myself in her in some ways.
When she talked about trying to kill herself—she had tried many times—I could understand how she felt. She needed help, and I could offer the same kind of support that had been offered to me over the years.
“It would be a tragedy if you killed yourself,” I told her. People had said that to me all the time, and so those were the exact words I used with her.
“There are people who love and care for you,” I told her. “Your mother, and your brother, and your sister—how would they feel if you killed yourself?”
“They'd be happy,” she said. I remembered feeling exactly that way in the past.
“No, they wouldn't,” I told her firmly. “They would never get over it.”
And on and on I talked to her, telling her about hope, and the future, and living. I told her how valuable she was, about the good times she had ahead. I was using all the words that had been used with me, all the messages that people had tried to ram into my own depressed brain.
It seemed to comfort her. At any rate, she didn't kill herself, and after a while she was discharged. She must have believed some of the things I had told her. The problem was, I didn't quite believe them myself.
Lori Scarsdale, New York, April 1985—October 1985
Suicide was on my mind again.
One of my favorite movies was Frank Capra's
It's a Wonderjul Life.
I watched it all the time. My parents were so happy to see me engrossed in such an upbeat, wholesome movie that they bought me my own copy. I guess most people find it makes them feel good to watch Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey, who is rescued from despair by a sweet guardian angel. That's not the way I felt. The part I fixated on was the scene in which Jimmy Stewart/George Bailey decides he'd be worth more dead than alive. That's just what I felt. I had put a tremendous burden on everyone. I would be better off dead.
My head swarmed with suicidal fantasies.
The Voices in my head were using megaphones. They called me waste, rubbish, junk, bile. “You're nothing but a piece of shit,” they screamed at me. I told Dr. Rockland what they were saying. To try to tease me out of believing in them, he made up an acronym for their message: I was LOWPOS, he said: A Lazy, Obese, Worthless Piece of Shit. I think he meant to make fun of the Voices, but it seemed he was making fun of me, and I felt worse and worse.
I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I'd be missed.
Killing myself was my job, my responsibility. I mentally punished myself each day for not having done it yet. The notion that suicide is against the law always preyed on my mind. What were the authorities going to do? Put my corpse behind bars? Handcuff my wrists with no pulse? Me-Murder, I called it. Would they take my lifeless body, peel it off the pavement and make it stand trial for that Me-Murder? Hah! Let's see them try to stop me.
Several times I tried to get a pistol to blow my brains out. But for someone who had been as sheltered from violence as I had been, it wasn't easy. You can't just go to Bloomingdale's and charge a revolver to your account.
I didn't want to just take an overdose or slit my wrists. I wanted something powerful that would reflect the despair that haunted me every day of my life. As the pressure of these thoughts built, my imagination went wild seeking ways of accomplishing my aims. I thought about jumping in front of a car, or better yet, a truck; or even better yet, a train. I thought about jumping out of a moving car onto the highway. I thought about standing on a bridge, pouring a can of gasoline over my head, lighting a match, and jumping in flames to my death. Splat. Rocks in a bathing suit, then into the ocean? How about jumping into a vicious animal's cage in the Bronx Zoo?
I tried desperately to dodge these fantasies. Planning on jumping off the top of the Galleria Mall? Then keep away from it. Don't even drive by it. Thinking about dumping all my capsules into a McDonald's shake? Never go to McDonald's again. Not even for French fries.
As frightening as the scenarios were, however, they gave me a chance at eternal peace. The Voices would alternately chant, “To die! To die! To die!” and then, “Peace! Peace! They are waiting to give you peace!” There was only one route to peace. The pressure was building. Finally, it became unbearable. I had to act.
It was the middle of the night when the bubbling kettle of my suicidal fantasies finally boiled over. I was in my bedroom, and the Voices were chattering away like Fourth of July firecrackers. They were condemning me to die, making me feel like shit. They were suffocating me and there was no way out. My urge to silence them for good was so impulsive and powerful that I didn't have time to act out any elaborate fantasy. I used what I had at hand.
I had a huge mirror on my bedroom wall, and it watched me as I prepared to murder myself. I made my own precise death-calculation. I had a bottle of Mellaril, a major tranquilizer I took every day for my psychotic symptoms. I knew what the highest safe dose was. I decided to take three times that amount, plus a little bit more. If I took more, it might make me sick enough to throw up. If I took less, it might not be lethal. So one by one I swallowed most, but not all, of the bottle of pills. I was going to die deliberately, as an expert.
Then, about thirty-five minutes into the overdose, I decided on some insurance. I went into the kitchen, and selected a knife. The paring knives were too small. The butcher knives were too big. I chose a medium-sized serrated one. As I gently drew the blade across first one wrist and then the other, I marveled that not only did it not hurt, it actually tickled. It felt good! I watched the red stains spreading across my arms.
I went back to my bedroom to watch my blood—and my life— seep out. I felt exhilarated. I did it! I finally did it! I felt like a hero on my way to finish a crusade.
A second later, I panicked. I was going to die. Really going to die. The thought terrified me. I bolted to my parents’ bedroom.
It was a little after 4:00 A.M. when, blood dripping from my wrists, I shook my dad awake. He knew immediately what I had done. He sprang out of bed. He jumped into his clothes and, dragging me spraying drops of blood behind us, pulled me into the car.
All the way to New Rochelle Hospital he screamed at me.
⁘Make yourself throw up, Lori. Make yourself throw up. Stick your finger down your throat.”
I couldn't do it. So it wasn't until we got to the hospital when they helped me throw up, then pumped my stomach and bandaged my wrists, that I was out of danger. For all the rest of the night, my dad waited by my side for the crisis team to arrive.
Because of the amount of tranquilizer that had made it into my system, I slept most of the time. While I was awake I begged my dad to keep me out of the hospital. He put the responsibility in my hands: If I felt I wasn't going to harm myself again, I could come back home.
I promised. I was only looking for relief, I told him. Relief from what? From those chattering, nattering, vicious, unforgiving Voices. And somehow with that suicide attempt they had been satisfied. The wild frenzy that reached its crescendo a few hours earlier had peaked and was now receding. I felt tired. I was distressed at upsetting my dad. But, as the Voices had promised, I did feel peace.
For the next several months, I felt better. It was as if in trying to kill myself, I had made an acceptable offering to the Voices. The volcano of their rage had erupted, and then subsided. I was more tranquil, more in control. So by spring, I decided to try to take another vacation.
I booked a trip with the Tufts alumni association. There would be people my own age there, from my school, my parents reasoned. I would meet people, make friends and have a good time. I picked a trip to Morocco. It was music that governed my choice. The Crosby, Stills & Nash song about riding on the Marrakesh Express had always fascinated me. Morocco seemed like an exciting, adventuresome place. I wanted to go someplace exotic where no one I knew had been.
But the trip was a disaster from the start. There were no Tufts alumni in the group, and no single young people. Everyone was old, or in pairs, or had young children. I felt alone and frightened the moment I stepped on the plane.
I hated Morocco. The people in the streets seemed so pitifully poor that I ended up giving away my meals to the little bug-eyed kids who looked so hungry. Mopeds were the vehicle of choice, and their buzzing about confused me.
But the worst thing was the sun. It was incredibly hot, beating down on the white buildings. It was so hot and so fiery that even in normal circumstances it was uncomfortable.and dangerous for people who weren't used to it to walk about. For me, it was even worse. After the suicide attempt with Mellaril, Dr. Rockland had switched me back to Thorazine. I was taking huge doses of it, and one side effect was to make me hypersensitive to the sun. I had a tough time dealing with ordinary daylight. The fierce Moroccan desert sun was murder.
I used lotion on my skin, and wore long-sleeved shirts. But I couldn't do anything about the part in my hair. I lathered the part up with sun-tanning lotion. I couldn't find a hat anywhere, so I put a towel over my head. Even that didn't work. The sun fried my scalp through everything. I came home from my first day walking and sightseeing in tears from the scalp burn.
So I decided to stop the Thorazine.
I arrived in Morocco on Sunday. By Wednesday, I was actively psychotic. People were wailing around me. My room was filled with candles, burning all day and all night, on the bed, on the floor, on the walls. When I showered, I heard my father's voice screaming at me out of the shower head. He was using words I didn't understand, speaking in a language I couldn't comprehend. Then his voice became many voices and I couldn't understand them either. I tried to figure it out. I was in a foreign country. Maybe the voices were speaking in some other language. I doubted it though. I was going crazy. That was it. My Voices were being taken over by other voices. It was petrifying. I longed for the relief that street drugs could bring me. I tried to get some the first opportunity I could.
And opportunity presented itself almost immediately. As Raymond had before, Mohammed brought that opportunity to me. That afternoon in Morocco, I met Mohammed when I was looking for a leather jacket. I had heard leather was a good buy in Morocco, but everything I had seen was too expensive. I met Mohammed in front of my hotel. He said he was a guide. His fee seemed reasonable. He showed me his driver's license to show me he was legitimate. We took a trip just outside the main part of the city to a leather store he knew. They showed me a red leather jacket that I loved. I haggled a bit. They served me mint tea. And I left with a jacket that I thought was a good deal.