The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (25 page)

With years of practice, I'd learned to keep my symptoms mostly
hidden from view; I was becoming adept at
acting
normal even when
I wasn't feeling it. Perfecting this acting, this
seeming
, was vitally
important if I were going to make my way in the real world. Yet in
spite of my vigilance, periodically my psychosis surfaced. One day, a
classmate received high praise from one of my professors; fortunately,
I had a session with White shortly after. "Someone's trying to kill me,"
I said. "He's a friend, he's an enemy, and he sent soldiers to the front
where I was to explode my brain. I'm scared."

"I think you're talking about your competitive feelings toward your
classmate," White said. "You sort of started there, but then you felt
scared to have such strong negative feelings about a classmate—so in
your mind, you made your classmate attack you. It's sometimes easier
to feel attacked than to feel angry or sad."

He also helped me understand that I retreated into thoughts of my
own violence when I felt cornered or upset; even to me, that made
some sense. "I think you're talking about threatening and scary ideas,
because you feel threatened and scared yourself," he said. "The
violence is your defense against fear. You are safe here."

So I went back out into the world, shoved the violence and the
delusions into a closet, and leaned against that closet door just as hard
as I could. I was determined not to lose any more time, not to lose any
more of my self...and then Professor Cover assigned our small group
its first memo. I was startled at how quickly my body reacted: hot,
cold, clenched fists, some trouble with concentration.
Memos are
what threw me the last time.
For two weeks, I worked on my
arguments, burrowing down into the research while managing my
other classes.
It's OK. Calm down. Focus.

My memo came back with only three words on it: "Generally very
good." I had no way of knowing that this was high praise indeed
coming from Bob Cover. Some students were required to completely
rewrite their memos; all I had to do was fix a few footnotes. But those
three words weren't enough; to me, they meant I wasn't enough. By
nightfall, I was more disorganized in my thinking and behavior than
I'd been since early in the summer.
The library's the only safe place,
I
thought.
I'll go work.

Once settled in, I looked up to see a classmate approaching. "What
year is it?" was my greeting. "Do you know where your schoolchildren
are? Who's in the library with us? Have you ever killed anyone?" It
had simply never occurred to me that others didn't also kill people
with their thoughts. My classmate (with impressive practicality, not to
mention quick thinking) asked if there was a doctor or therapist she
could call for me. I gave her White's name and number, then revealed
that the law book I was carrying had no "no's" in it. Then I started
reciting Aristotle in Greek.

"Elyn, stay here. Stay right here, I'll be back as soon as I can."
When she returned, she told me that White was on the phone; then
she led me to the phone itself.

"What's going on?" White asked.

"There's cheese and there's whizzes," I told him. "I'm a cheese
whiz. It has to do with effort and subliminal choice. Vertigo and
killing." Suddenly, I was terrified.

White's voice was calm. "You sound as if you're not feeling too
well," he said. "Your friends are concerned about you."

"Oh, they're nice. Do you like spice? I ate it thrice. They're all
hurting me! They're hurting me and I'm scared!"

"I know," White said. "But it's not you, Elyn. It's your illness acting
up. Everything is going to be OK. I want you to go to the ER now, the
doctors there will be able to help you."

Like a laser beam, his suggestion focused my mind: the ER? No.
I'd been given a second chance, I wasn't about to repeat the events of
the previous year. "No way," I told him. "No way in hell am I going to

the emergency room."

"But I think you need to," he said. "They won't hurt you, and they
may be able to give you some medicine that wall help."

"Or they may tie me down and lock me up," I argued. "No
emergency room."

"I know you're frightened because of last year," White said. "But
that's not going to happen this time. And I think you need their help."

"I'll think about it," I muttered. I was fragmented, leaking out at
the edges, but I was determined: It'd take police and significant force
to get me back into an ER again.

I left the library in a panic, headed back to my room, and
attempted to sleep, but it was futile; the very air in the room seemed to
swirl around me with threat.
Danger. Evil.
Exhausted, I headed for
the Student Health Center the next morning, and once again found
myself sitting with a doctor whom I didn't know and who didn't know
me. "I've been talking funny," I told him, along with only the
barestbones medical history. He gave me some Trilafon, which I
slipped into my pocket. YPI had loaded me up on Trilafon to the point
where I couldn't walk and couldn't read—why should I take it now? I
had a standing appointment with White the next day; we'd talk about
it then.

By the time my appointment rolled around, I was deep in
psychosis and almost speechless. I rocked in his chair, rolled my eyes,
and stared at the floor.

"How's everything going today, Elyn?" White asked.

"Two and the division of time." Silence.

"Can you tell me what you mean?"

No.
More silence, more rocking and gesticulating.

"Everything's going to be OK," he said. "It's good that you went to
Student Health; I was concerned that you were going to resist
treatment when you didn't go to the ER."

There was a drug, he said—Navane, an antipsychotic whose side
effects were milder than Trilafon's. We'd start at a low dose, ten or
twelve milligrams. "No," I said. "Not a good idea."

"It wall help you concentrate," he said. "It's milder than the other, it
works quickly, and please, it wall help."

Finally, desperate, I agreed. Only one memo and I'd already
crashed. How on earth would I make it through all the memos to
come?

The Navane worked as quickly as anything I'd taken. Within a few
hours, my mind had calmed. I could read. I could think.

Different bodies respond differently to different medication;
finding the magic potion is pretty much hit-and-miss. This seems
obvious, even simplistic, but it's the only consistently true fact in
treating mental illness. This time, Navane worked. I stayed on it for
about ten days, got a lot of work done, then decided that while it was
helpful, it was making me a little druggy, and besides, it probably
wasn't necessary.
I'll take it when I get sick, but not for long; I don't
want to be drugged.
Within two days, I'd stopped altogether. I'd
fooled them. Which of course raises the question: Fooled
whom?

It would take me another fifteen years to learn the lesson of what
happened each time I withdrew from drugs. It had been much easier
to learn ancient Greek, and not nearly as self-destructive.

One of the worst aspects of schizophrenia is the profound
isolation—the constant awareness that you're different, some sort of
alien, not really human. Other people have flesh and bones, and
insides made of organs and healthy living tissue. You are only a
machine, with insides made of metal. Medication and talk therapy
allay this terrible feeling, but friendship can be as powerful as either.

Steve Behnke was a first-year student, with a boyish face, a head
full of thick sandy hair, and a runner's body. We first talked in the law
school cafeteria sometime in early November, on one of those New
England evenings when leaves are turning colors and you can taste fall
in the crisp air. A group of seven or eight of us sat down to dinner on a
Friday.

Steve and I were in contracts class together, and a couple of times
he had asked me about an assignment. Other than that, we'd never
really spoken. The dinner conversation that night was casual and
pleasant, drifting from one subject to another—classes, and law
journal, and summer jobs. I noticed that Steve seemed engaged
enough—he nodded, he smiled—but after a while, it began to look
more like simple politeness. As the others got up to leave, I realized I
wasn't ready to go just yet.

And there began one of those conversations that last for a lifetime,
one in which there is immediate comfort and acceptance, the
equivalent of someone's strong hand offered to you when you most
need to grasp it. That first talk flew far and wide: how we got to Yale,
who our families were, how we felt about them. Then philosophy, then
religion, and what mattered to us, and why. Steve had majored in
classics at Princeton, where he was named salutatorian of his class
and spoke, in Latin, at graduation. The summer after graduation, he'd
worked as a janitor at a small-town airport, then gone to Rome, where
he lived with a group of Benedictine monks and read Latin at the
Vatican, with a monk who served as the Pope's Latinist. He'd
considered entering the monastery and studying medieval philosophy,
but decided against it—because he couldn't marry as a monk (he very
much wanted a family) and because medieval philosophy had ceased
to hold his interest, at least as a life-long endeavor. Instead of
becoming a monk, Steve came to Yale Law School. And so did I. And
neither one of us was quite sure why.

Sometime later, it occurred to me that at the very moment I was
being tied to a bed in a psychiatric ward, screaming bloody murder
and afraid for my life, Steve was singing Gregorian chant in a
monastery overlooking the ancient city of Rome. And here we were
now, come to the same place, from two very different directions. It
was past midnight when we said good night, and as I walked back to
my room, I had the distinct feeling, in the middle of my usual muddle,
that I'd been unexpectedly blessed.

I don't know why I decided to tell Steve the truth about myself; I don't
know why I thought I could trust him. But I did. I believed from our
very first conversation that this man would be a significant friend and
a force for good in my life. Once the possibility came to my mind, I
realized how very much I wanted it to be so. But I didn't believe that
could happen unless I revealed the truth about myself and let him
"see" me in full. So much of what I did on a daily basis was about
faking it; I knew that I would never fake it with him.

And so, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, at a pizzeria in New Haven, I
shared my history. Aside from doctors and therapists, it was the first
time I'd ever done this with anyone, anywhere.

Steve's a naturally curious man and a gentleman as well. So he
asked a lot of questions, but in a very gentle and noninvasive way. He
told me he didn't know much about mental illness; there'd never been
much of a reason to study up. But he listened, and he was empathetic,
and little by little, every detail came out. Speaking as a Jewish woman,

I suspected he probably would have made a fine priest.

When Steve and I first came to know each other, romantic
relationships were so far off my radar that it never even crossed my
mind to look for one or, more particularly, to look for one with him. As
our friendship progressed, I realized it was becoming exactly what I
wanted. He was, for lack of a better term, brotherly—that is, if you can
find a brother (or a sister, for that matter) who reads the same authors
you do, has the same political and philosophical beliefs, is staggering
under the same load of books, and is comfortable making tactless
jokes about mental illness. Specifically, mine.

It was late one blustery fall night, in the bowels of the law school,
when I was struggling badly, not so long after I'd told Steve about
myself. "You can't imagine what it's like in an emergency room—it's
god-awful, the way they tie you down and make you wait all night till
someone has time to see you. They walk into your room at the crack of
dawn, because they're ready to talk. What do they possibly expect you
to say except'
Let me f'ing go! "'

Steve looked at me with an impish grin. "Quote
Hamlet
, perhaps?"
And in his best Shakespearian accent he intoned, "Lo, noble physician,
the 'morn in russet mantle clad walks o'er the dew of yon high
easterward hill. So loosen my chains, kind sir, for the tasks of the day
await me."

He smiled. I laughed. He got it. I knew this man, whose depth of
heart was equal to the speed of his mind, would be a lifelong friend.

chapter fifteen

D
URING SECOND SEMESTER,
we were free to choose whatever
classes we liked. I chose the mental health law clinic and another in
criminal law. Steve was in both as well.

As part of the mental health law clinic, students represented actual
patients in psychiatric hospitals. Professor Stephen Wizner was the
head of the clinic. Tall, with curly black hair, he was often moody and
mercurial (sometimes, he gave advice one day that he contradicted the
next); he nevertheless helped me feel confident in my early forays
helping folks who often looked and sounded like me at my most
vulnerable.

Joe Goldstein, a law professor who was also a psychoanalyst,
taught the criminal law course. Joe looked like the quintessential
"mad professor": baggy clothes that looked like he'd slept in them,
plus wild, Einstein-like hair and a distinct, eccentric way of speaking.
He only assigned a very few pages of reading for each class—and his
syllabus made the course look like a breeze—but he wasn't fooling
around. He expected us to read every page, every paragraph, and every
sentence; to do otherwise could earn Joe's wrath, which was
considerable.