Lori herself was begging to come home. Every time we visited she pleaded to be released. She often threatened to sign herself out against the doctors’ orders, and once or twice she had actually tried to do so. She wasn't hallucinating anymore, she insisted. She wanted to get out of the hospital, and get on with her life. Marvin had promised her she could leave the hospital by her birthday in April. He felt she needed a goal to reach for. She grabbed on to that idea and wouldn't let go. She wanted to be home by her birthday. She would be home by her birthday.
My rational mind was screaming “No! No!” There was still something very wrong with this glazed, dazed stranger I saw before me. Thinking realistically, I could see that Lori was not better. She was drugged.
Still, who was I to argue? Marvin was the expert. If he said she would get better at home, I believed him. And while it was clear that Lori's doctors didn't approve, they were doing nothing to stop us. They did urge that she should be released, not to us at home, but to a halfway house. But when we rejected that option, they didn't press. What's more, it was hard to refuse Lori. She was so unhappy in the hospital, and so desperate to get out. She said she felt better, and who knew better than she?
Besides, all along the doctors had been telling us to face facts. Maybe the fact I had to face was that this remote sleepwalking stranger was my daughter. That this was what she would be like from now on. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe the doctors were right. Maybe I had to adjust, and learn to live with this strange new person who used to be my daughter.
So on April 22, 1983, Lori was discharged from New York Hospital, just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday.
Part III
There’ Nothing Wrong with Me
11
Lori Scarsdale, New York, May 1983’August 1983
I was glad to be home.
Daddy had promised me I would be home in time for my birthday. And true to his words, he had brought me back to my old bedroom just in time for cake and ice cream. It wasn't that I cared so much about my birthday. I just couldn't stand the hospital.
Everything about the hospital infuriated me. I didn't know why I was there. I didn't know how I had gotten there. All I knew was that I was trapped. I felt like a prisoner doing my time. I looked out the window every single day and waited for my freedom. Outside was so inviting. I begged for a walk on the hospital grounds. Even with one hospital attendant—or two—at my side, I was so grateful to breathe outside air. I hated being locked up.
Most of all, though, I hated the hospital because everyone there thought I was sick. Well, naturally they thought I was sick! If you are in a mental hospital you must be sick. That was why I wanted to get out. I wanted to get out to be normal again.
There was nothing wrong with me. So why did they keep telling me there was? All these doctors and all these nurses kept saying all these things about me. The words swirled around my head. “There's some bipolar disorder. We should use some antide-pressants.” “I think she's definitely schizophrenic. A paranoid schizophrenic. She needs neuroleptics.” “She seems to be very manic at times. Give her some sedatives to calm her down.” “I believe there are borderline tendencies. She needs more work in psychotherapy.” When they finally settled on a diagnosis of schizo-affective disorder—some schizophrenia, some manic-depression—it felt like one of those everything-on-it bagels they sell in the deli. Poppy seed, sesame seed, onion, garlic, salt, pepper … crazy, loony, insane, cracked, cuckoo. Daffy, demented, lunatic, mad, maniac, nuts, screwy, wacky—use your imagination.
All the time I was in the hospital they told me I was sick. They told me I was psychotic with hallucinations. I hated these two words. I knew they were not true. Psychotic meant like the movie Psycho and Norman Bates, and the Bates Motel. That was scary and sick. That wasn't me. I wasn't a Psycho -tic woman with a butcher knife.
And hallucinations? Another word that enraged me. Hallucinations meant that you were seeing something or hearing something that didn't really exist. But when I heard the Voices screaming at me, they were real. When the doctors and nurses challenged me, told me that I was out of reality, and hallucinating, I hated them. What made me the psychotic one? What about all those judgmental people? What made them the experts?
In fact, I knew they were trying to trick me, trying to torment me into madness. I knew they could read my mind and hear all that the Voices were saying about them. The doctors and nursing staff told me repeatedly that the Voices weren't real. But if they weren't real, then how did the staff know they were there? The staff told me over and over again that they couldn't read my mind either. But if they couldn't, then how did they know all about what the Voices were saying?
My tormenters were real. I didn't want people telling me they were false or unreal. I wanted help in making them go away. That's what they should have been doing. But since they weren't, I just wanted to get out of there, and fast. I was twenty-four years old, and it was time I got on with my life.
But how could I?
I didn't even know what my life was. The one I had left behind a thousand years ago didn't exist anymore. I didn't have a job. I didn't have an apartment. I didn't have friends. I didn't have a life.
It had been nearly a year since I had lived outside a hospital. I wasn't even sure how to do it anymore. I was used to having my life move with the rhythm of the hospital. Someone else had told me what to do and when to do it. Now that I was home, I didn't know exactly how to begin to make those decisions on my own. When I woke up in the morning, I just didn't know what to do with myself. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do? I found myself literally just standing around.
Because the medications made me at once lethargic and restless, I often just stood in one spot, moving my weight back and forth from one foot to another. I was taking so much medicine that I found it difficult even to smile. I walked around the house sluggishly, doing what I had to do like a robot.
Now that I was out, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to react to other people. In the hospital, I had had contact only with doctors and nurses, and with other patients. With the doctors and nurses, I was a patient. They would ask me questions, and I would answer them. The other patients were crazy. I had as little to do with them as possible. Outside the hospital were other normal people like me. But I couldn't figure out how to connect with them. I felt very awkward around people, even around Mom and Dad.
There was no one for me to hang out with. My old friends couldn't help me. I didn't really even want to see them. It hurt too much. When my old roommate Lori Winters came to visit me in the hospital, she looked like the Dove Soap girl, all slender and pretty with her clear peachy skin. I was so fat and ugly I could barely stand to be in the same room with her.
Everything had changed. Nothing was the same. Even my childhood plans with Gail Kobre. Ever since I could remember, we had planned to be each other's maids of honor when we married. We talked about it, laughed about it, planned what dresses we would wear, and who we would marry.
But on one of her visits to me in the hospital, Gail had some news for me. She and David were getting married in the spring. But I wasn't going to be her maid of honor. No one was sure if I would be out of the hospital in time. And no one thought I could handle it.
Well, I was out of the hospital in time. She was married in May, just over a month after I came out. And I was there in the audience with everyone else, not up near the chuppah by Gail where I belonged. After the ceremony, the photographer took a picture with Gail and me together. He caught a big smile on my face, but he didn't catch the Voices that were shrieking in my ears, nor the sad feeling that everyone was moving on and leaving me behind.
Of course I did have my family. But even that had changed.
There we were again, 6:30 P.M. sharp around the dinner table, just as I remembered it from my childhood. But it was a pretty pale imitation of the old days. Like my friends, both my brothers were growing up and moving on with their lives. Mark wasn't
there. He was in New Orleans, finishing up his senior year at Tulane, about to return to New York City to business school. Steven still lived at home. But he was at the end of his senior year in high school, had already been admitted to Johns Hopkins, and was hanging out with his own friends, doing his own thing.
So that left just me and Mom and Dad around the dinner table. And in place of the lively conversation I remembered from my childhood, there was now strained silence. What was I supposed to say to Mom and Dad? I felt a huge gulf between us. They had changed. They weren't proud of me. They hated me. I knew they loved me, of course, but they hated me too. They hated me, and they were afraid of me. The Voices told me so.
When my release from the hospital was first discussed, people in the hospital brought up the idea of a private-duty nurse. Shouldn't I have someone to stay with me while they were out of the house? Mom and Dad asked. I got angry with them. I would never consider such a thing. Never. Never. Never. I didn't need any more bodyguards. I had had enough of that in the hospital. I was out of the hospital, remember?
So at first, they took turns spending a lot of time with me. My dad took some time off from work, then my mom did. There was always someone around at first. What is Lori going to do? I was being watched like a prisoner, like a crazy person. When they began to leave me alone it was in frightened little jackrabbit bursts. Mom dashed to the country club across the street to drop off her golf shoes, and was back in eight minutes. I was okay. The next day a kamikaze run to the supermarket. Back in twenty minutes flat. Still okay. Was Lori going to bug out and try to kill herself again? No, Mom and Dad. That's over. I won't do that anymore. I promise. I'm better now. Really. Prettysoon, I got them to believe me. So Dad went back to work in the city, and Mom followed soon after.
They tried so hard to please me. They knew that food was one of the few pleasures left in my life, so they took me to eat anything I liked. General Tsao's chicken and moo shu pork with pancakes and hoisin sauce; pizza with the works and spaghetti; soft-shell crabs, and burgers and fries—I'd wolf down anything.
They also did everything they could to help me put together the pieces of my life. My mom took me shopping for clothes, and tried to encourage me. “Go out and meet young people,” my Dad said. “You won't have any kind of social life sitting around your room.” He even encouraged me to hang out where young people hung out. “Go to a bar,” he said. “You don't have to drink. Order a Diet Coke. Talk to people.” He was always giving me some pep talk. And at the end, he always said the same thing: “It's better than being in the hospital.”
But was it? I knew I hated the hospital. But the fact was, my memories of the past year were so foggy that I wasn't even completely clear what had happened in the hospital.
My last clear memory was of a morning in my apartment in the McAlpin. Lori Winters and I were leaning out the window, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade roll by just beneath us. We were so close that the three-story-tall balloons were bobbing just about at eye level. Then the next clear memory I have is of lying strapped down in an ambulance, a pregnant nurse at my side, being transferred from the Payne Whitney Clinic in Manhattan to New York Hospital in Westchester. People told me that in between those two memories I had tried to commit suicide twice, and that I had already been in the hospital for several months. I didn't know whether to believe them or not.
These gaps in my memory were enormously frustrating. It was like everyone on earth was in on some secret about me. I knew that there were people around—doctors, nurses, my parents, my friends—who remembered things about me that I couldn't remember about myself. It made me paranoid and angry. What else did they know that they weren't telling me? What else were they hiding from me?
Again, I knew where the problem lay. It was with the doctors and the hospitals. While I was in Payne Whitney, I had been given shock treatment, lots of it. I knew that because the doctors at New York Hospital told me. That's what had destroyed my brain cells. They had fried my brain, fried me, fried away all my memories.
I was angry. I told the doctors what they had done to me. They always said the same thing. Shock treatment doesn't do anything to long-term memory, they said. They took me downstairs in New York Hospital, gave me tests, measured my responses and looked inside my brain. It's not the electroshock, they said. Bullshit, assholes! I knew better. They had electrocuted the memories right out of me.
It was awful. They had taken away big chunks of my life. Not only could I not remember being in Payne Whitney, there were all kinds of earlier memories I had lost too. Gail Kobre had visited me in the hospital, bringing with her a scrapbook filled with pictures of our time in London. Pictures of us together. In Trafalgar Square. Before the Queen's Guards. Skipping down the street, laughing. I must have been there. There was my picture. But where was the picture in my brain? Zapped. I felt like an outsider watching other people's memories in a movie that had nothing to do with me.
What did I remember from the hospital? I remembered the attendants assigned to be close to me at all times. I remembered the formal gardens, one of the few pleasures I was allowed while I was there. I remembered bingo and pizza nights in the hospital auditorium. But as for the rest, all I had was a mass of fuzzy impressions that bounced around in my head: Sound. Absence of sound. Jiggling keys. The dinner bell. Whispering. Yells. Tranquilizers. Visiting. Out of control. Showers. Walks. Sunshine. Reflections from outside off a freshly plowed snow bank. Mom. Dad. MEDICATION! MEDICATION! Cheek those pills. Tip the scale every Wednesday. Lithium vampires drawing my blood Tuesdays. Faces watching from the nursing station. Two packs a day. The final chapter. Nothing to do. Carly Simon. Babies crying. Me crying. Tears of a clown. Forever and a day. Keys. Escape. Alcatraz. Nothing to do about nothing. A post office mug. Coffee in the morning? Spelled with two Fs, two Es. No thank you. And you're welcome. Blaring silence. Bomber planes. Sky blue. I love you. SHUT THE FUCK UP. Smiling faces. The sixties. Bouncing laughter. Can't breathe. This planet. Too terrified. Charles Manson. To die, they say. To die. Help me. Help me. Help me. Please. Tick. Tick. Tick. Goodbye.
Smash that window.
I can fly.
I desperately wanted to leave the hospital, so every time anyone asked me, I told them the Voices were gone. I would have been stupid to do otherwise. If I told them what the Voices were doing and saying, I would have been sent straight off to a state hospital for the rest of my life. That I was sure of. If, on the other hand, I was successful in convincing them that the Voices were gone, I could go home and live a normal life. What choice did I have?
By this time, I had become very skilled at concealing my Voices. I needed every ounce of skill I had. For days at a time, the Voices bombarded my brain with their nasty, raucous shouts. Concealing the Voices in college had been easy because the episodes were so few and far between. This time, however, it was much harder. The Voices were so much more frequent, so much louder, so much more forceful than they had been before. With practice, however, my concealment skills increased.
Many times they didn't work, of course. If someone addressed me while the Voices were actively assaulting me, there was nothing I could do. The Voices’ power was too fierce for me. There was almost nothing from the outside that could pull me away. I had to listen to the Voices, had to engage in their world. For as long as these Voices chose to hold me, they were the most powerful thing in my world.
But in between these acute episodes, I usually could muster an adequate response to whomever was addressing me. When anyone—doctors, nurses, my parents, other patients—spoke to me, I learned to focus on the very end of their statements or questions, and respond to that. Usually I could manage quite an appropriate response. And then I would go back to the Voices.
Even though the Voices were far more intense in the hospital than before, in some ways they were less frightening. When I was in high school and college, they had sneaked up on me, blasting out of the airwaves almost without warning. By now, they had become almost familiar
. I hated them. I suffered from them. But they seemed almost a normal part of living. I knew them. I understood them and they understood me.
When I got out of the hospital, the Voices were much softer, much less frequent than before. In the hospital, the doctors told me that it was because of the medicine I was taking, that the medicine was helping to fix whatever it was wrong in my brain. I knew better. I knew that this was just another sign that being in the hospital made me crazy. Wasn't it obvious? When I was in the insane asylum, I heard Voices that made me insane. When I got out, I felt better.
Still, I was so far from being the old Lori everyone knew and loved that I was constantly caught up in a storm of self-hatred. I was fat. I was ugly. Everyone hated me. My friends hated me. My parents hated me. They told me they loved me, but I knew they were lying. They hated me because I was a pathetic loser. I knew my brothers were afraid of me. I knew my mother was ashamed of me. I knew my father was disappointed in me. I was no longer the star my parents could show off to their friends. No more guitar. No more straight As. No more entertaining our friends with the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. I wasn't sick. I was just a loser. Everyone wanted me to go away. Or die.
It was part of the deal everyone made with me on my discharge that I would continue to see a psychiatrist three times a week. Whoever I chose, they said, would help me work out the problems I was having, and would explain everything to me.
In the final weeks of my hospitalization, I chose the psychiatrist I would be seeing. My dad had always told me to go right to the top, try for the best, seek out the most professional help. So I chose Dr. Lawrence Rockland, the unit chief of 3 North, the unit where I had been hospitalized. While he and I hadn't been really directly involved when I was in the hospital, I used to see him walking through the unit, or coming to meetings. He was always friendly, saying hello when passing by, and taking extra time to touch base with me, and show interest in my condition and progress. I knew he was the boss, so he must be the best.
The Quiet Room Page 10