Another Kind of Madness

by Stephen Hinshaw

  Photos revealed the four boys: First was Harold, known as Bud, born in 1912. Strong and athletic, he began to have troubles as a teenager. Showing the ultimate in defiance, he took up drinking. He worked sporadically as an adult, including a long stint as a golf caddy. Though I didn’t yet know the meaning of the word “irony,” I had a sense of the utter shame related to becoming an alcoholic in a Prohibition home.

  Next, Randall was born in 1915. Slighter in build than the other boys, he contracted rheumatic fever as a pre-teen and was confined to bedrest for a year. To make up for his lost schooling he decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover, starting with volume “A” and proceeding in order. There was no masking the high levels of scholarship in the Hinshaw family.

  Early in 1918, Robert emerged. Dad said that he and Bob were close. As an adult Bob became both a psychologist and psychiatrist. Years later he told me that when he witnessed the aftermath of his younger brother’s fateful flight from the porch roof in 1936, he decided then and there to become a professional in the mental health field and work toward both an M.D. and Ph.D.

  The fourth of four, Junior came into the world in November of 1919, a year and a half after Bob.

  Dad sometimes spoke of other relatives. One was a second cousin who had become one of the first woman physicians in the West. Another relative, my great-uncle Corwin Hinshaw, was a research physician on the team performing the first trials of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis in the 1940s. It was reported that he had just missed receiving the Nobel Prize. There was no mistaking the message: Big causes and high accomplishment were part of the Hinshaw family.

  But other relatives, I learned as I got older, had experienced serious problems. Beyond Uncle Bud with his drinking issues, a cousin of Dad’s died in her late twenties. She had problems with eating the right foods and keeping up her weight; she might have even killed herself. Dad’s voice trailed off; it was clear that this was not an easy topic to discuss. Others had spent time in asylums, the old name for mental hospitals. The more I learned, the clearer the divide became: In Dad’s family people either did great things or collapsed. I told myself that I’d need to push hard to stay on the right side of the divide.

  Dad spoke of his mother, a missionary to Latin America who later became committed to the Prohibition cause. Tenderly, he showed me close-up photos of her broad, kind face. But then he glanced down. “A tragedy occurred early in my life,” he said when I was further along in grade school. I didn’t know the meaning of the term, so he explained grimly. “If Mommy were to die, that would be an utter tragedy.” In early 1923, his mother became ill and had complications during surgery. Shortly after his third birthday, she died at a hospital in Chicago.

  Dad’s first memory was of standing in his living room. A large box was in the middle of the floor—a coffin, though he didn’t know the word. Holding Junior above it, his father told him sternly, “This is your mother. You’ll never see her again in this lifetime.”

  Among Dad’s folders I saw an international Prohibition newsletter entitled World Dry. The spring 1923 issue featured a long article on the life of the recently departed Eva Piltz Hinshaw, describing her early missionary work outside the United States and praising her dedication to the Prohibition cause. It included a striking photograph of her four sons, aged 3 to 11, in and around a wagon on the sidewalk, captioned “The Motherless Hinshaw Boys.” Bud stood to the right; Randall, Bob, and Junior sat inside.

  In this photo, as I study it today, Dad’s three older brothers show half-smiles for the camera. But from his seat in the wagon, Junior—three years old, dressed in a kind of androgynous gown—displays a facial expression those who study attachment might term frozen. He’s neither sad nor happy nor shocked. Instead, his facial muscles appear paralyzed by a distant fright, which he may be trying to ward off.

  Accumulated research reveals that the loss of a parent between the ages of three and five places a child at particular risk for a mood disorder later in life. There’s something about grief during those tender years that may be hard to comprehend and resolve, given the child’s lack of full development of language, memory, and attachment bonds to others. Yet the quality of the child’s remaining relationships, inside and outside the home, is an even stronger predictor of life outcomes. Early loss, in other words, does not inevitably lead to lifelong emotion dysregulation. It would take many years, though, before I learned about the impact of those remaining relationships on Dad.

  In a large cardboard box, Dad had kept copies of many of his father’s letters. In one from the spring of 1923, written to a relative, Virgil Sr. stated that Junior cried inconsolably for his mother at bedtime while the older boys tried to soothe him. There was nothing anyone could do to calm him down.

  Dad discussed his family’s subsequent move to Southern California. He cleared his throat as he began speaking, as though beginning a small seminar. Needing a fresh start after losing his wife, Virgil Sr. moved his brood of four boys out West. Two years later he remarried, to another missionary who’d worked in Latin America, just like his first wife.

  Dad beamed as he talked about his new home in Southern California. He attended a public school dedicated to John Dewey’s progressive ideals. The San Gabriel Mountains lay close behind, with the Mt. Wilson Observatory at the summit. It was there, Dad recounted, that the first evidence for the Big Bang was detected. Through the huge telescope, the astronomer Hubble saw that the colors of faraway stars were shifting toward red and realized instantly that the universe was expanding. When a train passes a station, Dad explained, you know it’s heading away because the clanging bell gets lower in pitch, the wavelengths longer. Red light, with long waves, is like a lower sound, so the stars must be rushing away from one another as space expands. The deduction was clear: There was a beginning to the universe eons ago, everything initially merged but soon flying apart, perhaps for eternity.

  All that knowledge, I thought, right behind Pasadena. Mysterious patterns could be discovered if you knew where to look and had a prepared mind.

  Dad’s father resigned as head of the Prohibition National Party in 1924 to become president of the International Reform Federation—a worldwide extension of the Prohibition movement—expanding his horizons to the global scene. Two more boys joined the family, Dad’s younger half-brothers Harvey and Paul. With my grandfather away so much for Prohibition work, Dad was involved with their upbringing, later helping them with their homework.

  In 1929 the stock market crashed. All the older boys, including Junior, pitched in to support the family. Virgil Sr. lost most of his legal and real-estate work but kept up his international reform efforts. Dad’s first real job, assisting a gardener in Pasadena, paid 17½ cents an hour. Later, he hauled huge blocks of ice to homes and businesses, to restock their iceboxes. One evening, Dad recounted, Grandpa Hinshaw pulled the family together to see who had money for dinner. Only Junior had a dime in his pocket, funding the meal of apples. Listening, I couldn’t remember having ever been really hungry. I silently vowed that one day I would leave my complacent life and try to do something important.

  In eighth grade Dad was P.E. squad captain for a group that included Jackie Robinson, the multi-sport athlete who became the first African American to play major league baseball. “I taught him everything he knew about sports,” Dad said, with a wicked grin. As a teen he put on muscle. He played football and was a shot-putter. Years later, his half-brothers Harvey and Paul told me that they never forgot the sound of Junior’s grunts during practice sessions at home, including the thud of the shot as it landed in the gravel driveway. At the same time, he was a regional debate champion. Academics and sports: The model was right there in front of me.

  Dad showed me a letter his father had written to a relative at the height of the Great Depression. One sentence stood out: “I never saw a day that I did not want to live a thousand years.” Where, I wondered, did that energy and dedication come from? With hindsight, I can only imag
ine that Virgil Sr. possessed a kind of chronic form of manic energy, though he never appeared to experience major depression.

  As I heard of Dad’s past, two concepts lingered in my mind: achievement and mystery. It was completely clear that the stakes were high for learning in the Hinshaw family, but why were some relatives ultra-successful while others crashed? Something frightening, something unexplained lay just out of reach of my understanding. The weight of the unknown sometimes stopped me in my tracks.

  *

  Dad’s departures hung like lingering smoke after a long-expired fire, ashes smoldering. I half-wondered whether something I’d done—or maybe something I wasn’t doing enough—made him leave. The terror hovered below the surface of my controlled life.

  Elementary school was my salve. The structure of each lesson, the homework I performed with almost religious devotion, the regular hours of the school day: My focus and effort constituted a futile attempt to keep any wandering thoughts at bay. All through school, when tests were returned in class and I saw another near-perfect score, I exulted. Like mainlining a narcotic, the bliss was overwhelming but fleeting, the surge of joy quickly evaporating as I faced another walled-off day.

  As I got older, victories in football, basketball, baseball, and track yielded moments of triumph but each loss stung, filling my bloodstream with venom I couldn’t seem to extract. How was I supposed to solve our family puzzles completely on my own?

  Ever so slightly, things could leak. Sometimes, entering a room where Mom and Dad were talking, I could sense it: a furtive glance between them, a hidden signal to keep things in check, a message transmitted up in that adult zone, above my line of sight. What is it, I kept wondering, I’m not allowed to know?

  Looking up at Dad’s makeshift home library one cloudy afternoon, I asked, on a whim, if he were writing any books of his own. He turned quiet for a moment before replying. “I’m pulling together my ideas,” he said softly. “But this takes real time.” He told me several years later that he had never been able to organize his thoughts and ideas into a book, only single articles. As he spoke, frustration covered his face. As an adult I came to understand that his episodes and hospital stays had robbed him of his prime academic years. Back then, though, what I saw for the first time was his vulnerability, some kind of hole inside him.

  Sitting in his library I asked him where ideas come from. He replied that this was a fascinating question, explaining that philosophers debated whether ideas existed inside people when they were born or whether people learned ideas from looking out on the world. I wasn’t quite ready for discussions of nativism versus empiricism, but this was the kind of issue he pondered all the time. “How few new ideas there really are,” he continued. Even though a person might believe he had an original thought, it usually turned out that someone else had already thought of it, maybe even centuries ago.

  Right then and there I felt it: Dad feared that he had no original ideas of his own. To my surprise, he was expressing regret over his life. Something was blocking him; something that had cast a pall over his life—but what? Another side of Dad existed, somewhere I couldn’t see.

  *

  Once our own set of conversations began when I was a grad student in clinical psychology, Mom told me that, when Sally and I were quite young, she drove out to the old Port Columbus airport to pick up Dad from an academic conference. She’d dropped us off at Grandmother’s in order to have an evening with her husband after his half-week trip.

  In that era anyone could go right to the gate to greet returning passengers. With real anticipation, Mom got there early to watch him walk down the small stairway leading from the plane’s front entrance. As he made his way across the tarmac and opened the door to the terminal, she caught a glimpse of his eyes. Without warning her knees buckled. She nearly collapsed.

  There it was, unmistakable: the glint in his gaze, the inevitable sign of an episode ready to emerge. It was a particular sparkle, giddy yet menacing, which only she understood. She struggled to stay upright. From past experience she knew all too clearly what would soon take place: exuberance, wild energy, suspicion, sexual fervor, quick bouts of rage. She knew, too, that there was nothing to stop the runaway train once it had left the station.

  The worst thing, she told me, was her utter powerlessness to do anything about it. The terror was hers and hers alone. Would he end up in the hospital again, after her secretive calls to the philosophy department chairman or to Dad’s doctors, telling them just how outrageous his behavior had become this time? Would someone need to contact the police?

  Mom rarely showed anger. But as she recounted the story her eyes narrowed. The ultimate in frustration, she said, were those times she tried to tell Dad’s doctors of her intuition about his quick changes of mood, when it was completely apparent to her that his brain chemistry was undergoing a radical shift. Yet each time the doctors let her know that the perspectives of a mere spouse were preposterous. Unless he were in grave danger and required imminent hospitalization, confidentiality must be upheld, so they typically refused to speak with her at all. And even if they engaged her, what could a Midwestern housewife—even a brilliant one with a Master’s degree in history—know about the unconscious mind, the standard of the day for understanding mental disorder? Her ideas about biological changes related to the onset of mental illness were obvious folly. Only those trained in psychological theories could comprehend deep personality dynamics and initiate lasting change through years of interpretive therapy.

  Given the accumulated knowledge of the ensuing decades, it turns out that Mom’s intuition was entirely correct—alterations of key neurotransmitters are undoubtedly linked to bipolar episodes, and the psychiatrists of the time were betraying their ignorance and arrogance. Part of the reason for the continuing stigma of the entire field, I’ve come to believe, is its long-standing resistance to bringing serious science into the enterprise. How could the doctors of the 1950s believe they knew it all? People who experience mania are notoriously poor historians, so it’s essential to include significant others in the process of diagnosis, in order to get the right information. And how could professionals relegate underlying biology to the stuff of myth? The treatises of the time betray elitism, arrogance, and the ultimate in narrow-minded thinking.

  As I listened, my rage smoldered. Going further back in Dad’s history, why did the superintendent at Norwalk fail to call Virgil Sr. until the eleventh hour in 1936, when his son was about to receive last rites? Do people with mental illness, and their families, deserve such callous neglect? Only recently did I learn of the 1975 film Hurry Tomorrow, a searing documentary from the 1970s about Norwalk (later renamed Metropolitan State Hospital), with torturous images of forced medication and utter dehumanization. The history of “care” for people with serious mental illness reveals how stigma predicts an unspeakable lack of concern for basic human rights, too often leading to brutality.

  Back in the airport, Mom gathered herself and hugged her husband as if everything were fine. They walked slowly toward baggage claim as she attempted to conceal her panic. She knew enough not to set him off once he’d begun to escalate. Over the following days, completely helpless, she watched and waited until he once again emerged into complete madness.

  Who supported her? She couldn’t tell her mother, a Daughter of the American Revolution, that her husband sometimes went insane. Or even her closest friends, whom she’d known since kindergarten. Some had seen Virgil as he’d bulled his way through a social event, but how could she speak of the voices he heard, Columbus State Hospital, or electroshock therapy? The shame was so great that she always covered: He’s visiting family; he’s at a conference; he has a physical ailment. Even when his brother Bob had to fly in from California to find treatment for Virgil, no one else knew. The stigma was supreme.

  The aftereffects of the silence and suppressed terror stayed locked inside her as she held the family together year after year. It took every ounce of her fortitude to ma
intain the family. Until one day, 20 years later—after Sally and I were grown—the cumulative effect would unleash its force and erode every cell and tissue in her body. For the last four decades of her life, she battled severe rheumatoid arthritis, which was clearly triggered by the stress from the mortal battles she’d fought, alone and without support, throughout her marriage.

  *

  Dad’s talk of grown-up relatives got me excited about the idea of becoming an adult. In first grade, my teacher announced an assignment that caught my interest. Older than the other teachers, with her stiff black hair molded into a severe flip, Mrs. Deacon always spoke calmly.

  The first-grade classroom was in a brand-new, low-slung building down the block from the main school building. The grassy fields behind had dirt areas, perfect for making trails for the marbles I brought in from home. Scents of paint, crayons, and construction paper permeated the colorful, airy room, but the sticky, sour scent of white paste was the strongest. Some kids said that the paste was made from horses’ hooves.

  “Today, class, we have a special project,” said Mrs. Deacon with enthusiasm. We were to draw a picture of the job we wanted to have when we grew up. To prepare us, she asked us to think about what we’d want to be. Some kids raised their hands right away: teacher, fireman, doctor, policeman, dancer, nurse. But my idea was still forming.

  As the others started drawing I called her over, telling her that I wanted to have two different jobs. She thought for a moment before asking whether there was one that I’d like more than the other. I replied that I couldn’t decide on just one. “I want to be an astronomer, to learn about the stars and planets. But if I practice a lot, I want to be a pro basketball player, too.”