by Jaime Lowe
In the waiting room, I was pacing and agitated and I had a death grip on my backpack. There were people suffering from traumatic car accidents, broken limbs, bleeding out from fresh flesh wounds, and feverish babies wailing into the night. I was not bothered by their pain. I went up to each of them to ask the specifics of their condition, to understand why they were there and what their relationship to me could possibly be. (Everyone was related to me and my cause.) My mom saw this and intervened. She told me to stop talking to strangers, to stop talking closely to the other invalids. She purposely put limits on me and confined me. If she provoked me, I might have an outburst and get treated faster. If she told me no, I would wildly insist on yes. I wasn’t just another shingles outbreak or sprained elbow. I was speaking in tongues and trying to heal these broken patients or enlist them in my army, I was channeling the Muppets and Michael Jackson to let them know that everything would be all right. I was murmuring to myself about poison, and electrified by the possibility of an elaborate escape plan . . . the waiting room responded with despondent heaves and sighs and groans of pain. People were suffering and I insisted on Uzis and rainbows. Reception noticed. I was escorted by antiseptic nurses and unfeeling night administrators past the doors and away from my parents to a gurney where I lay down willingly for strangers. I was nightgown-swaddled and buckled in.
I didn’t fight. The night-shift psychiatrist was young and handsome and I remember feeling like a queen being rolled around the ER. Again, like at Prado, I felt instantly okay. War was on the outside. I was here to expand my psychological presence to return to the battlefield better equipped. I was smitten with this handsome ER doctor who was going to make me better, who was doing my bidding and not the other way around. The restraints were just proof of my importance, of my power. He asked me questions to determine my level of sanity. Questions of logic and determination. Questions that were like a test. There’s no logic in this world, I thought, how can you test that? How can you know? But I knew how to game the system, I knew the right answers inherently. He did a physical exam, a neurological exam, lab work, a mental status examination, and a medical history. I refused the breast, rectal, and genital exam. I was rolled onto an elevator and kept in seclusion for a night.
The intake report said what was already obvious to everyone around me: I was exhibiting an “increased psychomotor rate, decreased need for sleep (about two to three hours a night), racing thoughts and paranoid ideation regarding her parents following her and watching her, as well as taping the phone calls that she was making.”
I woke, groggy from sedation. The ER docs ruled out head trauma, other medical conditions, and use of drugs or intoxication. They determined that I was in need of psychiatric care and asked me about my mood, voices, my beliefs, if I was suicidal; they tested me with questions to determine how abstract my thoughts were and whether my mind was being controlled by other people. I thought, I am going in deep, deep cover. I will find the evil in these neutral walls. I will exterminate before I’m exterminated. There is no guarantee of survival, but I must push on into this heart of darkness, penetrate the system, broadcast the corruption and be hailed a singular hero with omniscient knowledge of the universe past, present, future.
I believed I had special powers, the report noted; I knew “when the end of the world was coming due to toxic substances” and felt that I was the only one who could stop it. I tried to tell everyone in the waiting room, but they were too busy crying over broken bones. This was the end of the world. This was not a drill. One persistent thought—a gut instinct—was that I was the one, the only one. A prophesized being, special, sent to earth with a mysterious mission—one that I was just now understanding with each passing day. I was Jesus, I was Bob Dylan, I was Hitler, I was John Wilkes Booth, Derrida, Marx, the Monkey Wrench Gang, a bear, a pile of glitter, and a galaxy. I was in an action movie, a war movie, a romcom—I was the protagonist in all of these, of course—I had to warn the population at large about the future, nuclear annihilation, war, genocide, apocalypse on the highest scale, bigger than biblical. I would fall in love along the way. I would recruit this love to fight the larger, epic war. The feeling was that of incredible pressure and responsibility. I could not believe I was tasked with this. I was only sixteen. I was an average teen. But this is how superheroes are born.
• • •
PULL BACK AND PICTURE this same person, this superhero twenty years later. She is stretched out, making angels in an endless desert, her wings imprinted on the Bolivian salt flats, the infinite, forever land of lithium. She is spellbound. She leaves an impression of her body in the cool, wet, iridescent, crystallized, cacti-marked terrain. She wonders if eating the salt crust will help or hurt. She is equipped with armor and weaponry and powers bestowed on her by chance. She has conquered demons, won the apocalypse, and now, stretched to the brink, she soaks and steeps in the element of her making. She knows it doesn’t matter. This place, this pilgrimage is bigger than she is, bigger than anything she’s known. She thinks back to the beginning when it was just a capsule and a cure, and she thinks to the future when it is corrupting her insides. This is what she is made of. This is who she is. This is how she came to be. She is there to be intimate with her keeper and her kryptonite, to marinate in it and rub it between her fingers, up to her forearms, into her pores. She walks barefoot. The lithium rises up through the soles of her feet, floods her body, and touches her brain.
CHAPTER 2
ADMITTANCE
I WAS ADMITTED to UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute on September 8, 1993. The discharge summary, a document that noted my progress from beginning to end, said that I had been suffering from increased paranoia and a lack of sleep, and that I had been hallucinating “people from the past.” The report included my parents’ interpretation of my erratic behavior the previous two months, which they described as increased “irritability, lability, and ‘bossiness’ with family members.” Some time before the Night of the Hospital, I had filled out a questionnaire called the “Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 4–18.” It was meant to be filled out by a parent, but I found it and filled it out myself. When the survey asked for an explanation in academic performance and why a “child is not being taught,” I answered, “Because my father controls me.” I listed “death” as an obsession, “cats” as a fear, and under the question of whether I ate or drank things that were not considered food, I wrote yes with the examples of “tequila and cigarettes.” The fortieth question of the survey asked for a description of the “voices that aren’t there.” My response was “But they are there.” Toward the end of the 113 questions, the survey asked for descriptions of any strange ideas, and for that I wrote “to kill everyone except for me and one other person.” I was a mass murderer. I was Adam Lanza. Based on my answers, I seemed violent, vindictive, delusional, illogical, reckless, troubled, addicted; reading these answers years later, it’s hard to believe I ever wrote them on a piece of paper. It’s possible I was answering hyperbolically, playing into the absurdity of the questionnaire. I don’t know; my intake report included a detailed account of auditory hallucinations and fears of the end of the world. It doesn’t seem impossible that in my mind state I would have welcomed a worldwide do-over, an Adam and Eve scenario in which I got to start from scratch with everything. On the other hand, the fantasy fit perfectly with my line of thinking—the world was ending, I was tapped to start over with a fresh new society—a revolution and an apocalypse in one. On a personal scale, that’s what hospitalization was to me, a quick shake of the Etch A Sketch to start over with a blank palette, me at the circular controls.
I entered NPI sedated but quickly began talking rapidly and incoherently. According to the report, I was not lucid. I was oriented to time but not place. And I was certain that my parents were not my parents, but agents impersonating my parents, on a mission to follow, watch, and record my phone calls—to monitor my behavior. I was assigned to Dr. Mark DeAntonio. He said l
ater that when I was admitted, “Your state was altered; you couldn’t function in that state on any level.” He asked my parents about me. They said I was a top student at University High and that I had close friends, that I was confident, ambitious, creative, and generally engaged but that I hadn’t been lately.
Dr. DeAntonio rocked in his office chair and twirled tufts of his hair, leaving horned curlicues jutting this way and that. He wore thick-soled motorcycle boots, faded black jeans, a collared shirt hastily tucked in, and earrings in his right ear. He had piercing blue eyes, like ice. He looked more punk than psychiatrist. His eyes squinted quizzically without hesitation. He had some of the mannerisms of a patient—tics and oddities—but he was, in fact, the head of adolescent psychiatry. We met and he asked me about my backpack, which I still had a death grip on. I carried it with me everywhere—to group, to doorways, to the lounge, to the dining area. He asked me what was in it. I would not reveal its contents; I would not crack under pressure. Dr. DeAntonio looked cool but he was still one of them, the head of them, maybe the most heinous and evil of them? Within days of my admittance, Dr. DeAntonio diagnosed me as manic depressive, the term used then for bipolar disorder. He said I was a classic case. I was one of the 44 million Americans who experience mental illness in any given year and one of the 5.7 million people diagnosed as bipolar.
He met with my parents—all four of them—for a family meeting. They described a period two years ago in 1991 that included “multiple psychosocial stressors.” My older brother, Matt, had moved to Berkeley. I had started a new high school. They talked about the noticeable changes that happened gradually the summer before. My mom mentioned my behavior in Maine—I had been argumentative, intense, obsessed with the loons. I remember plunging into the cold water of Potash Cove on Lake Thompson and swimming through the still waters, communing with the fowl. Everything is a symptom in retrospect. I remember the rock that made a deep region shallow. I would swim out to where I could stand, where the tiny translucent fish would gently bump into my toes. I felt a rush of euphoria, a shock of cold. It wasn’t especially weird but coupled with my lightning eyes and odd demeanor and unaccountable fixations, maybe it was. If you were to look at pictures of me that summer, you would have seen a laughing, relaxed rising senior with red curls that would not obey the dictates of a bob cut. I wore old flannel shirts, ripped jeans, and purple Doc Marten boots. I left Maine early that summer. My parents, worried, arranged for Joe, my stepmom’s stepfather—a jovial and gracious school bus driver who loved to go dancing—to meet me during my layover at O’Hare in Chicago. I ate lunch with Joe and his girlfriend, Trudy, and we talked about Joe’s job and the kids on his school bus. My mom made note of other oddities, like the time I came home with seventeen camera key chains from the Nature Company. I had figured that everyone I knew needed one to keep one in the glove compartment, in case of a car accident, obviously. They were meant to record the damages. I was an opinionated person but there was a new edge to my arguments, a passion that felt misplaced. I was journaling a lot. More than your average Indigo Girls–loving teen—my notebooks were covered in expansive and intricate doodles.
My parents explained that there was a clear shift in behavior. I’d always been an intense child, but the choices I was making—the conversations I was having and the way I was functioning—it was off. They described my sleep patterns as a child to Dr. DeAntonio. I was a precocious insomniac. After my parents’ separation, when I was eighteen months old, I had night terrors regularly. In our first apartment on Almayo Avenue in West Los Angeles, our downstairs neighbor would pound a broom into her ceiling with each squall of hysteria. I grew up with sleeplessness, and night wandering stuck with me. My mom taught me to try to sleep. “Picture the waves,” she would say. “Think about the ocean, the waves go in and they go out.” As she soothed, I would breathe in and breathe out, matching the waves rolling in and out with visions in my head. My medical records noted two major traumas: my parents’ divorce. And, when I was thirteen, I had been molested by a stranger at knifepoint. We were a verbal family, well versed in psychological discourse, but we didn’t talk about the attack much. Immediately after it, I went to see a therapist named Dr. G. My family referred to the sexual assault as “the incident,” which simply meant we never used the phrase the incident again. In retrospect, the attack was connected with the breakdowns that followed, but at the time it was hard for me to see—and the psychiatric community favored genetic implications of mental illness over environmental issues. This thinking has evolved over the past couple of decades to incorporate both environmental and genetic factors, but it’s a complicated and controversial determination to make. Is mental illness a result of nature or nurture? How many of these diseases are caused by experienced trauma, how many by a genetic lottery? How many by a combination of both?
Dr. DeAntonio asked for a family history. My parents told him that the only link to mental illness was with my maternal grandfather, Irving Tannenbaum, a barrel of a man who died with all his hair and all his teeth at age eighty-nine. He was a Teamster and spent most of his career dropping off kegs of Budweiser to local bars and liquor stores in West Los Angeles. He was surrounded by four chirping and loquacious ladies, his wife and three daughters, for most of his life, which left him inside himself. Irving would read mystery books in his striped brown velour chair; he had a gruff demeanor that belied an occasional inner twinkle. Two years before my hospitalization he had been hospitalized at NPI as well after a late-onset depressive episode. (We were the family that NPIed together!) After months of Howard Hughes–esque behavior—he refused to shower, cut his hair, clip his nails, or emerge from his bedroom—he was given Prozac, a transformative medication that took his personality from completely dysfunctional to congenial. He shed his gruff exterior and we all wondered at the time: What if Grandpa had been medicated earlier? He was the only clear link, substantiated by his family—a niece who committed suicide via a stab wound to the chest and siblings who were all on varying points of the spectrum. The niece’s husband, an anesthesiologist at UCLA, thought his wife was an undiagnosed bipolar person. It never occurred to us that Grandpa’s grumpiness was treatable; he was sane by comparison to his relatives, who were all estranged anyway.
For the first few days of my hospitalization, I was put on Mellaril and Ativan to control the acute mania and psychotic symptoms. They eventually switched me to Loxitane and Ativan, which I was meant to take two or three times a day and at night before bed. My dad, reluctant to accept a bipolar diagnosis, considered a second opinion. He didn’t know what bipolar was, what it looked like. He couldn’t imagine it was me. My symptoms got worse and I started to show signs of cycling again, at which point my dad consented to the diagnosis and to the treatment.
CHAPTER 3
IF NAZIS DON’T GET YOU, THE MOCCASINS WILL
I WAS SIXTEEN, young, at that time, to receive a bipolar diagnosis. The morning after I was driven to the hospital, I was volatile and irritated. The nurses said I was disturbing other patients. So I got a private room with four beds. There were about seven other teenagers in the ward, mostly girls with eating disorders and one boy. There were automatic double-locked doors next to the on-call nurses’ terminal. Doctors could pass through; we could not. Immediately, I paged through my patient handbook, a small stapled brochure that outlined rights . . . very few, there were very few rights afforded to me. I explained that I was sixteen, old enough to drive, old enough to file to become an emancipated minor, old enough to know when certain nurses were trying to kill me. I demanded to be released; I would be seventeen in two months and I was too old not to make my own decisions, too old not to exercise free will. I already had too much responsibility to be stripped of choice. I had a part-time job wrapping gifts at a boutique owned by pothead lesbians, I was a Red Cross certified babysitter, I had a driver’s license, I had been a camp counselor, a volunteer at a shelter for runaway teens, I’d campaigned for three Democratic presiden
tial nominees and attended political rallies to protect a woman’s right to choose. I was an autonomous latchkey kid. Here in the ward, I was a danger. I argued aggressively, pushing the point that my residency at this facility was a violation of my constitutional rights, my human rights. “I have been to Amnesty International concerts; this doesn’t happen in this country,” I said. A nurse politely pointed out, “A minor has no constitutional rights, no amnesty.”
I eyed the double doors. I thought of escape.
NPI was a jail. The building was an imposing postwar brick behemoth shaped like a plus sign with wings extending in each geographical direction. The adolescent ward was in the west wing. Looking out the north-side windows I could see a power generator three stories tall and equally wide. If I looked past the metal grates, past the generator, I could see the bucolic hills of UCLA’s campus and imagine the expansive green lawns with freshman students and stacks of books and backpacks full of purpose. Those rolling grass hills were not for us; we were locked in, double-locked in—no, triple. Those hills were not real to me anyway, just another movie set, a form of make-believe to mask an apocalyptic landscape—cratered earth swallowed by thick nefarious lava, a war-torn battlefield burning on the west side, an army of degenerate zombie serial killers thirsty for brain. Nothing good was happening on the outside. I was fixated on the generator—the pipes intertwined and shined, they were big and boisterous and volatile. It was a maze of metal, menacing and alive. I watched those pipes like something was going to hatch—a plan, a spirit, a baby, a monster, a baby monster, a zombie serial killer, the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez himself. The south side of the ward faced an equally awful image: a fenced-in asphalt volleyball court and recreation area that was wrapped in double-sided barbed wire. What kind of MacGyver move would it take to escape and save the world? Tuck and roll? A hysterical diversion? Sure. Maybe.