by Anna Berry
Great-Papaw Scott never saw a psychiatrist for an official diagnosis, but he was probably a classic paranoid schizophrenic. And like many paranoid schizophrenics, he died relatively young, in his early sixties. My Memaw Jones inherited several of his beautiful folk-art houses and now keeps them in her basement, where they sit and collect dust. I’ve told Memaw several times that the only things I want from her after she passes away are those beautiful folk-art houses, the only things that remain from my great-grandfather, who was crazy as a loon but also quite possibly an artistic genius.
My older brother Mark—my only full-blood sibling—is like a younger version of Great-Papaw Scott. He heard voices from an early age. Mark’s first breakdown happened as a teenager, officially starting when he walked out onto the top of an ancient Indian burial mound across the street from the top-secret nuclear facility where my father worked, pulled his long, dirty gray trenchcoat over his head, and shouted, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” over and over again until security personnel came to restrain him. The voices in Mark’s head apparently ordered him to sound a warning to the soldiers guarding the nuclear reactors across the street that World War III was imminent.
Mark was hospitalized for the first time not long after that. He was never exactly what anyone would consider “normal,” even as a child. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in his teens, Mark flunked out of several different colleges (including a large Midwestern university, where before dropping out he accused one of his male professors of sexually harassing him) until ultimately deciding to join the U.S. Army. His past mental illness kept him from enlisting until he found a psychiatrist willing to draft a letter saying that his paranoid schizophrenia (for which he’d been heavily medicated since the age of sixteen) didn’t exist. Mark stopped taking his meds, went to the recruiting center with his phony bill of good mental health in hand, and was promptly admitted to the Army infantry division.
Mark stayed in the Army for less than eight months. Shortly after completing basic training and being stationed in Korea as a medic, he wrecked the ambulance he drove in the South Korean demilitarized zone and got a medical discharge from the Army that entitled him to a monthly disability payment for life of $800. He went back on antipsychotics as soon as he got home from Korea, and he hasn’t held down a real job of any kind for more than two or three weeks since. I’ve often suspected he wrecked that ambulance deliberately, though I have no proof.
There is a long tradition of suicidal paranoia and hallucinations in my family, lending credence to the theory that mental illness, especially schizophrenia, is in part a genetic condition that runs in families. For example, two of my great-great-grandfathers on my mother’s side committed suicide in the late 1800s. Details are sketchy now, but after interviewing several of my older relatives, I discovered that one of my great-great-grandfathers holed himself up in one of rural Virginia’s many mountain caves one winter night and killed himself by drinking a Mason jar full of carbolic acid. He left a note saying he committed suicide because he had witnessed a murder in the backwoods and the perpetrators had promised to come and kill him if he told anyone what he’d seen. My mother and grandparents insist that he only killed himself because “that’s what people did in the olden days when they saw something bad.”
My mother goes as far as to say that our ancestor had no choice but to kill himself before the “murderers” he saw came and killed him themselves. But I believe that the “murder” he saw was merely a hallucination, and the people supposedly coming to kill him were simply the schizophrenic voices in his head, the same voices that demanded he steal the bottle of carbolic acid from a neighbor’s barn and drink it.
Another of my great-great-grandfathers killed himself by putting the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Nobody knows why he did it—just that he did. I’m sure the family voices told him to do it too.
The dark, demonic voices caught between the double-helix strands of my family’s DNA run very, very deep. I don’t hear those voices anymore, but I used to. They were there for me as an odd, wayward child who talked to herself; they were there for me as a morbid, disturbed, and distraught teenager who shaved the back of her head and drew skeletons and death-metal symbols on her frosted blue jeans with a Sharpie. They were there for me all through my twenties, which I spent wasting away in one destructive relationship after another, polluting my body with alcohol, drugs, and compulsive sex. Even after all the personal insight and behavioral changes I’ve worked so hard to instill in myself after more than fifteen years of psychotherapy, those voices are still there for me, whether I like it or not. They’re always there. They’re just dormant, is all. I managed to beat them back into submission. But they could rise again.
This book is the story of how I finally learned not to listen to the mad-bad voices that have crippled my family for at least seven generations. This book will show you that no matter how bad it seems, no matter how hopeless your illness or a loved one’s illness is, recovery is not impossible. This book will show you how you can stop listening to the mad-bad voices too.
Buckle up, folks. You’re in for the worst—and best—ride of your life.
1. Mary Soliman et al., “Bipolar II Disorder in Adults: A Review of Management Options,” U.S. Pharmacist, November 2011, www.medscape.com/viewarticle/754573.
2. Perry D. Hoffman, PhD, “Borderline Personality Disorder: A Most Misunderstood Illness,” National Alliance for Mental Illness, www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=20075&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=44745.
3. Erik A. Fertuck, PhD, “Borderline Personality Disorder Is Real: Part I, Diagnostic Validity,” Psychology Today, Science at the Border, April 27, 2009, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-the-border/200904/borderline-personality-disorder-is-real-part-i-diagnostic-validity.
4. American College of Pediatricians, “The Teenage Brain: Under Construction,” May 2011, www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/parenting-issues/the-teenage-brain-under-construction.
5. Jane E. Brody, “An Emotional Hair-Trigger, Often Misread,” New York Times, June 15, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/health/16brod.html?_r=0.
6. Borderline Personality Disorder Resource Center, “What Is Borderline Personality Disorder? Co-occurring Disorders,” New York-Presbyterian Hospital, http://bpdresourcecenter.org/co-occuringDisorders.html.
7. Deborah Daniels Carver, MD, “Clinical Aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder,” Medscape Psychiatry & Mental Health eJournal 2 (1997), www.medscape.com/viewarticle/430852.
8. Oliver Freudenreich, MD, “Differential Diagnosis of Psychotic Symptoms: Medical ‘Mimics,’” Psychiatric Times, December 30, 2012, www.psychiatrictimes.com/forensic-psychiatry/differential-diagnosis-psychotic-symptoms-medical-%E2%80%9Cmimics%E2%80%9D-.
9. Janice Lloyd, “Many with Mental Illness Go Without Treatment, Survey Says,” USA Today, January 19, 2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/medical/health/medical/mentalhealth/story/2012-01-19/Many-with-mental-illness-go-without-treatment-survey-says/52653166/1.
10. Not his real name.
11. Todd Leopold, “The Creative Struggle of Brian Wilson,” CNN.com, January 17, 2012, www.cnn.com/2012/01/13/living/brian-wilson-creativity/.
12. Lauren Paige Kennedy, “20 Questions for Carrie Fisher,” WebMD, November 2010, www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/questions-for-carrie-fisher.
13. Nate Jenkins, “Dick Cavett Talks about His Depression,” Huffington Post, June 20, 2008, www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/20/dick-cavett-talks-about-h_n_108332.html.
14. Not her real name.
Chapter 2
Vienna, Austria, October 1999
I am sitting in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the stunning Gothic medieval church in the center of Vienna and just a short walk from Dieter’s apartment. It’s six a.m. The church’s grand stone ceiling soars above my head; the patterns made by the dewy Austrian morning light pouring through the stained-glass window
s paint themselves onto my face and arms in fields of blue-green lace. The only sound is the soft footfalls of the Eastern European cleaning woman who mops the ancient, pockmarked stone floor. She guides her huge gray mop around the feet and legs of the few early-morning faithful who have come to kneel and pray.
The drab-faced woman, her face sunken inward from a lack of teeth, looks at me with surprise when she finds me just sitting in a pew, wearing my faded Levis and battered Doc Martens instead of the pressed, crisp, and formal European clothing all the other faithful wear. I hold no rosary, make no move to even pretend that I am here to pray or ask forgiveness.
Although I have the same long, lean build and fair blonde features as many Austrians, I’m dressed in my cheap American clothes, sporting my gaudy American hairstyle and making no effort whatsoever to blend in. The cleaning woman mutters something in Polish, probably a complaint about how even this ancient, holy place has been overrun by ugly American tourists. She doesn’t seem to notice that the padded kneeler just in front of me is damp, and not from the dewy condensation that has formed on the ancient stone walls as a result of the early-morning Alpine drizzle and fog.
The kneeler is damp with my tears.
I meet Dieter Franzl[1] in the early spring of 1999, in Chicago. He’s an Austrian graduate student from Vienna working on a doctorate in business administration. Dieter is tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and dreamily handsome, and he lives in a studio apartment a few el stops away from me. His accent is somewhere between Dr. Freud and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it turns me on like nothing I’ve ever heard, before or since.
In the early spring of 1999, I am two years out of graduate school and have gone back to work for my old boss at a large university library, where I once had a part-time graduate assistantship. I work for a pittance as a full-time department manager in the library’s acquisitions department.
I am back on campus working a low-wage job with a ninety-minute bus-and-train commute each way from the North Side because my brain and I both have had too much trouble adjusting to the real world. My former high-stress job as a financial editor at a brokerage firm burned me out to the point of a near-nervous breakdown a year ago. I accepted the deep pay cut offered by my old grad-school boss and embraced the comfortable, familiar territory of my former graduate-school campus like an old friend. I had also gone through an extremely bad breakup with a medical student (the latest in a long string of bad breakups dating back to high school) just before I quit that brokerage job, and I took the job on campus, just blocks from my ex-boyfriend’s condo, almost as an act of personal revenge. I even stalked that medical student for a little while because doing so helped assuage the low-self-esteem demons that dominated my brain. But my ex-boyfriend was smarter than I was, and a doctor-in-training to boot, which made him a less-than-ideal target for stalking. So in 1999, I gave up on stalking my ex and set out to find my next self-destructive relationship.
When I start searching for that relationship, I am poor, anxious, and more than a little battle-scarred. Still, other than the occasional rainy blue Saturday when I spend the whole day in bed, crying and hyperventilating, I am content with my life in general.
Sort of. But I want—need—something more. And that something more has to be in the form of a man, preferably a loving one who will share my bed each night, worship me by day, and become an essential extension of my body, my mind, my very existence. I am sure that if I can find that man in question, I will be totally happy and won’t have to spend any more rainy blue Saturdays in bed crying and hyperventilating all day long. In other words, I need a man to fill the gaping black hole in my brain.
That gaping black hole is slashed into my brain while I am still in the womb, a zygote absorbing my mother’s hormones while my genes replicate, two by two. The gaping black hole gets bigger and bigger as I grow up, deeper and deeper as I watch my mother and my brother succumb to the illnesses that run inevitably through our veins like toxic waste. It gets deeper and deeper, wider and wider in college and then in graduate school, until I can’t function normally without a man—any man, real or imagined—filling it up. I fear being alone the way some people fear God. For me, intimate companionship is like a drug. Latching onto another person who can fill up the parts of me that are missing therefore becomes my primary objective in life, and like any addict seeking a fix, I’ll take less-than-perfect options given no other alternative. A man who ignores me, insults me, or uses me for sex is better than no man at all, just as a junkie knows that shooting up with a dirty hypodermic needle is better than going into heroin withdrawal in a dark alley, at least in the short term. And no addict seeking a fix is ever thinking about the long term.
Whenever I can’t find a man to fill the gaping, black hole in my brain for me, I find myself trapped at the bottom of an even deeper black hole, bound and gagged by hopelessness, fear, and despair, my own personal version of drug withdrawal or the DTs.
For some, finding love is a matter of life and death. And so it is for me.
By the spring of 1999, I’ve grown tired of the regular dating scene, but I still need a man to fill up the gaping black hole in my brain before I drown. So on a desperate whim, I place a personal ad in the local alternative weekly paper.
TALL, SMART, EDUCATED BLONDE, FIT, CUTE AND 25, seeks intellectual and sophisticated male 22–30 for dating, conversation, and love. Must adore the arts, liberal politics, culture and the all-around Bohemian life. Knowledge of Kant and Hegel a plus. No Republicans, please.
I get only a few responses, none of which seem promising, until the day before the ad is set to expire. For the last time I log into the private e-mail account I got with the ad and find a titillating response.
Hi this is Dieter franzl I am from Austria. I am working on doctorate degree at norwestrn, also work very good job for a top consulting firm, good money and travel income. I adore american wmen, you sound so lovly, pls do call me and we will talk/have nice fun. (Oh and BTW Hegel rocks.)
Even if the e-mail is plain-text and badly typed, I can almost hear Dieter’s lilting Austrian accent in my mind’s ear, like electric telepathy. He attaches his picture in a GIF file. I open it, take one look, and nearly faint.
It’s good enough for me. I call Dieter that afternoon.
That first telephone conversation, Dieter and I talk for hours, well into the night. We talk as if we’ve known each other our entire lives. We talk in a way that has my body and mind buzzing with a sexual high that is better than heroin, better than speed or crack. And it isn’t just me that’s buzzing and high with raw sexuality that speeds its way down and across telephone wires and nerve synapses. Dieter is buzzing with it too.
“I needt to zee you right avay,” he says. His thick Austrian accent is so powerful, so penetrating. I picture myself lying underneath him while he speaks to me, his deep Germanic voice like the incessant pounding of rough sex. I can’t get enough of it.
We agree to meet for breakfast the next morning. I am working second shift at the library that day, and I don’t have to show up for work until two. That gives us the whole morning and early afternoon to talk, bond, maybe even make love.
When Dieter and I sit down for apple pancakes and Danish together, a powerful connection forms immediately. Within seconds, we are clutching hands across the table and cooing and making eyes at one another in a manner so childish and absurd that everyone else in the restaurant turns to stare. Within minutes, we are professing love for one another. Until this moment, I’ve always believed “love at first sight” is the stuff of silly fairy tales. But there it is, love at first sight with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a sexy Austrian accent, sitting across from me over a plate of syrupy apple pancakes.
“Can you skipt verk today?” Dieter asks, sensuously stroking the back of my hand with his thumb and forefinger.
“No, I can’t afford to,” I sigh.
“Vhy nodt?”
“I’m kind of poor.”
Dieter kisses my hand. “Vell,
zen vee vill have to do somethingk aboudt dat.”
He walks me to the el station, kisses me passionately, and makes a show of cupping my breast in the middle of the busy street. People walk by and tell us to get a room.
“Don’t vorry, vee vill get a room very soon,” he tells them, laughing.
He asks me for my phone number at work, and I give it. The whole long el ride down to the South Side, I think about Dieter Franzl, his accent, his penetrating, deep-set blue eyes, his long, lean hands upon my body. I keep on thinking about him at work, distracting myself to the point that I drop an entire shipment of new books on my foot.
Dave, my co-manager on second shift, rushes over. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I say, dreamily rubbing my foot. I have my steel-toed Doc Martens on, thankfully—otherwise those heavy hardcovers on British literature and German philosophy would have smashed all the bones in my instep. But I couldn’t care less. My whole body is floating on a pink cloud thirty feet above the earth. Someone could douse me with gasoline and set me on fire, and I wouldn’t even care.