Another Kind of Madness Page 14

  Without any release for the images Dad had provided me, I couldn’t digest what he’d said about his lifelong schizophrenia. Through the crudest possible method, I expelled what I’d taken in.

  In June I saw my year-end report of all As. Yet for my most important course—understanding myself—I had barely passed. Each day the contrast stared me in the face.

  *

  Ron had always been offbeat, even back in junior high when I first met him. He was strong, loud, and intense. His dad was an engineer and his mom a teacher. He called them by their first names, which everyone thought was weird. Ron didn’t smell good, especially after exerting himself in woodshop class. Maybe no one had shown him how to use deodorant. But he was super-smart and super-athletic. By high school, the coaches had molded him into an incredible defensive end. Ready to run down any ball-carrier, his neck collar and arm pads giving him the look of a gladiator, he played a key role on our undefeated teams. Ron got into Harvard on sheer academic and athletic talent.

  During freshman year I often headed over to his dorm in the evening. The living room was always filled with roommates, weed, and great music. We talked intently of psychology and world issues. But every once in a while Ron did something strange, like the time his mom sent him a huge box of cookies in the mail from Columbus, a week’s supply at least. We opened it with a couple of other guys, each of us eating one or two. The next night, I headed back for more. With a strange look on his face, he told me they were gone. “Come on, Ron, what do you mean?” I asked. Where was he stashing them?

  “I finished them after everyone left last night,” he continued.

  “That’s impossible! There were at least a hundred cookies in there.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” he responded sardonically, his grin twisted. “I ate them all!”

  A couple of his roommates soon came in and confirmed the story. That’s Ron, their shrugs said; they couldn’t believe it either. If Ron had an impulse, there was no stopping it.

  The summer after freshman year I was back in Columbus and so was Ron. He called one night and we decided to drive over to the OSU campus and see what was happening. His hair was really wild by then, not just long like everyone else’s but all over the place. Picking him up, I could see that his eyes were huge, his gaze intense and erratic. As we crossed the Olentangy River on a warm June evening, throngs of people crowded the sidewalks. “Do you see them, Hinshaw?” Ron snarled, staring out the car window.

  “See who?” I answered, trying to keep my eyes on the road.

  “All of them, right there!” Ron called out. “They look like people, but they’re not. They’re robots!” At first amused, I was now hearing alarm bells. “You can’t tell by looking at them,” he was now shouting, “but they’re mechanical, pretending to be human. They’re machines, gears and wires inside. People are mechanical grasshoppers!”

  Had Ron smoked a joint? Or was he voicing a metaphorical belief about human alienation? I somehow knew that neither was the case. He calmed down a bit as we went into a bar. Back then in Ohio, at 18 you could get low-alcohol beer.

  Worried about him as we headed home, I asked if he wanted to spend the night on our couch in the family room. Like a lost puppy, he accepted eagerly. I set him up before going upstairs, where for once I fell asleep within minutes.

  The next day, after Ron had walked home alone at some point early in the morning, Mom had a haggard look. “Did you see the family room this morning, Steve? Wrappers everywhere, records out of sleeves, everything a total mess. Loud music until four a.m. Neither your father nor I could sleep a wink.”

  I was stunned, suddenly guilty that I’d invited him over. Their bedroom was right over the family room but I hadn’t heard a thing. Mystified, I apologized. Later on, Dad came over to talk. He had dark circles under his eyes but tried to smile. “You were just trying to help your friend, weren’t you,” he said. “He’s not in very good shape, is he?” Dad had a sixth sense for particular forms of distress.

  Back in Cambridge in the fall, Ron didn’t go out for any varsity sports, even though he would have been first-team in anything he tried. Without warning, he dropped all his classes. If I saw him around, he looked otherworldly. One day he suddenly left Cambridge, no one was sure for where. A former roommate said a few months later that Ron had ended up in a mental hospital somewhere, maybe New York. “He’s got schizophrenia, that’s what I heard,” said the roommate with a bewildered expression.

  No one saw Ron again. He’d vanished into the ether. But he stayed on my mind.

  Desperately, I tried to work it out. Dad had been diagnosed with schizophrenia since the 1930s—the often lasting condition with hallucinations, fixed delusional beliefs, illogical thinking, and difficulty processing and expressing emotions. Ron had developed it, too, but with a huge difference. Once Ron began his collapse, he never got better. Neither had my cousin Marshall out in California, Uncle Paul’s oldest son, who had been in and out of mental hospitals since his first term at UC Berkeley in 1968, without any sign of improvement. Yet Dad seemed so normal much of the time, at times super-rational even if a little detached. How could they all have the same condition? In class, I drew genograms, squares for male relatives and circles for females, shading in the shapes for cases of mental illness. With diligence, I might crack the family code.

  Each time Dad and I headed back into his study during a visit home, my heart accelerated. He might start by asking about my interest in psychology, speaking excitedly about his own fascination with both psychoanalytic models and behaviorism during his years in college. He discussed philosophy and the ideas that had always thrilled him—the origins of knowledge, the progress of science, the sense of ethics people live by. Cautiously, in the third person, he raised the topic of schizophrenia once more. “When one has heard exultant voices and angelic choruses praising the Lord all night long, as I have, such a diagnosis is understandable,” he said. I had a glimmer of doubt but said nothing. Dad’s pattern seemed altogether different, leaving a major problem to be solved.

  Although shattering, everything he told me made a strange sense. There must have been something this huge, this catastrophic to have produced the vast hangar of silence surrounding my life.

  *

  Back in high school we took a summer family trip up to northern Michigan, a break from my cross-country workouts before the football conversion, Sally’s chorus practices, Dad’s summer teaching, and Mom’s course prepping. Boyne Mountain was a small peak, but compared to the glacier-carved plains of most of Michigan and Ohio, it seemed plenty tall. Eager to take the chair lift and hike the trails, I asked Sally to join me. But her expression instantly revealed her long-standing fear of heights. “I want to,” she said plaintively, “but the chairs are so high off the ground! If I looked down, I might faint. Really, Steve, I probably would.”

  Thinking fast, I replied, “If I sit next to you and we concentrate on the view, we’ll be up to the top in no time. It’ll be more fun than you think.” I let her know how proud she’d feel and what a great hike down we’d have. After she finally relented, we walked from the station to wait for the chairs to swing around the bend and approach us from behind. When the chair hit the back of our thighs, we sat back as the guy swung the metal bar over our heads. With a surge, we lifted off the ground, rising through the pine forest with a rush of air on our faces as the slope receded beneath our legs, 20, 40, then 60 feet below.

  The view was stunning in the now-cooler air. But looking over, I saw that Sally was stricken. Her grip on the bar was so tight that the color had drained from her hands. “I’ve never been this scared in my life,” she croaked. “Look how high we are!” The chair rocked back and forth in the wind.

  “Don’t look down,” I ordered. “Hang on. We’ll soon be up to the top.”

  “Steve,” she cried, her voice breaking as she grabbed my arm with one hand. “I can’t stand this another second. I’m going to jump.” I felt her abruptly rearrange her bo
dy, her hands groping to lift up the bar, the ground far beneath us. This was no idle threat. The panic in her voice was unmistakable.

  “Sally, if you jump you’ll break both your legs,” I spoke loudly, trying to stay calm. “You could fall on your head.” Indeed, she’d have certainly died. “Stay right here!”

  Should I grab her? But the seat was starting to rock. I concentrated on talking firmly, without a trace of doubt. “Sally, listen to me. Close your eyes; you have to.” I craned my neck to look toward her. This was my only shot. “Good, keep them closed. Now do this—think of our cat at home.” It was Thai-Thai, our Siamese. Sally’s love of cats was incredible. “Think of petting your beautiful cat and how good it will feel when we’re back at home to see him. Think only of the cat. We’ll be off this lift in a couple of minutes.”

  Hesitant at first, she began to sit back, her eyes tightly shut. I told her about things she liked: her friends, the cat, anything to keep her mind occupied. Hurry, I silently ordered the chair lift. She kept her eyes shut tight as I talked.

  After a few interminable minutes the ground came up fast beneath us. I lifted the bar over our heads and held her arm, telling her to open her eyes before pulling her off as the chair quickly swung around for its return trip. The lush countryside spread beneath us. Though pale, she had her feet on the ground. Never had I heard her so thankful. “I was ready to jump,” she said.

  “Believe me, I know,” I replied. “You had me worried.”

  I couldn’t get over the vice-like grip of her terror. I wasn’t sure how I’d known what to say to her up there; it had just come to me.

  Beginning my second year of college, my new plan was to drop pre-med courses and major in social relations, the interdisciplinary department blending sociology, social psychology, and anthropology, now merging with the small experimental psychology department dominated for years by B. F. Skinner. It might ultimately lead to a Ph.D. in clinical psychology if I could put in the work and get enough experience both clinically and in research. Maybe, just maybe I could learn enough science to understand mental illness and use any skills I had to help people—the way I had helped Sally.

  I sought field work, and the medium-security prison south of Boston offered the opportunity to teach a psychology class. Passing through the metal detector each week, I felt the trickle of fear spread over my skin. My co-instructor, a senior, and I brought up classic psychology experiments and showed films of these in a sterile, cinder-block room. Each inmate received a certificate at the end of the term, a small item, but one that might make a difference at a parole hearing. It was the least I could do, I thought, for those who’d turned abuse and deprivation into hurting others as well as themselves.

  I headed back outside the gates each week but didn’t gloat over my freedom. My own incarceration felt internal. How might I break out into a more authentic way of living, beyond my constant overscheduling, my lurking fear over what I’d learned but dared not share? More than I knew at the time, I identified with the inmates.

  The fall semester was relentless, with endless reading lists and countless papers to write. Autumn faded fast, the trees devoid of leaves before October was over. In November spits of snow alternated with clear, freezing days. Every week or two, after hours of congestion and unease, I hauled myself out of bed for another torture session in the bathroom. By mid-year I’d lost ten pounds.

  Every few weeks I walked over to the textbook section of the bookstore, a vast windowless annex. Row after row of new books gleamed, listed alphabetically by course. I always started in the “P” section housing the psychology books. But even the subareas of psychology—cognitive, developmental, biological, personality, clinical—loomed large. Down the aisle lay the other “Ps”: paleontology, philosophy, physics. Opening a book at random, I scanned the dense opening paragraphs. I was entering other worlds, but how could I get immersed without becoming lost?

  On some daring afternoons I went to other aisles: “A”—astronomy, anthropology, Asian studies; “B”—botany, biochemistry. In the dull glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, each book called out. But I feared that I might lose myself if I entered worlds of thought that were too different from my own. Quickly retreating back to the “P”s and psychology, I took a deep breath. I had returned to the place I needed to keep my focus.

  The battle lines were being drawn. Could I learn anything important if I were afraid to truly explore? Might I transform the knowledge of my family into anything useful? Every night, even the ones I didn’t end up in the bathroom, the questions swirled.

  8

  The Iron Suit

  During holiday visits to Columbus Dad and I sometimes saved our final talk until he drove me back to the airport, affording half an hour in the cocoon of the car. The streets and freeways faded in the intensity of the discussions. Ever more, I became initiated into the secret world of madness.

  In one of our conversations when I was close to finishing college, it became clear that Dad wished to bring up additional information about the treatments he’d received. ECT was at the top of the list. Although stereotyped as barbaric in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other aspects of popular culture, ECT can be an extremely effective intervention for severe forms of depression. Yet during much of the twentieth century it was used indiscriminately and even punitively for almost any form of irrationality. Back then it featured overly long pulses of current, which often caused major side effects such as memory loss. In the earliest days, before anesthetics were used, patients might break a limb from the seizure-induced thrashing. It’s still not known exactly how ECT works. Placing an electric charge through a person’s skull and thereby inducing a brief grand mal seizure alters a great many neurotransmitters and brain processes. But which of these explains its beneficial effects on serious mood disorders remains a mystery.

  Dad told me of his terror regarding the procedure back in the fifties. One such session at Columbus State Hospital, when Sally and I were quite young, stayed on his mind. The technicians, he told me, would place a steel arc on top of his head and clamp cold, metallic electrodes to his temples. After waiting—always the waiting—a surge of current would commence at his psychiatrist’s signal, sending his brain into a convulsion. His doctors had surmised that the medications he was taking weren’t doing enough. Talk therapy, such as it was, only scratched the surface. At the time, his diagnosis was chronic schizophrenia, but little matter: ECT was used indiscriminately during that era.

  On the morning Dad was recollecting, he was lying flat on a gurney, listening to the squeak of its wheels echoing through the corridor. Pushed by an attendant, he was heading to the special room, the place he dreaded above all others. With his arms and legs strapped, he saw the globe lights glaring down from the ceiling, passing above his face every few seconds as the slow journey unfolded.

  Above all, he must show no fear. Keeping his pride intact, he said, was essential. Once inside the room he’d be injected with medication, enough to make it impossible to sit up. He’d be powerless once more.

  Finally inside the door, he braced himself. He saw the nurses, scurrying to record his vital signs. The technician entered, the one who would trip the switch to allow the current to flow into the wires attached to the clamps. Would the crackle of electricity produce smoke from the side of his skull? His head, in fact, felt like scorched earth each time he awakened.

  Out of nowhere a question entered his mind: Where were Alene, Steve, and Sally? Did they still exist? The house on Wyandotte Road, the small kitchen where his son sat on his lap, the back yard framed by trees: They were all a faint memory, a film long since ended and the theater empty. Fighting panic, he wondered whether he’d ever see the brick and stone buildings of Ohio State again. Was he still a professor, or had that been someone else in a different lifetime? And what about Pasadena, his boyhood home with all his brothers?

  How had he arrived in the hospital once again? He must have lost control in the classroom and at home.
A vague recollection of flinging his golf clubs into the neighbor’s yard appeared before his eyes, but the medicines had clouded his memory, making his life a permanent, dull present. By now he was inhaling the sticky scent of electrode paste and the metallic aroma of the ionized air from the previous ECT session with another patient. After his own procedure, he would try to figure out where he was, the headache overwhelming. Could he face it once more, this surge of power that made him feel like a charred husk?

  There was one ritual from deep in his past: The Lord’s Prayer, which had comforted him as a boy and provided relief during earlier times of despair. Lying flat, he began to move his lips, but the guttural whisper was barely audible.

  Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

  On earth, as it is in heaven.

  Several young doctors, undoubtedly trainees, were observing the procedure from a corner of the room, writing notes on clipboards. Glancing tensely at the patient, they heard his monotone, their expressions revealing sharp concern.

  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses …

  “What’s he doing?” one of them called out to the lead psychiatrist, Dr. Southwick, who presided over the session. “Why is Hinshaw muttering?”

  … as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  Dr. Southwick considered his patient on the padded table. Glowering at the trainee, he retorted with enough force that everyone could hear, including the patient. “What the hell do you think he’s doing—he’s praying! How else do you expect him to deal with his fear?”

  Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

  For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.

  Amen.

  A rubber guard now coated his mouth, its bulky mass nearly making him gag. Maybe his teeth wouldn’t crack as he began to convulse. The final anesthetic was now administered and he began to drift off. Everyone held still for the signal. It was happening again, the white heat moments away from penetrating his skull. Not for the first time, everything went black.