The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.

in my experience, the words “now just calm down” almost inevitably have the opposite effect on the person you are speaking to.

Dropping in and out of your own life (for psychotic breaks, or treatment in a hospital) isn’t like getting off a train at one stop and later getting back on at another. Even if you can get back on (and the odds are not in your favor), you’re lonely there. The people you boarded with originally are far, far ahead of you, and now you’re stuck playing catch-up.

If you are walking on a path thick with brambles and rocks, a path that abruptly twists and turns, it's easy to get lost, or tired, or discouraged. You might be tempted to give up entirely. But if a kind and patient person comes along and takes your hand, saying, "I see you're having a hard time- here, follow me, I'll help you find your way," the path becomes manageable, the journey less frightening.

All my life, books had been the life raft, the safe haven, the place I ran to when nothing else worked.

The humanity we all share is more important than the mental illnesses we may not

some truths that were too difficult and frightening to know.

Don’t focus on it,” she said. “Don’t define yourself in terms of something which even many highly trained and gifted professionals do not fully understand.

I needed to put two critical ideas together: that I could both be mentally ill and lead a rich and satisfying life.

If you are a person with mental illness, the challenge is to find the life that's right for you. But in truth, isn't that the challenge for all of us, mentally ill or not? My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.

So the grades I earned were the only objective signal I ever received about how I was doing in the world. The task of setting and achieving academic goals operated as a sort of adhesive; I needed it to hold myself together. Failing (or, at least in this case, failing my own expectations) tore that adhesive off and further splintered my fragile sense of self.

How many times, I wondered, would I have to deal with the betrayal of this mass of nerves and blood vessels and muscle and skin?

Or try this: Place yourself in the middle of the room. Turn on the stereo, the television, and a beeping video game, and then invite into the room several small children with ice cream cones. Crank up the volume on each piece of electrical equipment, then take away the children’s ice cream. Imagine these circumstances existing every day and night of your life. What would you do?

What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not. With proper treatment, someone who is mentally ill can lead a full and rich life. What makes life wonderful--good friends, a satisfying job, loving relationships--is just as valuable for those of us who struggle with schizophrenia as for anyone else.

But explaining what I’ve come to call “disorganization” is a different challenge altogether. Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One’s center gives way. The center cannot hold. The “me” becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal.

That was when I learned that for all my good intentions, I could be simultaneously on the receiving and giving end of the stigma that goes along with mental illness.

Nothing I can do. There will be raging fires, and hundreds, maybe thousands of people lying dead in the streets. And it will all—all of it—be my fault.

Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on. At first, the day is bright enough, the sky is clear, the sunlight warms your shoulders. But soon, you notice a haze beginning to gather around you, and the air feels not quite so warm. After a while, the sun is a dim lightbulb behind a heavy cloth. The horizon has vanished into a gray mist, and you feel a thick dampness in your lungs as you stand, cold and wet, in the afternoon dark.

A mental illness diagnosis does not automatically sentence you to a bleak and painful life, devoid of pleasure or joy or accomplishment. I also wanted to dispel the myths held by many mental-health professionals themselves—that people with a significant thought disorder cannot live independently, cannot work at challenging jobs, cannot have true friendships, cannot be in meaningful, sexually satisfying love relationships, cannot lead lives of intellectual, spiritual, or emotional richness.

Different bodies respond differently to different medication; finding the magic potion is pretty much hit-and-miss. This seems obvious, even simplistic, but it's the only consistently true fact in treating mental illness.

Law is based on a theory of personhood; that is, the concept of someone who can make choices and suffer consequences, and who understands the threat of sanction. The doctrine of informed consent (indeed, most of American political theory) presumes that we are not just subjects to be directed, but rather autonomous beings capable of making independent decisions.

Who was I, at my core? Was I primarily a schizophrenic? Did that illness define me? Or was it an “accident” of being—and only peripheral to me rather than the “essence” of me? It’s been my observation that mentally ill people struggle with these questions perhaps even more than those with serious physical illnesses, because mental illness involves your mind and your core self as well. A woman with cancer isn’t Cancer Woman; a man with heart disease isn’t Diseased Heart Guy; a teenager with a broken leg isn’t The Broken Leg Kid. But if, as our society seemed to suggest, good health was partly mind over matter, what hope did someone with a broken mind have?

Ironically, the more I accepted I had a mental illness, the less the illness defined me—at which point the riptide set me free.

psychoanalysis asks fundamental questions: Why do people do what they do? When can people be held responsible for their actions? Is unconscious motivation relevant to responsibility? And what renders a person not capable of making choices?

You might also strive to make your life as predictable and orderly as possible—to literally control the various ingredients that make up your life—so that you knew ahead of time what was expected of you, what was going to happen, and how to prepare for it. Your basic goal would be to eliminate surprises. Slowly, painstakingly, you would rebuild your own internal regulator, with structure and predictability. What you lose in the way of spontaneity, you gain by way of sanity.

Immediately, every sight, every sound, every smell coming at you carries equal weight; every thought, feeling, memory, and idea presents itself to you with an equally strong and demanding intensity.

Taking off your clothes can feel like taking off armor; revealing vulnerability feels dangerous. And even the sanest person has to admit that the physical experience of orgasm is disorienting, even somewhat hallucinogenic—for me, that letting-go, falling-through-space feeling hadn’t always been good. When space looks suspiciously like an abyss, and “losing yourself” can equal psychosis, ceding control can be terrifying.

I was afraid the staff would laugh at me—and as frightened as I was, the thought of derision frightened me even more. In retrospect, it was a life-threatening deception, somewhat along the lines of hiding recurrent chest pains from one’s cardiologist from embarrassment. Nearly

A central tenet of both classical and Kleinian analysis is that the treater must remain fairly anonymous to her patient—she does not answer questions about herself