My fondest memories from my childhood involve my grandmother’s humble one-story, one bathroom bungalow in Dublin, Georgia. The many memories locked in from the years of my mother’s childhood with her 7 siblings made it seem like a second home. The house stayed busy during those times, when both of my grandparents kept the house alive as long as they lived. At some point during the days of Christmas, everyone in the family would shuffle through the house for a short visit. I remember the gas heater fought off the bitter chill of the frosty December days. I awoke to the sound of chatter from my countrified relatives and their heavy accents. I enjoyed eavesdropping on conversations of the “grown folks”, so I left my little red sofa, and voyaged to the kitchen. The mouthwatering sent of eggs, bacon, grits, and sausage struck my nostrils as I entered the kitchen. My mother invited me to the table, with a heaping helping of the meal. I couldn’t focus on my food for the pictures that lied on the table. My cousin was shuffling through pictures of the most bizarre drawings I’ve ever seen. Our aunt sat over the table beaming at the attention her artwork had brought. I startled every time I saw her when I was young, sometimes afraid to sit alone in the same room as her. Still, I couldn’t help, but to be captivated by her pictures. The pencil drawings had swirls and strips, strangely obese car-like objects, and oblong headed people, with an occasional eyeball that didn’t fit in.

I did not know it at the time, but my aunt had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. In her mid-forties at the time, she had been dealing with the disorder since high school when she was sent home early from school for “strange behavior”. Her drawings reminded me of something more complex than what a child could do, yet too odd for an adult to invent. Recently, I took an art class where we had to draw “blind contours” or drawings where we just run the pencil across the page based on what we are observing. The catch is that we cannot look at the drawing pad as we’re tracing. When I looked down for the first time after completing my drawing, I was shocked. Some of the objects put me in mind of my aunt’s drawings. Luckily I have trained myself that this was not strong enough evidence for me to pursue seeing a psychiatrist. However, I did feel that this could really mean something. Maybe schizophrenics share this same “blindness” from their environment, so they lose the ability to become apart of it. Their detachment from the world stems from their inability to “see” it in the same way as the majority of society perceives it. This detachment leads to their eventual inability to relate to others, thus withdrawing to their own perceptions – the only ones that make sense to them. Society was not designed for individual ways of perception, but to conform to a uniform concept.

I believe we sometimes forget that there is more to a person than just what we can see immediately. They are more than just disorders or statistics – they are people. We tend to see them for their disorder alone and forget that they are human beings like us. My aunt adopted the nickname “China Doll” because her perfect face held an unreal beauty like a face of a porcelain doll. Her childhood was drenched in poverty having to share the one story house with her seven siblings, and eventually some nieces and nephews once her older siblings moved from the house. She found comfort and pleasure in what her beauty could bring her - the attention of handsome young men from her neighborhood. Her “unholy” behaviors were shunned by her Christian mother, who dictated the household according to a “hell and fire” Baptist faith. Once the onset of her disorder struck her in her prime, she became disorganized and began to lose the ability to maintain her beauty. After the birth of my cousin, who also eventually developed schizophrenia, her husband could no longer bear to live with her, and they separated. The lack of social ties, no friends and sporadic family visits, increased her symptoms.

It is only God’s blessing that my aunt has never ended up as a destitute transient walking the street with no where to call home. However, there are so many schizophrenics whose fate does lead them down this road. For Chalres Lachenmeyer, father of Nathaniel Lachenmeyer the author of The Outsider, his life brought him down this bumpy road of itinerancy. Nobody who first saw him could see his years of hard earned education. Even the smartest man in the world cannot keep his sanity. There appeared to be no place in the world for him. Everywhere he tried to find comfort, people would end up judging or rejecting him. They could not see pass the looming, disorganized, and delusional figure before them. No one could see the man behind the shaggy beard and lice filled clothing. What the eye cannot behold initially is crucial to understanding the essence of a schizophrenic’s life. The most fragile years are during the childhood when family’s are suppose to follow rules of parenting so their children will end up the same as others and accepted by society.

The double bind theory describes how parenting style is crucial for a child to develop normal interpersonal communication skills. If a child cannot escape from a situation where he or she is experiencing punishment for good or bad behaviors the child will become confused. Their perception of the universe will follow double-bind patterns and scattered thinking. Charles’ innate rebellious nature caused his downfall. His inability to comply with the religion of his mother caused a paradoxical interpretation of reality. For example, when Charles was a child he hurt his knee and instead of his mother aiding him, she told him to believe the wound did not exist and the pain would go away. This situation causes a dangerous denial and distortion of reality for the child raised under the Christian Science faith. If the child wants to obey his parent he must pretend the cut does not exist thus enduring the pain. On the other hand, if he opposes his mother’s claim, he is punished for being a sinner who cannot overcome the false perception of the material world. The unfortunate Mr. Lachenmeyer senior, when trying to convince his son of his delusions, appeared to inherit more from his mother than he would have liked. “Imposing his delusional system on me, he was, without realizing it, committing the same sin as his mother: attempting to distort his son’s vision of the world to match his own.” (pg 100)

For most humans with an inquisitive nature they search for answers that lie beyond reality. “One of the most important lessons… in life – reality is created as well as discovered.” (Pg. 59). The materials that exist in the world today would have been seen as a schizophrenic’s plaything in the past. The cellular phone, for example, would have been seen as a “nut” box. How else could one from the turn of the century describe “hearing voices” from a little rectangular piece of metal? The ideas that stem from modern day science would have been a schizophrenic’s dream in the past. “Science demands of man the construction of theories and models of reality.” (Pg 61). This is the scientific mind that looks beyond the stars for the answers to the universe. How does one know if something really exists? It is the difference between knowing that aliens are invading the planet, or just having a theory that life can possibly exist outside our small planet. The point of science is to enforce empirical and feasible hypotheses based on substantial evidence. Every delusion to a schizophrenic is indeed feasible, yet he or she cannot perceive that those delusions lack evidence. For Mr. Lachenmeyer senior, he searched for the truth or reality so vehemently that he slipped from it. He placed so much emphasis on social ties with his research in sociology, yet lost his ability to be apart of society

Schizophrenics seem to have difficulty in interpreting the reality that exists outside the self and their mind. What better way is there to explain the phenomena of the universe, than to search for specific cues that help answer our most challenging questions? A cue could be as simple as an apple falling on Newton’s head, or a lightning bolt racing down Benjamin Franklin’s kite. These cues provide instruction for further pursuit into the explanation of an ambiguous event. Then again, cues provide a “clue” that reinforces an individual’s belief. For a schizophrenic, a fatal mistake arises when he or she reads a cue wrong. A normal occurrence, or coincidence for any other individual, may help to reinforce their abstract beliefs. When Lachenmeyer’s father thought his wife’s preparation of a new meal was a forced celebration of Lent, his father was simply reading the cues wrong. Perhaps someone else would have seen it as a funny coincidence, laughed it off, and not put much more thought to it. However, Charles saw this as a sure sign that his suspicions were correct about the imposition of Christian Science being placed on him again - now by his wife. “Not only was he misinterpreting the situation, he was specifically interpreting it, in the absence of any evidence.” (pg 69) It is Charles’ lack of “theory of mind”, or the understanding that others’ beliefs and intentions are independent of our own, that could cause him to believe that his wife even knew about the holiday.

If someone were to tell us that the sky is never blue, this challenge to our knowledge about the atmosphere would not waiver our stern beliefs. We would counter their claim and accumulate more than enough evidence and witnesses to suggest the opposite. Schizophrenics share this same desire to convince others of their beliefs, yet they are completely unaware that they have no evidence to support their claims. “Charles was attempting to impose his interpretation of reality on the people who had insisted their interpretation of reality on him for more than a decade.” (pg 232) Clues from Mr. Lachenmeyer’s early years foreshadow his eventual break from conventional thinking. “My goal: to develop a new point of view toward mental illness. Every innovation is the result of the assumption of a new point of view. Must break out of and stand outside of a system of thought before a new system can be developed.” (pg 63) It is this break in conventional thinking that allows a schizophrenic to become unaware that his or her delusions vary from the norm. Perhaps, the delusions are not completely detached maybe just a misinterpretation of real events. For example, when Mr. Lachenmeyer senior was in a car accident in Canada that forced him back into the States, he mistook what was a coincidence as a confirmation that a conspiracy was after him. The one belief that Charles held, that no one could deny him was “his insistence on his self-worth as a person and his belief that he was still someone.” (pg 232).

“We create strange, complicated fictions – God, love, justice, beauty – which we offer up as enduring truths.” (pg 254) Love is a complex web of emotions needed to maintain a healthy relationship between husband and wife. Yet ask a person from a society of arranged marriages and have them describe what love is. Their definition would be different. As humans, we are inclined to believe that there is a fair justice system. However, the fact that different states in the United States are governed by different laws means that not all individuals committing the same crimes are treated the same. Who wrote the book on truths? Some say God is a truth, the one and only all-good Supreme Being. Philosophers have tried for centuries to find a way to convince an atheist that God exists. If God is perfection, and all things perfect exists, then therefore God exists. Even so, not everyone believes. If God did not write all truths, considering the fact that all humans do not believe in God in the first place, who defines truth? It is this lack of really knowing if something is true or not that allows schizophrenics to detach themselves from the “common” truths and to adopt their own.

When it comes to discerning the truth, there is so much left in life to understand, so many questions left unanswered, and far too many secrets for us to know or comprehend them all. We live in a world of so many secrets nature, government, outer space, and religion it is easy to believe in irrational thoughts. According to Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, as many as 40 percent of people who suffer from schizophrenia are unable to examine their behavior and thought processes independently of their “constellation of symptoms”, therefore they do not believe that they suffer from a mental illness. (pg 96) How can you help someone who is unable to see that he or she has a problem? They simply cannot understand that their scattered thoughts are causing their own suffering. What they think is conspiracies against them, is in actuality their own mind betraying them.

It’s ironic though, that they prefer to stay to themselves, when it is they themselves that are the enemy. To a schizophrenic, delusions equal belief. For anyone with an unwavering faith, their beliefs equal truths. If the sufferer were discussing a literary work, a movie script, a dream or even nightmare the truth could make little sense, but yet still be accepted and understood. It’s because their ranting is incomprehensible and not accepted that people refuse to listen to them. Coincidentally, schizophrenics primarily need “…sustained social contact as much as everyone else” (pg 146). It is natural for prisoners placed in isolation where they spend days in a dark, damp hole in the ground can develop delirious hallucinations. Complete isolation is the punishment for losing one’s social skills, yet by leaving them alone to their thoughts we are fueling the flames of their delusions.

Except for brief conversations with bartenders and waitresses who dismissed him as ‘weird’ or a ‘wacko’, the only opportunity he had to socialize with people – to hear voices that could compete for attention with the voices raging in his head – was when he sat next to someone on one of the benches around town, or on the rare occasion when someone sat next to him.” (pg 173)

The media portrays false beliefs about the dangers of mentally ill. Movies such as Psycho make the mentally ill seem dangerous and unpredictable. The contrary exists for “normal” serial killers, from the movie Natural Born Killers, who in a way are glorified and even idolized by mimics. Mr Lachenmeyer junior, argues that the media covers the relatively few violent crimes committed by schizophrenics overlooking any struggles or accomplishments like for John Nash. (pg 121). The disorder hits at such a young age, relatively few schizophrenics get a chance to have accomplishments. The media and the public have an obvious indifference to the plight of people with schizophrenia in this country. Schizophrenics are more likely to commit an act of violence on themselves or for others to commit one on them. According to Lachenmeyer junior, roughly 10 percent of people suffering from schizophrenia commit suicide. If anything, the schizophrenic himself or herself is the victim of society whether the schizophrenic has adopted this belief into their delusions or not. “From his [Charles] point of view, the only thing he was guilty of was his determination to survive the indignities and suffering they had imposed on him.” (pg 231).

When a group of people are exiled from mainstream society there tends to be a separation of “us” versus “them”. The minority race is often placed in the “them” category and can never become like “us” to the majority. The frightening thing about schizophrenics is that it could happen to anyone, of any race, whether in the minority or the majority. In this case “us” is the normal group and “them” is the mentally ill. A normal person’s annoyance and intolerance of the mentally ill is his or her fear of becoming like “them”. “I felt when I recognized qualities in myself that reminded me of who my father used to be, by instilling in me the fear that if I were too much like him, I might share his fate.” (pg 112). I have to admit every time I find a similarity I share with my aunt I am frightened that I will one day become like her. Something as small as an old picture of her that looked identical to me at the same age set me in a temporary panic. Maybe when she was a child the cackle of her schizophrenic grandfather frightened her into thinking she would someday contract the same disorder that overtook his brain.

It is crazy to love life and humanity when life and humanity have conspired to strip you of everything, even the sanctity of your mind and sense of self… his transformation into the transient, was a resilient expression of faith and hope. He had not given up on the world that had given up on him. (pg 222)

Society is designed for people to either succeed or fail – little help for failures. Nathaniel states that schizophrenics possess the same heroism of the terminally ill who share the same determination to survive, just to prove their love of life. “If anything, their heroism is greater; they are losing to their disorder something even more important than their bodies – their minds.” (pg 250-251). I think it is because we would rather forget those failures, or the fact that we also can fail. We look upon a person’s inability to comply with the standards of society as his or her personal failure – not as society’s failure to give a damn. Though my aunt has never been homeless, she had lived on welfare for most of her life. During most of those years, my cousins have used those government benefits for their own selfish gain. It is a shame when society cares nothing for one’s struggles, but it is unimaginable when one’s own family cannot care less. When we look at the misfortune of welfare or homelessness we do not see it as a problem of society, but that individual’s problem. Nathaniel Lachenmyer makes the point that deinstitutionalization caused more harm than good resulting in the failure to provide adequate care for 60 percent the mentally ill who are forced to live on the streets. (pg. 123-124) Whether society could see the importance of one homeless schizophrenic or not, “…Charles did not just see himself as a homeless person struggling to survive on the street; it was clear that he felt that his life had a purpose.” (pg 177)

The true fear of a person that mental illness has overlooked is not so much a fear of the mentally ill, as he or she fears losing control to one’s mind. An anti-social man who fears loss of control will go out to commit a crime against a vulnerable target just to have dominance. A depressed girl who cannot regain control over her life might become anorexia simply because she holds dominance over her body and what she puts into it. Schizophrenics lose so much more control over their lives, but do not even realize the true cause for this loss. A schizophrenic loss of control begins with their inability to control their imagination or thoughts. It’s like the brain has truly taken over the body throwing every thought from a person’s knowledge into conscious and communicated as fact. “He [Charles] was Commander-in-chief and the King of England. He said he would be released soon and we would all be arrested and shot.” (pg 228) Maybe Charles’ brain is inadvertently denying the fact that he has lost control over his life. People with mental illnesses lose so much more than their mind. They lose productivity, the respect of society, their livelihood, their ability to take care of themselves (homeless/ welfare), and ability to conform. “Everything that I possessed was taken away from me: my business, my house, my wife, my son, my car, etc.” (pg 115) What they do not realize is that their behaviors are to blame for taking it all away.

I think people have a tendency to avoid the people who they have no desire to relate to or attempt to understand. I remember the difficult times with my aunt. Once, she suddenly had an outburst against my grandmother firing my mom and her other sisters up in their mother’s defense. I remember not knowing that she even had a disorder until I was in high school. She was always that “strange” and “different” relative that everyone has in their family. I was frightened of her, because I did not understand her. More importantly, I did not want to become like her. It’s frightening to have someone who you are related to suddenly be struck down with a disease. For example, someone who has a family with a history of cancer, diabetes might be afraid that they may contract that same illness. The nature of that disease can be medical or mental. It’s possible to avoid any sort of illness, but once the malignant tumor starts to form, or once your thoughts scatter and split it’s hard to return to normal. It’s only natural to be afraid of becoming different or becoming an outcast – not only from society, but from your own family. Schizophrenia represents the struggle of our society and how easily an individual can become an outsider. “Here a man had the greatest battle of all: the battle to preserve the dominion of the self against an invading cancer of the mind.” (Pg 26).

“In the mind of every person suffering from schizophrenia there exists an entire city of thought which is inaccessible to anyone other than its architect” (pg. 12). Peering into the mind of a schizophrenic, one would excavate a fantastical country of the mind’s purest creations. The misunderstanding of the disorder is a wall that keeps our eyes from seeing the true beauties of the schizophrenic’s imagination. The great wall of unknowing keeps us from appreciating the fragility of the human mind. Every schizophrenic is not just a mumbling, delusional, hallucinating or catatonic misfit. The schizophrenic is a tangled web of histories and secrets that baffle philosophers, psychiatrists and family members alike. The more they struggle to find the causes of the disorder, the more they are caught in the quick sand of mystery. The mind is a treasure chest and maybe the schizophrenic is the key to understanding the full depth that the human brain possesses.

Reference

Lachenmeyer, Nathaniel. The Outsider: A Journey into My Father's Struggle with Madness. Broadway Books New York: 2000.