A Niece Explores the Intricacies of the Schizophrenic Mind.
by Candace Mittel
Note: This is Aunt and the Brain: Part 2. We previously published Part 1, and will feature the longform piece in its entirety in our print issue coming June 6th.
IV. Logic vs. Insanity
Voicemail:
Bye! I guess you’re back in Chicago. Bye. It’s nice seeing you. Seeing you live. Bye. It’s your Aunt. Bye. Must be in big millionaire houses. Bye. I got fat. Bye. Bye, Candace. Enjoy the next few months. You must have vacations all the time. Bye.
Understanding the causality of schizophrenia is exceedingly incomplete. Theories exist, debated and contested among researchers and doctors, but they only offer observations, such as excessive levels of dopamine and various other abnormalities in the brain structure of patients with schizophrenia. Genetics is probably the most prevalent factor. First-degree biological relatives are ten times more likely to develop the disorder than others.
People always ask why I studied mathematics; the assumption is that math is boring, unimaginative. I never know how to answer those people because, in a sense, I agree. It’s not intoxicating. Math is practiced under strict axioms of logic: equations, theorems, memorizations and computations. But I did it to keep myself sane, to buy an insurance policy on my brain, to defend it from brain terrors as I know them. Aunt has been banned from public places like local grocery stores from time to time. She has been kicked out of malls and gyms for disturbing or scaring people. She has been physically restrained by the police and by doctors, safety belts pulled tight around her torso, arms and legs. Although I have never seen one such incident myself, I don’t like to think about the screeches my dad has recounted or the suffocating straps clenched across Aunt’s chest.
This will not happen to me. I might have a genetic predisposition, but I oil my machinery, run mathematical marathons in my head, strengthen and stretch my muscles to their limit. There is no way my brain will fall victim to such a horror, no possibility of it collapsing, melting or tangling into chaos and senselessness. If I can solve differential equations and prove to you that the square root of two is indeed an irrational number, then there is no possible space for something such as insanity. No, logic is my foundation, my precondition. Even when exercising creativity, it will be practiced only under the strict axioms of logic.
We know, however, that my insurance policy isn’t such a dependable contract. In fact, insanity and logic aren’t mutually exclusive at all.
Nikola Tesla, one of the most extraordinary inventors who ever lived, fell in love with an imaginary pigeon he claimed had laser beams shooting from her eyes. He also invented the radio, radar technology, x-rays, the remote control, wireless communication, and the alternating current, an electrical system at a time when the world knew only candlelight. This so-called “mad scientist” or “madman in the attic” spoke eight languages, could memorize entire books and recite them verbatim and was able to visualize devices in his mind and then construct them without taking a single note on a piece of paper. Tesla said that his hallucinations, flashes of light, vivid images and imaginary journeys inside his head made an impression on his real life experiences and that he channeled these thoughts toward invention.
John Nash, subject of the book and later Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind, was a mathematical wonder. His professor wrote just one sentence for his letter of recommendation to Harvard graduate school: “This man is a genius.” Nash also believed that every man who wore a red tie was a member of a massive Communist conspiracy against him. In and out of hospitals most of his middle-aged life for schizophrenia, Nash eventually abandoned his delusions (hearing voices and finding signs he thought were divine revelations) and decided they were a waste of time and energy. Nash won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. The following year, at age 67, he admitted that by returning to the standard rational and logical scientific thought process, he felt limited. “I wouldn’t have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally,” Nash said in a 2005 PBS interview.
Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history; Clara Bow, “The It Girl,” and one of the most famous American flapper actresses of the 1920’s; Vaslav Nijinsky, known as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century; James Beck Gordon, one of the greatest drummers of the ‘60s and ‘70s; Tom Harrell, one of the most respected trumpeters and composers in the last 30 years; Syd Barrett, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of Pink Floyd; Steve Clark, football superstar who won two Super Bowls with the Green Bay Packers — they all suffered from schizophrenia.
Perhaps the jazz movement would never have even emerged without schizophrenia. Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the man credited with jazz’s evolution, suffered so severely from schizophrenia that he could not read sheet music. If he wanted to play, Bolden was forced to improvise, a unique technique that ultimately transformed ragtime into jazz.
These examples are not to glamorize or laud schizophrenia. Lincoln was institutionalized by her son after she tried to escape a hallucinatory fire. She tried to commit suicide and eventually died at her sister’s home where she had been confined. Bolden was in a mental hospital in New Orleans until his death 24 years later. Nijinsky, following his brief dancing career, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and mental institutions, and he spent extended periods of time in absolute silence; he eventually died in a clinic in London. Bow stopped conversing with her husband, tried to commit suicide and eventually died alone in a bungalow. Barrett was active with Pink Floyd for just 10 years, but his mental illness and psychedelic drug usage eventually inhibited him from being able to perform in concerts.
And there is certainly nothing attractive or appealing about Aunt’s schizophrenia. Although her frizzled hair might suggest otherwise, she is not a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. She is not a famous opera singer or an Olympic gold medal gymnast.
These stories do reveal, however, that there is something about insanity that seems to sometimes harmonize with creativity and brilliance; that there is a massive distinction between an individual and his or her illness, and that we should hesitate with more respect and humility before judging or denouncing even the most extreme expressions of imagination.
I’m not convinced that quelling or censoring psychosis is always the right way to proceed. And I am certainly convinced that criminalizing schizophrenia is always the wrong way to proceed.
If being “out of touch with reality” means building the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, recording radio waves from outer space for the first time in history, discovering resonant frequency of the earth, building earthquake machines and producing balls of lightning in a laboratory, as the pigeon-loving Tesla accomplished in his lifetime, then I’m not convinced that quelling or censoring psychosis is always the right way to proceed. And I am certainly convinced that criminalizing schizophrenia is always the wrong way to proceed.
Mental health law scholar and University of Southern California professor Elyn Saks agrees: “It’s a national tragedy and scandal that the LA county jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the US,” she writes in her 2007 memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.
Although Saks’ disease is currently under control with drugs and psychotherapy, she was terrified to disclose it for years, dreading the reactions and judgments of her colleagues and the university. She knew the stigmas associated with mental illness run deep in American society. She feared she would be deemed unreliable. She could lose respect. She could lose her job.
Most people think schizophrenia is a split personality disorder, one that is violent and dangerous. This misconception stems from the word itself, which means “split mind:” schiz (to split) and phren (soul, mind or spirit) in Greek. However, the Swiss doctor Eugen Bleuler, who first observed the disease in 1908 and gave it this name, had the intent of conveying the splitting apart of mental functions, the central characteristic of the disease, and not the splitting apart of personalities. Somehow the proper connotation blurred over the years. This, coupled with the media’s eager coverage of sporadic shootings in the United States — rampages in schools, movie theaters, and shopping malls — has stigmatized schizophrenia as barbaric, vicious and uncontrollable.
It’s not that these tormented shooters are not ill with schizophrenia because many of them, in fact, are. But as Andrew Solomon wrote in the New Yorker last week, “our impulse to grasp for reasons comes, arguably, from a more basic need—to make sense of what seems senseless.”
As unfathomable as these sporadic shootings are, the failure lies in our society’s dull and deficient efforts to treat mental illness, not in the mentally ill people themselves. Jails are not the answer. There may not be a perfect solution, but a step in the right direction exists somewhere in the fusion of properly allocated resources to innovative research, affordable treatment centers, experimental medicines, societal understanding, better mental health education and awareness, and the warmth, sympathy and care from loved ones. It shouldn’t take another Newtown to realize this.
Some even think that we need only the latter two in our solution’s recipe. Also from Solomon’s article: “Emily Miller, an editor at the Washington Times, wrote, ‘We can’t blame lax gun-control laws, access to mental health treatment, prescription drugs or video games for Lanza’s terrible killing spree. We can point to a mother who should have been more aware of how sick her son had become and forced treatment.’”
Saks ultimately decided that writing her story was necessary in order to demystify the notion that schizophrenia means rampant school shooter; that it means dysfunctional, criminal, bipolar or homeless: “I had been thinking for a long time about writing a book about my life when [Michael] Laudor’s story became public. I already had mixed feelings about putting everything down on paper. The heartbreaking story happening on the other side of the country only increased my ambivalence…in the end, though; it was Laudor’s story that convinced me to go ahead. The media frenzy that surrounded it only added to the mythology that fuels stigma: that schizophrenics are violent and threatening. In truth, the large majority of schizophrenics never harm anyone; in fact, if and when they do, they’re far more likely to harm themselves than anyone else.”
Saks wanted to debunk the conception that mental illness means otherness: “There are no schizophrenics. There are people with schizophrenia. And they may be your spouse, your child, your neighbor, your friend, your co-worker.”
V. Freedom of Thought
Voicemail:
Hi Candace, honey, how are you, what are you getting for your dad for his 58th birthday, are you going to come back with a jet set? Bye, Candace I know you’re enjoying school, you’re almost done with it, isn’t that exciting. Bye, Candace. Maybe you came home again for the past month and a half; I just got more out of shape. Bye, honey. You’re even enjoying it. Bye. Get him something good, okay? Maybe you’ll be home this weekend. Bye.
I reject simple conceptions of freedom as a right.
Freedom is never a right because uncontrollable restraints are real — as real as the keratin protein in your fingernails. I am not, and never was or will be, in total or perfect command over the course of my life — none of us are — because it progresses from a place we never chose. There are physical things, a set of circumstances we are born into of which we never had control, and these limitations will continue to check us, drag us through certain paths and let us only glimpse at the borders of others.
Slowly, however, we learn freedom through practice, comprehensive knowledge and assorted experiences. It takes time. “Freedom is,” as Sartre defined it, “what you do with what’s been done to you.”
Eventually, autonomy indeed reigns through the interior operating of the mind. Because however prescriptive our lives are, we have independent minds and we learn to use them freely. This is precisely what my parents taught me from an early age, and as a child. My thoughts were as loose and unlimited as the thick, wavy hair that spilled down to the small of my back. In the eloquent words of Virginia Woolf: “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
But this is not so simply true! Freedom is an empty word without the context of the brain! Don’t you see that this freedom of thought model is quite exclusive? It grants entry only to normal, working brain structures and shuts its doors to the rest.
Aunt possessed freedom once. My dad says when they were teenagers, his friends would hang out with him only for the fleeting chance they might get a word with his sister, maybe ask her out to dinner or a movie. My dad describes his sister in her youth as cheerful, beautiful and popular. Essentially, she was normal. She had freedom just like everyone else.
But it was swiftly taken away.
Her freedom of thought ironically restricted her life…The looser her thoughts, the brighter and bigger her crazy sticker.
Twenty-one, close to my age now, is supposed to be carefree and wild, full of energy, an open treasury of experimental unearthing and discovery. But for Aunt, 21 it was a cavern of disruption, disorder, confusion and misery. When Aunt was 21, she returned from a semester abroad in London, essentially unrecognizable, emaciated and gaunt, some skin and some bones, my dad recalls. She thought the smoke alarms were watching her in their home. A few months later she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Henceforth, not only had her physical freedom vanished — shuffled from one hospital to another, always under the supervision of a doctor or family member — but so had her freedom of thought. In fact, her freedom of thought, the one I value so dearly as vital to a liberating existence, ironically restricted her life. The stranger her comments became, the higher the dosage of psychiatric drugs. The stranger her comments, the longer she would remain institutionalized. The looser her thoughts, the brighter and bigger her crazy sticker.
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Candace Mittel is a recent graduate of Northwestern University where she studied Mathematics, Jewish Studies and Creative Writing Nonfiction (and no, they are not connected, but she’s open to suggestions). She currently lives in a Starbucks-free city, otherwise known as Jerusalem, and studies at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies where she spends her days (and often nights) making 2,000 year-old arguments relevant to her life today. Candace enjoys interviewing Israelis on the street (see her website Jerusalem Medley), listening/singing to the Les Mis soundtrack and eating a superbly ripe avocado or mango
