CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Growing Concerns
Chapter 2 More Signs and Symptoms
Chapter 3 Talking to God and All
Chapter 4 Diagnosis
Chapter 5 My Name is Legion
Chapter 6 The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
Chapter 7 Androgyny, the Divine Spark and Nihilism
Chapter 8 Good-bye CAMH, Hello Belle Idée
Chapter 9 Start with Childhood
Chapter 10 Reflections on Psychiatrists
Chapter 11 Orthomolecular Medicine and Beyond
Chapter 12 Energy Medicine and Vibrational Energy
Chapter 13 Medication Wars
Chapter 14 The Never-Ending Battle
Chapter 15 The Levels of Healing
Chapter 16 The Other Psychiatrists
Chapter 17 The Assemblage Point
Chapter 18 All the World’s a Stage
Chapter 19 Expressed Emotion
Chapter 20 The Practical Assemblage Point
Chapter 21 The Mother as the Observer
Chapter 22 The Same Procedure as Before
Chapter 23 Fleetingly Improvised Men
Chapter 24 Hearing Voices
Chapter 25 The Ties That Bind
Chapter 26 Family Constellations
Chapter 27 Breakthrough
Chapter 28 The Alexander Technique
Chapter 29 More Twists on the Recovery Rollercoaster
Chapter 30 The Expressed Emotion of Acting
Chapter 31 Up is Down and Down is Up
Chapter 32 Homemade Soteria
Chapter 33 Back in the Bin
Chapter 34 Colère
Chapter 35 The Tomatis Method
Chapter 36 Sound Therapy: In the Beginning was the Word
Chapter 37 Out-of-Body
Chapter 38 Pioneers in the New World Health Organization
Chapter 39 Public Dreams, Private Myths
Chapter 40 Desert Matrix
Chapter 41 CHAPTER UNDER CONSTRUCTION
“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer. “It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
—Madeleine L’Engle
In September 2002, on the morning Chris[1] was due to leave for university, he still had not packed his bags. Clothes were strewn all over his bedroom and his suitcase was empty. He seemed dazed. I yelled at him to begin packing his bags for the year ahead. The taxi would be arriving in half an hour. Chris had always been so on track and capable. He never needed reminding about what to do . . . until recently. I threw all of his clothes and necessities into two suitcases and slammed them shut, doubting how he was going to survive on his own if he couldn’t even pack a suitcase.
Half an hour later, I watched from the window as Chris and his father loaded the suitcases into the cab and headed for the airport and their flight to Canada, where Chris was to begin undergraduate work at the University of Toronto. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Something was wrong. A dedicated, organized, and intellectually ambitious student during high school, Chris had somehow lost his edge in the past year. For the first time ever, he had needed prodding to complete his work. His final exam results in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program fell short of his teachers’ expected results.
It was an uneasy time, and where his father and I might otherwise have let Chris make the trip to Toronto by himself, we opted instead to have his father accompany him.
Our current home, Geneva, Switzerland, where my husband, Ian, and I work for international organizations, is renowned for many things, among them proximity to the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). CERN is the birthplace of the World Wide Web, which can be thought of as the earthbound equivalent of the Akashic records, an ancient Sanskrit term describing an ethereal library of all knowledge—thought, word, and action—that can be accessed through the subconscious mind.[2] In the winter of 2002, CERN began work on the installation of a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a super-duper particle accelerator, which was completed in 2008. This particle accelerator is intended to recreate the conditions in the first one-trillionth of a second following the “big bang,” thereby explaining how matter first clumped together to form the cosmos. Like so many things in my voyage of insight into the schizophrenic condition, the relevance of this quantum physics event and the “God particle” to Chris's situation only became clearer to me later.
Geneva is also known for its gray winters. Stratus clouds form a blanket over Lac Léman and the sun doesn’t shine for months on end. Night falls early. Winter 2002 seemed particularly gloomy, especially at dinnertime. The tea lights on the dining room table flickered like votive candles. Chris stopped joining in dinner conversation. Alex and Taylor, his younger brothers, were also somewhat subdued, but not to the same extent. Ian seemed more intent on eating than talking. When I spoke, Chris would turn his head every so often and silently put his fingers to his lips to hush me. Dinners became quiet affairs. I now think the tea lights were a mistake, though I preferred them to the harsh glare of the overhead chandelier. Tea lights only emphasized the gloom.
While I was uneasy at these changes in Chris's behavior, my first real scare came on an airplane. In December 2001, Chris and I flew to England where he had an interview scheduled at Cambridge University. Cambridge demands that its incoming students know exactly what they want to study for the next three years (e.g. history or chemistry), and to have excelled intellectually compared to their peers while in high school. Chris had applied for a place in chemistry. Despite being an excellent math student he was not particularly interested in career paths like engineering or computer science. In his application to the university, he had expressed the vague notion of wanting to understand the essence of matter. I considered that a tad presumptuous and a bit strange, more like the musings of an ancient alchemist than a modern chemist.
The link to alchemy was another clue that I failed to grasp. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung saw alchemy as the Western equivalent to the practice of yoga; those practicing it were, in essence, embarking on a spiritual path. Chris's strange interest could be seen as the beginning of a spiritual struggle to heal and to integrate his divided self into a stable whole. But, of course, I did not know that then.
The interview at Cambridge didn’t go well. A postmortem conversation I had with Chris revealed that the interviewer thought that Chris lacked confidence. I had noticed that his confidence had been waning over the past year, but couldn’t pinpoint its onset to anything other than the academic stresses of the final year of high school.
Part of our reason for coming to Cambridge was to enjoy spending time together, so Chris and I wandered the university's hallowed grounds, eventually settling down to a pub beer. The next day we took the Easyjet flight from Luton to Geneva. We left grey foggy England and a short hour and a half later began the descent through the stratus layers to Geneva. The plane was within inches of touching down when Chris suddenly cried out, touching his hand to his temple in pain. As soon as the plane landed, the pain in his head disappeared. We went immediately to the first aid office at the airport. “Un mystère,” said the nurse.
In the days that followed, Chris went twice to the family doctor. He found nothing conclusive as a cause. Nothing to worry about, he reassured us.
Over the next few months, Chris began to check his temple regularly. He kept tapping the tender spot, saying it felt like an indentation. Taylor, who was then thirteen, cheerfully piped up that “if it were a tumor, it would be pushing out.”
What the doctor didn’t pick up on was possible problems with the prefrontal cortex, the executive area of the brain that deals with complex planning, personality, and social behavior. The executive function relates to "abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working towards a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social ‘control.’”[3]
A Beautiful Mind, the film about Nobel laureate John Nash’s descent into schizophrenia, appeared in Geneva theatres in July 2002. Ian was particularly interested in seeing it because he had once heard John Nash speak at the American Economics Association convention. So, off the family went — all but Alex, our sixteen-year-old, who, now that school was out for the summer, slept most days and partied with his friends most nights.
I knew nothing about schizophrenia other than its diagnosis is supposed to be very bad news. To the best of my knowledge I had never personally or even peripherally known anyone with schizophrenia. So I was surprised when Nash’s roommate turned out to be a hallucination.
The movie was great, but I was left with a niggling worry.
Taylor picked up on it. “Ha, he keeps tapping his head just like Chris does.”
Or did. Chris had stopped the repetitive feathery touches to his temple a couple of months earlier. At the time, I didn’t make a conscious connection between what John Nash went through and Chris’s symptoms. There seemed to be a logical physical cause for Chris’s temple problem (the change in the plane’s altitude) and he seemed to have recovered from it. I wasn’t familiar with psychosis or primed to look for it, so I had missed such subtleties as Chris putting his fingers to his lips to keep his mother quiet at the dinner table so that the pope could get a word in. The pope first spoke to Chris during a church service, Chris revealed to me several years later.
A week later, Chris and Ian were talking in low voices in the bedroom. I crept to the closed door and listened. “Ophélie is a beautiful girl and . . .” Ian’s voice faded away. Ophélie, the daughter of a friend of mine, was a classmate of Chris’s. I had a sense of foreboding—with good reason, as it turned out. Chris wanted to marry Ophélie. He was unsure what to do about it. He wanted to find a job in Geneva to support her. University for him was nowhere in the picture, despite the fact that he was supposed to be leaving in a month for Toronto. Ophélie was leaving for university in London in a few months, a reality that was unbearable for Chris
Marry Ophélie? To my knowledge, they hadn’t even been dating! This was strange. Scary, even. Out of character. I tried to rationalize that young people fall all the time. I can still recall the pain of first love and how mind and mood altering it can be. My intuition told me that where Chris was concerned, there was something highly unusual going on. There had been no lead-up to this sudden declaration of love.
The rest of the weekend I lay on my bed, staring into space. On Monday, I met Irene, Ophélie’s mother, for our usual lunch and brought up the fact that Chris was seeing Ophélie. Irene quickly let me know that Ophélie only thought of him as a friend. I asked myself how his mind could leap to marriage when his romantic relationship with Ophélie was one-sided. There was nothing solid enough here to justify forgoing university. Irene confided that she had recently learned that Chris’s friends had been worried about him.
I felt sick. Worried about him? What had they noticed? Why hadn’t someone said something? When I thought more about it, I realized how quiet Chris had become over the past year. When his friends came over, Chris just sat there, not saying much. The others would be chatting and laughing, but not Chris. He had become, well, sort of plastic in his looks and speech. He didn’t smile much, though he didn’t seem depressed, and his face had a wan look to it. His speech was somewhat mechanical and devoid of interesting observations — to me at least. I attributed this impoverishment of speech to an intense academic year, but then I recalled other worrisome instances when friends of the family telephoned and Chris answered the phone, there was no warmth of recognition in his voice.
For the next two weeks, Chris took the train to Ophélie’s house, returning on a train later in the evening. Would he propose marriage? The unexpectedness and the depth of his life-altering plan scared me. He was clearly wearing his heart on his sleeve and he was going down fast, like a bird shot in midair by Cupid’s dart. This wasn’t the Chris “in love” that I would have expected, if the path of love is predictable at all.
“Why not take Chris to China with you?” I asked Ian one day. This was a practical diversion. Ian was travelling to Beijing for work and had air miles to spare. Brilliant! Chris would be distracted by the new and strange. By the time he got back, ten days without Ophélie would have elapsed, the situation would have resolved itself somehow, and Chris would be that much closer to starting university. Life would move on.
From Ian’s perspective, the trip to Beijing did not go well. Chris took no interest in the extra day of sight-seeing Ian scheduled, choosing to sit in the tour bus while the rest of the group visited an acupuncture center. Ian was frustrated. Ian and Chris quarreled often, which was something new.
When Chris returned from China, Ian and I did not discuss Ophélie with Chris and concentrated instead on helping him prepare for university, without any enthusiasm or effort on Chris' part. We were very concerned that Chris was about to ruin his first year of university, which he hadn't even started.
Based on his IB results, Chris was eligible to claim first-year university credits for biology, chemistry, and math. In Ian's and my opinion, an IB course is no equivalent for a first year university course, particularly in the maths and sciences. Entering a second year course not having done the first year prerequisite is fraught with peril. Canadian university courses often last a full year and cover a lot of territory very quickly at the beginning.
Seeing how determined he was to claim first year credits, our compromise suggestion was that Chris could claim credit for a course as long as he was planning not to pursue that subject area further. He agreed to our suggestion. However, Chris had also decided that he wanted to take a first-year physics course, despite the fact that he had not taken physics in his last two years of high school. This could be done, the university informed us, as long as the student is good in math and is willing to work. “Okay, if you insist,” Ian and I said to Chris, “but whatever you do, do NOT claim credit for first-year math.”
Chris's desire to leap ahead without doing the preliminaries was baffling to us. He exhibited a coolly detached impression of his own abilities, seeming to convey that his mind was far more capable than the minds of mere mortals. He projected an aura that he already knew all the information that was needed and that he didn’t have to go through the steps. This was a new trait in him that was at odds with his seeming lack of confidence that I and others had observed. Since Chris is not a boisterous personality given to expressing his moods and opinions, this particular trait could well have remained hidden. Psychiatrists call this trait “grandiosity.”
A case in point was driving lessons. Chris had enrolled that summer in driving school. Students are eligible for a one-day course at a practice driving range when they feel they are close to taking their driver's test. Chris decided to take the course midway through his driving lessons. His practice session was cut short by an irate instructor who told him to go home and come back when he was ready. Ian and I were astounded. We were also angry with him. What was he thinking? Did he actually think he knew everything there was to know about driving?
The possibility that Chris might be mentally ill didn’t occur to Ian or me at that time. My experience in raising three sons and entertaining their young male friends had been that they all have an inflated sense of their own skills, especially where vehicles or sports prowess is concerned. If they go skiing, they brag about their imminent plans to do the black diamond runs, even if they are novices. They all seem to think that getting their driver’s license will take a matter of days and they will pass with flying colors on the first try. Well, we hoped Chris was just demonstrating that kind of bravado. Maybe it was even a good sign. He had always been so compliant and a follower of the rules.
The University of Toronto is huge, but there are colleges within the university that are small and allow the students to relax and get to know people in a less threatening environment. Of these, Trinity College has a reputation as one of the best. It attracts students who are ambitious and engaged. Chris was faltering in both categories when he entered in the fall of 2002. He wanted to skip Trinity’s orientation week. Ian and I insisted otherwise. How could he possibly think that skipping orientation week was a good idea? What was he thinking? Orientation week provides an opportunity for students make new friends and learn to feel a little bit at home in a strange new setting. There would be toga parties, beer fests, and other college rituals.
Chris went to orientation, and enjoyed himself. Subsequent letters home indicated he was still enjoying himself and taking advantage of all that the college and university had to offer. He rang home about a week into the start of his classes.
“Mum, I want to get a credit for my math course and go into second-year math. This course is too easy. I’ve covered most of the work already.”
By then I was fed up with his unusual attitude in the face of common sense and replied testily, “Go ahead. It’s your life.”
With Chris away at Trinity, I turned to the task of cleaning his room, thinking all the while of Chris's puzzling behavior with every photo and term paper and scrap of his recent life that I uncovered.
As I cleaned, I reflected on Chris's recent phone call seeking our permission to take a second year math course. Where did this constant asking for permission come from? Permission-seeking seems like a timid trait, but Chris was not so much timid as apologetic. I didn’t understand his self-effacement. I tried to correct these habits over the years by pointing out that apologies were not needed or wanted and that neither was his father's or my permission in most cases. The direct approach produced no change in his character. Later I tended to regard the apologizing and permission-seeking as apathy, but I was confused whether it was apathy or ambivalence.
Apathy means lacking interest or energy; being unwilling to take action especially over a matter of importance. Ambivalence is having two opposing feelings at the same time or being uncertain about how you feel.
Can apathy/ambivalence be demonstrated in the womb, I wondered? Perhaps so.
I became pregnant on March 30, 1983, in Ottawa, Canada, where Ian and I had moved after we met in graduate school in Toronto. I remember the date exactly because I heard a “ping” of “mission accomplished” when sperm met egg. So it came as no surprise to me when the ultrasound set the due date as December 10. It also came as no surprise to me that “he” was confirmed by the ultrasound as a “he.” The landscape of my dreams during that time featured babies dressed in blue.
After the first ping of joy, we heard nothing from Chris in the womb.
“Lots of movement?” asked Dr. Lee, during his energetic monthly prodding of my stomach.
Well, what exactly was a lot of movement? Chris was my first. How was I supposed to know what’s considered movement? I agreed that there was movement, because mother and baby were otherwise healthy. Every so often I felt perhaps a finger move. Once I lay on the floor and rested a book on my stomach, just to see Chris shrug it off, but that was the extent of physical exertion on his part.
The due date came and went. I was visiting Dr. Lee weekly at this point and he asked if I wanted to be induced.
“No, let’s just wait and see what happens,” I said. “No sense in messing up his horoscope. He’ll come when he’s ready.”
I trudged to the hospital each week thereafter for an electronic fetal monitoring test where I ingested orange juice to stimulate fetal movement. Chris was still hanging in there, but the tests showed there was no cause for alarm.
“Be prepared for a girl,” said the technician. “High heartbeat.”
New Year’s came and went. The days dragged on. Finally, in the early hours of January 6, 1984, there was, at last, some activity, although my waters hadn’t broken. Chris was still in no hurry to make his appearance. Was he being apathetic or ambivalent about the deadline? He was by then twenty-six days overdue.
The next twenty-four hours at the hospital were rough. Chris clearly wasn’t in any rush. I staggered up and down the hospital corridors, breathing out of sync, despite my prenatal coaching. Ian gently instructed me to remember our rhythm and I snarled back at him to just let me get on with it. Exhausted, I finally opted for the epidural and jettisoned the idea of natural child birth. The epidural slowed the birth process down considerably.
“Be prepared for a girl,” the nurse warned as she removed the fetal monitor.
“No, it’s a boy,” I shot back confidently.
And, of course, he was.
“All ten fingers and toes,” Dr. Lee crowed. “His test scores are healthy—and here's the proof that his ultrasound due date of December 10 was correct. His fingers are peeling.”
In the next two days Chris opened his eyes for the first time in my presence. I was enchanted by the deep blue. About a week later, his tiny hands unclenched. Only in retrospect do I find it unusual that he was clenching his hands for so long. It now signifies tension to me.
My daydreaming about Chris's birth was interrupted by the discouraging scene in his room. I remembered his hastily packed suitcase, a fumbled attempt to begin the beginning of the rest of his life. Chris used to be pretty neat and I didn't have to nag him about cleaning up his room, but that, too, had changed in the past year. Strewn throughout the clutter were torn bits and pieces of papers.
When I picked one up, I saw Ophélie’s name and address at the top.
It was a strange love poem, and reminded me of something a knight might pen for his lady. He wrote about testing his strength, as if he was planning to undertake a series of extraordinary challenges in order to win her love. I reasoned that the words were no more bizarre than many rock lyrics and Chris was a keen musician, so it all kind of made sense. It was beautiful and poetic and oddly meaningful. Despite some misgivings, I was impressed by the feeling, the striving, and the sheer energy in what I read.
I picked up the rest of the crumpled papers and threw most of them away. I hoped that whatever had inspired this outpouring had also gone away. I was wrong. This was only the beginning.
In the years to come I would notice many things about Chris that could be considered part of an extended, heroic journey. At the time I had never even heard of mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, who wrote that all great myths share, to some extent or other, the same hero's journey: the hero, living in ordinary circumstances, receives a call (hearing perhaps a voice), that catapults him into the land of the supernatural. He endures many tests and hardships, possibly even suffering spiritual death in order to be resurrected. During this ordeal he gains special knowledge that he may choose to share with others if he accepts the challenge of returning to the land from where he came. The journey home is fraught with peril, too. The gift that he brings back will be used to enrich the world.
Campbell's hero's journey is a descent experience, a dark night of the soul, told time over time by many people, including the psychiatrist Carl Jung, and can be seen also as a metaphor for serious illness. In Christian theology, the dark night of the soul is illuminated by an ever present light, which eventually will lead the hero to union with the Divine and ultimately, self-knowledge. Sometimes the hero is accompanied on his journey by another, who undergoes a parallel experience. I was privileged to share this journey and to discover that psychiatric illness can be a metaphor for growth — his and mine. But before growth could happen, first we had to descend to the abyss.
I grabbed my notebook to take with me. This journey needed documentation.