The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller, Amanda Bennett Page A

her symptoms are, and what was caused by the electroshock, and what by the medicine. Don't you think that we should take her off all the medications and see what she's like then?”
    The doctor was dubious. Lori's problems have more to do with her condition than with her medication, she said. And in any case, since Lori had required so much supervision in the past, any experiments without medication would have to be done in some kind of hospital setting.
    “But couldn't we take her home? You know that I am a psychologist. If she needs professional supervision, I could take time off and watch her myself…”
    While Marvin and the doctor had been debating, the young man and I had sat silently. Just at that moment, though, he broke in.
    “Schizophrenia is a very serious illness,” he said. “It may be a very long time—if ever—before she will get better. She will probably never be able to live on her own again. It would be better for both of you if you faced facts.”
    I was in shock. This young man, a person I barely knew, had just told us there was no hope. No hope for Lori. The hospital was giving up on her, and we should too. My stomach was tied up in knots. I glanced over at Marvin, who sat there looking stiff and angry.
    There were tears in his eyes. But I, who had spent the summer sobbing, couldn't squeeze out a drop.
    Schizophrenia? What did that word mean? I didn't understand it. I didn't believe it. All along they had been talking about manic-depression. When they said schizophrenia I didn't know what they were talking about. What did they mean when they said she was hallucinating? And what did schizophrenia have to do with it?
    Schizophrenia meant split personality, didn't it? I had heard about schizophrenia, and I had seen some movies about it. To me, schizophrenia was
The Three Faces of Eve
, the film starring Joanne Woodward about a woman who had three different personalities that came and went without warning.
    How many personalities did they think Lori had? Was the girl who told us she could fly a different personality from the personality of the Lori we knew and loved? Where had this other person come from and how could we make her go away and get our Lori back?
    I didn't think to ask those questions. And the doctors just seemed to assume we would understand what they were talking about, or at least accept it without understanding.
    Who could I turn to? Marvin was still locked inside himself, and wouldn't talk to anyone. So he couldn't solve problems the way he usually did, by calling around to his friends and colleagues and seeking the best possible advice and information. He was a psychologist. Surely he understood what schizophrenia was. But he was too tormented to explain it to me clearly. Or perhaps he was shielding me from the truth. Once again I felt alone and confused.
    I went to the Doubleday bookstore at lunchtime and bought three books on mental illness. To me, mental illness was tragic and upsetting, but the kinds of mental illness I was imagining for Lori had still been rather commonplace. Marvin and I had been devastated by Lori's breakdown, but that's all we had thought it was—a breakdown. People like Lori had nervous breakdowns. She had been under too much stress. She had been depressed. She had been unhappy. Even saying she could fly—it was awful, but if we thought about it as mental confusion caused by stress, we could still understand it. When the stress went away, and her symptoms were treated by drugs, the confusion would go away.
    But schizophrenia? The word itself was horrifying.
    I started skimming the books while I was standing in line, read as much as I could before I went back to the office, and the rest on the train on the way home.
    All my ideas had been wrong. Schizophrenia wasn't a split personality. It was a brain disease, a chemical imbalance. People with schizophrenia did hallucinate. They heard voices commanding them to do things. They heard voices talking about