The Quiet Room (29 page)

Tension poured out of my body. It was as if she had punctured a terrible boil. Dr. Doller had taken all the badness in me and turned it into good. I was grateful to her, and at the same time pleased with myself for having confided in her.

Sometimes I got angry with Dr. Doller. I found the times she went on vacation especially difficult. While she was gone I would shred money—dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, twenty-dollar bills if I could get my hands on them—using the pun in her name to vent my hostility symbolically.

But sometimes—unlike Dr. Fischer, who kept a therapist's professional detachment—Dr. Doller got mad at me too. Once when I refused to take my medications she lost her cool and hollered at me. She threatened to take away my weekend pass unless I took the medicine the way I was supposed to. Later on she calmed down and apologized. I took the medicine.

The Voices reacted differently to Dr. Doller than to anyone else. They challenged me to destroy her the same way they ordered me to kill Dr. Fischer. They threatened that if I continued to see Dr. Doller, they would put both her and me in hell. But somehow it was different. Somehow I could feel in the Voices a fear that I had never felt in them before.

While I was sitting with Dr. Doller, I'd be in constant fights with the Voices. There were two of them in particular who were my enemies and hers. There they were, the two of them, howling warnings to me about her. But where the Voices usually yelled at me to kill someone before that person killed
me,
this time even though they said Dr. Doller was going to hurt me, I could tell that the Voices were yelling at me to protect
them.

VOICE NO. 1: This asshole floods you with lies.

VOICE No. 2: Eat shit, you excuse for a doctor. Eat shit. Eat shit.

VOICE No. 1: You fuckin’ asshole. She's going to hurt you for life, shithead.

VOICE No. 2: She's worth manure, so spit on her goddamn brain.

VOICE No. 1: Give her a good punch and rip open her skull, that piece of shit.

VOICE No. 2: We will not be extinguished by power of M.D.

BOTH VOICES: By power of M.D. By power of M.D. By power of M.D.

They were frightened. The Voices were actually frightened. She was the doctor with power to destroy them.

Slowly, gradually, I began to be able to confide in her more and more, and through her to be able to open up more to Dr. Fischer. After speaking with Dr. Doller, I wrote to Dr. Fischer telling her how I felt about her. We talked about it, and about how my fantasies about killing her might really have more to do with my wanting to kill all those bad feelings.

Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more comfortable telling Dr. Doller what was really going on inside my head. It was strange. I told her some of the most disgusting, nauseating, horrendous, humiliating and private thoughts and feelings and she didn't seem repulsed. In fact, she always seemed to like me. She was never judgmental, even when I confided my worst secrets and fantasies.

In fact, it was her very matter-of-factness that I found so comforting. Once, after much inner turmoil, I finally confided to her a grisly fantasy that had been torturing me in which I killed and mutilated my father. The fantasy nearly overpowered me with its gruesome detail. But when I poured it all out to Dr. Doller, she didn't seem a bit shocked.

“I'd give that about a seven, Lori,” she said. “You can do better than that.”

Nor did she shrink from giving me hard messages. Once when I was talking to her of my hopes of being cured, she looked at me soberly. “Lori,” she said, “we are going to try to get you better. But you're never going to be able to go all the way back. You're never going to be the girl you were in high school, or even college. You are going to have to learn to work with the person you are now. You're going to have to learn to live with the voices.”

When I was feeling up, she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. “Remember how good you feel now,” she said. “There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don't want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won't last forever. Capture the good moments,” she said.

24

Lori New York Hospital, White Plains, New York, January 1989

As the new year dawned I tried hard to hold on to those good moments, and on to my hope of a new life.

I tried to understand about the Voices. For years in therapy, Dr. Rockland had told me that the Voices were a part of me, stuff buried deep inside coming out in another, strange way. I had learned to say that when I was asked, but I never really believed it. This time around, I tried hard to understand what my doctors meant when they said the Voices weren't real.

When I heard Voices shouting at me to castrate a male staff member, Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller explained, there weren't really voices that other people could hear. It was just my own hostile thoughts getting blown up out of proportion inside my brain.

I listened. I thought about it. No way, I thought at first. I don't have horrible thoughts like that. Those thoughts aren't me. It's those Voices who are the crazy demons, not me. Besides, the Voices were so clear, so real, and so vivid. It seemed impossible to me that they were simply figments of my own imagination.

But gradually, with Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller leading the way, I slowly began to test the waters. If I was hearing Voices cursing me out loud, I'd say nothing, and wait. I'd look around. I'd turn in the direction the Voices were coming from. No one seemed to be disturbed. No one even seemed upset by their vehement words. It was as if they were deaf. I wanted to shake the people around me. You idiots! I thought. Do you think by simply ignoring them they'll go away?

At first I thought I was being tricked. Everyone was simply pretending not to hear the Voices. I didn't know why they were pretending like that but it made me paranoid and suspicious of them. What other things were they plotting against me?

Then the Voices would creep up again. Still no reaction from those around me. I felt a little stirring. Maybe they really couldn't hear them. Quickly I retracted the thought. Of course they were there. I heard them as clearly as “the Star-Spangled Banner” at a baseball game.

Then I started asking Dr. Doller and Dr. Fischer if they heard what I was hearing.

“Do you hear that laughing?” I asked Dr. Fischer in session.

“No,” she said.

“Do you hear those people yelling ’To Die!’?” I asked Dr. Doller when I met her on the hall.

“No,” she said.

Over and over Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller told me the same things that Dr. Rockland had said: The Voices were only my own thoughts. The difference was that now I was more ready to hear them. I trusted Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller. Why would they fool me? Of course I never quite believed them completely. The Voices were too real. But at least I became willing to consider the possibility-

And as I became willing to consider the possibility, I began to be able to see—faintly at first—that the Voices had real emotions behind them. Once I began to be able to tell my doctors what the Voices were saying about them, they began to help me look more closely at what the Voices were saying and why. I would tell Dr. Fischer that the Voices were telling me to strangle her.

“Is it possible that you are feeling angry with me?” she would say. And slowly, gradually, I would begin to be able to realize that I had been angry because she had been late to session, or jealous because I had seen her talking to another patient.

If I couldn't make the Voices go away, then at least I could get to the powerful emotions that were underneath, Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller said. So I practiced letting out that anger in different ways, hoping to funnel off some of the fuel that fed the Voices. With the two doctors tutoring me, I tried to learn to identify my anger and express it in words before it turned into a full-blown crisis of Voices.

Sometimes that had led to some strange triumphs. I wrote in my journal:

I made progress today. I called Dr. Doller an asshole behind her back and not in the Voices’ words. In other words, I got angry on my own.

As time went on, I tried hard not only to understand, but to make myself understood. I tried to explain as clearly as possible to Dr. Doller about the compartments in my brain. When all the individual compartments were closed, I was safe. When one or more compartment drawers were open even slightly, evil would seep out of one of them and villainous thoughts out of another. Pretty soon my mind would be a mess, everything scrambled together like broken sunny-side up eggs. The chaos of the evil seeping from the compartments would be just too overwhelming for me to bear.

I also made up a system to help Dr. Doller judge the strength of the Voices tormenting me. It was so hard for the doctors to tap into my brain and understand how bad I was feeling. So I came up with a 0 to 3 rating scale. Three was so consumed by Voices that I was overwhelmed. Zero—which hardly ever happened— meant no Voices at all.

Dr. Doller and I would be sitting down on one of the halls on the unit and she would ask me how the Voices were.

“Well, Doc, I'd give it a one.” That meant I was feeling relatively okay. When, later in the day, I would report to her that the Voices were climbing into the 2 plus range, and I was beginning to panic and feel suicidal, she would remind me that only a few hours earlier I had been feeling much better, and that I would feel better again.

I even mastered the Quiet Room.

The last time I was in the hospital the Quiet Room had been such a frightening, terrifying place. Every time I had been sent there it had seemed like punishment for misbehaving. This time everyone talked to me over and over again. The Quiet Room isn't a place for punishment, they said, and it isn't the enemy. If you can go there on your own you can calm yourself down.

How could I believe them? I had seldom gone there without being carried. Often I had been in there out of control and screaming until I was dragged out into a cold wet pack. Go to the Quiet Room voluntarily? Now who was crazy?

But still, they persisted with their almost monotonous chant. Come for help before you are out of control. Ask for medication. Use the Quiet Room. Work with us, they said. Work with us. Gradually I became able to listen to them.

The first time I tried walking into the Quiet Room on my own, I was trembling. This was it. This was what I had been taught to do. I could feel the rage and pain building up inside me. “Don't go! Don't go!” the Voices screamed. “You'll die there! You'll die there!” they cried. I paused. Was I going to listen to the staff or the Voices?

Suddenly, I decided. Fuck the Voices. I was going in. At first it seemed like a whirlwind. There was so much stimulation in my brain all at once, it seemed I was breaking apart in all different directions. There were Voices, sights, thoughts, feelings. I wanted to scream but nothing came out. My heart was out of control in my body and my hands were shaking. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breathe. Too much was happening.

Finally out of mental exhaustion I collapsed. But I relaxed. The more times I marched myself into the Quiet Room the easier it was. The Quiet Room became a place to chill out and deescalate, rather than to be punished. Finally, the Quiet Room really became quiet.

Nearly everyone agreed I had made real progress. But progress at what cost? Simply keeping the symptoms in check was sapping all my energy and exhausting me. And the Voices were still always with me. Their pummeling talk of hellfire and punishment was my constant companion. In addition, their crazy crooning had taken on a sensual, voluptuous quality: “Talk to us, darling little cunt,” they whispered. “Talk to us.”

Sounds echoed through my head like thunder. There was a hailstorm in my brain, with tornado winds knocking down telephone poles and trees. I heard bomber planes overhead and braced myself against their destructive roar. I was overwhelmed by every sound I heard around me. I couldn't tune out any noise; each one pounded my brain with equal intensity. Traffic. The wind. Water flowing down a sink's drain. Birds. Windows opening or closing. They all rattled in my head like artillery fire.

But the worst torment these days was not the things I heard, but rather the things I saw. I saw fire, lightning, colored bolts of light. I saw people hanging in the window, and body parts hanging from the trees. I saw fire around people and walls and faces. Sometimes I felt I had projector eyeballs, shooting things and shapes and colors straight ahead of me. Sometimes I saw things as if they were movies floating before my eyes. Sometimes I saw things that looked as real as my bed or my lamp or my tennis shoes.

I couldn't sleep at night because of the creatures in my bed. I sat at my desk writing in my journal one night because I was afraid to go near my bed. “There are four of them sitting on the bed,” I wrote.

Usually I saw creatures with faces that were like the scariest Halloween mask ever made or creatures with big blubbery, hairy, slippery green faces. But sometimes I saw people I recognized. I saw the face of my parents’ friend Dr. Arnie Maerov melt into a caricature. Why him? Was it simply because he was a psychiatrist, or because he was a friend of my parents? I saw my seventh-grade science teacher, Fred Zaltas. I had had a crush on him when I was thirteen, but I hadn't thought of him in ten years.

I saw my childhood Jerry Mahoney doll. Jerry was like my pal. I played with him, acted out fantasy conversations with him as if we were really friends. We entertained people as I had back in another life so many years ago. We made people laugh. And then he too melted like syrupy wax into a gruesome ghastly figurine, almost like a three-dimensional mind puddle.

And then I saw Charles Manson, staring at me from the walls of my room just as he had once stared at me from the front page of the newspaper back in California when I was a child. He penetrated my entire mind and body with his fierce and frenzied eyes. Patients in the hospital mocked other patients who seemed to have a psychotic stare. But no patient that I had ever met had about him the look.that Charles Manson did. His eyes were stilettos piercing through my soul. I couldn't escape his gaze. Every time I tried to look away he commanded my eyes to stay fixed on his. I was unable to break his psychotic stare.