I Was Crazy Now I'm Not

The author, a Harvard-trained paediatrician, has endured four mental breakdowns. Each one taught him to think more clearly.

- Dr Mark Vonnegut

I couldn’t sleep or eat for several days. Then I started hearing voices. Not gauzy, special-effects voices, but actual, real voices coming from outside my head. It’s the kind of thing that can’t be ignored. When somebody says hello, it’s impolite not to say it back. Hi. Hello. Hello?

So you end up in a conversation with yourself, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like you’re talking to somebody else. Somebody outside yourself.

In the beginning the voices were fairly friendly, but then they became more insistent and critical. Unfortunately, they have a lot of inside information that can and will be used against you. You don’t know you’re mentally ill, so you simply assume that things have changed for everyone. Maybe hearing disembodied voices is just part of the new deal. I remember sitting down next to a friend and saying, “So what are your voices telling you?” He got up and found himself a different place to sit. This was 45 years ago.

Ultimately my friends couldn’t put up with me because I did things like break a big picture window. (I thought we were suffocating.)

Everything I did made sense to me and much of it was heroic. My friends got hold of my family who did the sensible thing to do with someone who’s floridly psychotic: they put me in a psychiatric hospital. The hospital gave me large doses of antipsychotic medication and put me in seclusion.

Bipolar disorder and many other mental illnesses are heavily influenced by genetics. It helped that my mother had had similar symptoms. When I complained about the voices, she was able from her own experience to say, “Why don’t you just go along with them?”

When I told her I thought I could foresee the future, she said, “Well, who doesn’t?”