Author Knows Woes of Schizophrenia

(April 4, 2004) -- It's a strange notion, author Virginia Holman said. "Mental illness is still hidden, it's still thought of as separate from physical illness ... as if our heads were not attached to our bodies."

Holman spoke to the Rowan County Chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill Thursday night, telling the story of growing up with a schizophrenic mother who went undiagnosed and untreated for years.

To deal with her bizarre childhood, Holman, who now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote a memoir.

"Rescuing Patty Hearst: Growing up Sane in a Decade Gone Mad," is a straightforward look at schizophrenia, painted with love.

Using her own memories and those of her family and friends, Holman reconstructs those years of ignorance, frustration and heartbreak.

"Schizophrenia is the cruelest of psychotic brain diseases," Holman said. It usually hits young people between the ages of 18 and 25 and comes on without any warning. And most people suffering from the disease have no idea they're sick.

Typically it begins with hearing voices or having delusions. One of the first episodes with her mother was following the color red. Schizophrenics are often drawn to colors. At first, it seemed like a game, following stop signs and fire hydrants and cars -- her mother said red would tell them where to go -- but when she became hopelessly lost, Holman, then 8, had to find the way home.

In 2000, Holman finally asked her mother the question that had been burning in her for years: "Do you remember the first time you heard the voices?"

Expecting something creepy or scary, she laughed when her mother said the voices told her to take her husband's shirts to the cleaners. It was as simple as that.

It was 1974 when her mother became ill. Holman was 8, her sister was 1. It was not until 1981 that her mother saw a psychiatrist. By then, her brain was severely damaged by the disease. And it was not until 1989 that she was finally hospitalized.

The second episode was a full-blown delusion, as her mother took Holman and her sister to a metal-walled cabin to set up a MASH unit for children involved in a secret war.

Holman's father did not immediately come to the rescue, and has been criticized for this. But he did come, and he stayed with the family, coping in the only way he knew -- and trying, trying, trying to get help. Holman calls him a quiet hero.

"We couldn't get her evaluated unless she was suicidal or homicidal," Holman said, and her mother became increasingly violent and detached. Her father and sister moved out and into Holman's apartment when she was in college, weary and scarred from the battles.

Then, on a frigid night in February 1989, Holman's father found his wife huddled in a corner under a pile of clothes in her cold, dark house. He also discovered that she had taken an ax to every electrical outlet in the house, looking for a wire tap. Finally, they had the evidence they needed.

When doctors evaluated her, they asked her father why he had not sought help sooner. It was a sickening irony.

Armed with years of evidence about how the system does not work, Holman's goal is to break the silence, to get people to talk about and take action for the mentally ill.

Psychiatric patients are due the same treatment as those with heart disease, she said. It, too, is a physical illness; it eventually destroys parts of the brain -- her mother will never improve.

People must "learn about the illness and break the stigma," she said.

"There are lots of theories about why it develops," she said, "but nothing concrete." She never found any family history -- but didn't really expect to.

Schizophrenic episodes are sometimes misunderstood or ignored by family members. In turn, some blame the family for bringing on the illness.

Terrified she would become schizophrenic, Holman was always looking for signs. She thought long and hard about having a child, about getting married, about everything. Schizophrenia has a higher incidence in some families, research shows.

But now that she has asked the tough questions, of her mother, father and sister, and written a book baring soul and family secrets, she finds she has opened minds and doors.

Speaking about her experience gives her the chance to keep it from happening to someone else.

And finding an active association here, she said, is encouraging.

"People need to know," she said. "We need to talk."

Source: Salisbury Post - North Carolina

Virginia Holman is the author of "Rescuing Patty Hearst: Growing Up Sane in a Decade Gone Mad." As a child, Holman was held captive by her schizophrenic mother in a 700-square-foot cabin with cement floors and no ceilings in rural Virginia; her book tells the story. She received a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship for 2003-2004.

Read "Mother's Mental Illness," another article by Virginia Holman.

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