A Beautiful Note

Written by HealthyPlace.com Staff Writer

Tom Harrell, named jazz trumpeter of the year three times by Downbeat Magazine, is known for the gorgeous, intricate melodies he composes.

Picture right: Tom Harrell, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, has been named jazz trumpeter of the year three times by Downbeat Magazine.

Seeing Harrell play, it's impossible to believe that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia - a mental illness so profound that it institutionalizes many of its victims.

Harrell overcomes it with music. Yet the moment he stops playing, his disorder seizes him. Voices materialize and threaten his sense of reality.

"He was intriguing. He was mysterious ... This purity of spirit. He's a beautiful person. There's nothing not to like about the guy."
wife Angela Harrell

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But while Harrell appears in full retreat from the world, the music prevents him from losing his place. And when horn returns to mouth, the voices vanish. It's the only time you don't see the signs of his illness. Correspondent Charlie Rose reports.

In fact, the schizophrenia makes something as ordinary as having our soundman put a microphone on him an ordeal. But soon, the moment passes.

"As long as I take the medicine now, I can stay on an even keel, and then I'm able to function," says Harrell, who communicates musically, not verbally - which is all his band members need to follow him during performances.

Still, they have all borne witness to his paranoia.file:///C:/Users/Public/Desktop/Microsoft%20Security%20Essentials.lnk

"I think we see it all the time. He doesn't announce it, say, 'I'm sitting, I'm hearing voices,' you know. They'll be sudden changes for no apparent reason," says pianist Xavier Davis.

"But maybe someone mentioned someone or whispered something just out of earshot, and he heard that as something like, 'Tom, get off the stage. You suck.' You know, like just something that was never said. And so, maybe he'll just take a short solo because he thinks people don't want to hear him play.

But Harrell wasn't always like this, says his older sister, Sue Abrahamson.

"He was good-spirited, creative," says Abrahamson. "He had friends that he would do things with and hang out with. And seemed pretty normal."

Normal, but with a genius IQ, Harrell starting playing the trumpet at the age of eight. When he went off to college at 18, his sister received a call that he had tried to commit suicide.

"That was the first sign that there were problems," says Abrahamson.How could a seemingly normal little boy with a normal childhood travel from happiness to despair so suddenly?

"We don't know what causes the illness," says Dr. Eric Marcus, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He's familiar with Harrell's history and is an expert on schizophrenia.

"A paranoid schizophrenic is someone with schizophrenia whose major manifestation of illness is the hallucinated voice and/or belief that people are out to get him - that they are targeting him in some way," says Marcus.

When Harrell was in his 20s, those voices ordered him to walk through a window after he had some orange juice.

"I come in and I see blood all over the rug, and I say, 'What happened,?' And he said that when he drank the orange juice, the voices told him to go out the window," recalls Abrahamson. "And so he had to break the window to get out. So that's how he got cut."

The glass shattered, but it kept him inside. The following video is a Tom Harrell interview.