‘I still get depressed, and I still hear voices, but it makes me feel good to see I can help other people.’ : Voices in the Night

The voices that Lillian Allen hears in her head tell her she’s worthless. They tell her she does nothing right. They ask, “What good are you?” And then they tell her to destroy herself.

“I think of suicide all the time,” she says. “When I’m driving, I hear my mother’s voice say, ‘Smash your car into the side of that wall!’

“Only by saying it out loud to myself--’Smash your car into the side of that wall’--can I stop from doing it. And then I cry. . . . “

She sits deep in a chair in a small office of Santa Monica’s Step Up Center, a woman of 37 who seems as thin and fragile as winter sunlight.

“Is it always your mother’s voice?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Sometimes it’s the voice of my ex-husband. Sometimes another voice.”

Her expression flips from hesitant smile to tear-filled eyes and back again. The smile is distant and remote. It belongs somewhere else, to someone else.

“Who is the other voice?”

“I don’t know,” she says softly. “Someone who doesn’t like me.”

Step Up on 2nd Street is a halfway house for the mentally ill. It tries to counsel them and help them find work. It tries to edge them back into the mainstream.

The center’s director, Susan Dempsay, became its creative force six years ago while searching for a way to help her own son who, with devastating precipitance, tumbled into what she calls a separate reality.

Mark was 18 and just out of high school, a straight-A student, handsome and popular. Dempsay remembers the night their family was plunged into chaos:

“I was watching television when Mark walked into the room. He had been listening to music and wore earphones. He turned the television up as loud as it would go. It was blaring. I turned it down again. He did the same thing a second time.

“When I realized something was wrong, I went to him. He curled up on the couch and began screaming and flailing his hands and feet. I couldn’t get near him. It was as though he thought I was some kind of monster. . . . “ That was 10 years ago. Mark was diagnosed as schizophrenic. The family broke up. The pain continues.

I later talk to Allen, a receptionist at the center and one of the people Dempsay is trying to save.

She is in a fragile state of recovery. Dempsay finds her in the bathroom sometimes crying and covering her ears to shut out the voices.

Al Martinez

“The voices started when I left my husband,” Allen says. “That was in 1975. He began using drugs when he was in Vietnam. When he came home, he kept using them. He began beating me.

“I tried to talk to my mother about it. ‘This man is killing me,’ I said. I finally told him it was either me or the drugs. He chose the drugs. ‘You will wake up some morning and I’ll be gone,’ I told him. That’s the way it happened.”

Allen was crushed by an unbearable sense of failure. She couldn’t sleep. The voices in her head began in whispers, then rose to crescendo.

“My head throbbed so much I couldn’t stand it. At first, I covered my ears. Then I began drinking whiskey to stop them, to fall asleep or to just pass out. My house and my body became filthy.

“My mother’s voice was the worse. It kept saying, ‘Kill yourself, you don’t need to be here. . . . ‘ “

Violence against Lillian Allen began early in life, she says. “When my father left, it made my mother angry at me. She called me an animal, a dog. I reminded her of him. She would beat me and shave me bald.

“She tried to strangle me once and then tried to stab my face with scissors. I put up my hands to protect myself, and the scissors went through my palm.

“She took me to a psychiatrist and said I was crazy. I went along with it. Maybe it was true. Maybe I was insane. I didn’t know.”

After her marriage failed, there were at least three suicide attempts. When Allen sought help from her mother, she was turned away. That was a decade ago. She hasn’t seen her mother since.

“I was depressed and couldn’t talk. I began to see giant spiders, things that weren’t there, crawling on me. . . . “

She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. Years of institutionalization followed. It was during a 10-month period in a lockup facility that she discovered Step Up. They would release her to visit the center during the day.

“I got so much support from Susan. I was always depressed and in tears and talking about taking my life. She would tell me she cared for me and I was worth something. She gave me a job.

“I was afraid I’d fall on my face, but Susan always had confidence in me. She was taking a big step hiring someone with a mental illness.

“Sometimes I have bad days but I feel I’m a little better. I still get depressed, and I still hear voices, but it makes me feel good to see I can help other people. I’ve come a long way from where I’ve been.

“Without Step Up, I would be in the street and who knows what would have happened to me? I hope to be well someday, to be normal. Let me tell you, those voices are no fun.” She smiles hesitantly and stares off into space. She seems to be listening.