Mental Illness Has Darkened Life of ‘Girl Next Door’

Years ago, when Lisa was a college student living at her parents’ oceanfront home on the Balboa Peninsula, she drafted a response to a newspaper story about a man who had choked to death while strapped to his bed in a mental hospital.

Lisa wanted to let people know that this man, whom she had befriended during one of her own hospital stays, was bright, kind and loving. He was not some lunatic who deserved to suffocate on his own vomit.

“My mother was absolutely furious with me,” Lisa, now 34 years old, told me the other day. “She made me tear the letter up. She didn’t want anyone to know that I was ill myself.”

The woman seated next to me in a reclining rocker, her 4-month-old daughter at her breast, is the one I call Lisa.

She told me that I could use her real name for this column so that her friends, neighbors and co-workers at UC Irvine might learn that she is schizophrenic. But if the past is any guide, these same people would shun her if they found out.

I was thinking about this as I spoke with Lisa in the Irvine townhouse that she shares with her husband and children. Until I met this middle-class mother, articulate and poised, mental illness really never had a face.

It was an abstraction that politicians boiled down to numbers--we need more beds, more clinics and more dollars--and a whisper behind the headlines of climbing suicide rates and homelessness.

The most conservative estimates say that 3% of all Americans suffer from severe mental illness--schizophrenia, manic-depression and other psychoses--but this statistic had somehow never grabbed ahold of me. Sometimes a spectacularly violent act would command my attention, then I’d shake my head and carry on.

To associate all this with Lisa disarms me. Hers is a perfectly normal home. Framed artwork adorns the walls, there are shelves heavy with books, and taped on a front window are a paper bat and jack-o’-lantern that her 5-year-old daughter created in kindergarten class.

This could be anybody’s life that I have stepped into. I wonder what I had expected.

But throughout our conversation, Lisa feels compelled to remind me, and perhaps herself, that she is “still a human being.” Many times, she has felt like less.

“My mother would always say, ‘Just smile and you’ll be OK. Everything will be OK,’ ” Lisa says. “She’d say, ‘Look, you have everything you want, a beautiful house. Stop it! Don’t do this!’ ”

But it was during a psychology class at Orange Coast College, Lisa says, when she realized that maybe she could be helped. Her professor recommended a mental health clinic. Within hours after walking through its doors, she was admitted to a hospital.

Since then Lisa has been hospitalized more times than she can remember, drugged and counseled, patted on the back and sent back out.

“This is like cancer,” she says. “It is a sentence.

“It hurts when you feel crazy. It is not a high. You can almost feel your brain cells dying.”

Lisa can tell when her illness is taking hold. People’s expressions change. They back away. They become afraid.

“You learn your danger signals,” she says. “I start laughing. I can’t stop. I’m like the typical demented person laughing in the corner or if not, I’m exploding. In other words, I’m real hard to live with. . . .”

This is why Lisa worries. She doesn’t know when the ground will next melt beneath her, when she’ll begin her slide into private hell. She wonders if her family will still be there the next time she emerges. She has come too close to losing them already.

As we spoke, tears sometimes wet Lisa’s cheeks. She told me, in her words and in her tone, that she was barely hanging on. Her insurance is better than most, she says, but it is about to run out.

Lisa says that even her husband doesn’t really understand that mental illness is not something that you can just snap out of, although she has tried.

“There are times when I think I can deal with anything,” she says. “But then you realize that this is still part of you. . . . I think about the words of my psychiatrist, ‘This is the progression of your disease,’ and about him telling me that I will never be healthy again.”

Others, Lisa says, have given up sooner. Perhaps her closest friend will be next.

“She has her supply of medicine. . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if she committed suicide. She is a manic-depressive. She’s run out of hope and help. I understand it.”

As we neared the end of our conversation, Lisa told me that sometimes she wondered what her life would have been like if she had not become sick. She would have been able to finish school, spend more time with her children, read the books that she loves.

“None of this is of my own choosing,” she says. “But people, somehow, just don’t believe it.”

As I got in my car to drive away, I carried Lisa’s thoughts with me. They are still with me, and I expect they always will be. What Lisa wants is understanding, someone who will listen.

I hope this column can substitute for that letter Lisa’s mother never let her mail.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.