Quiet Room Lori Schiller\'s 1996

¶ … Quiet Room

Lori Schiller's 1996 memoir the Quiet Room defies many of the stereotypes attached to the common image of a schizophrenic person. Like many schizophrenics, Schiller began to suffer symptoms in late adolescence. However, this intelligent and composed young woman was able to use tremendous strength of will to put on pretence of normalcy for many years. She attended a prestigious university and even was able to create a relatively stable life for herself, revolving around excelling in her classes and spending time with her friends, while still untreated for her illness. However, at the age of twenty-three Schiller was no longer able to ignore the auditory and visual hallucinations that plagued her. She was committed to a mental institution and there began the journey into the world of the officially 'mad.'

One of the most effective aspects of the Quiet Room is the way that it portrays the reactions of individuals to someone in the grips of mental illness. As well as Lori's first-person accounts, the journalist who helped compile the book, Amanda Bennett, includes accounts of individuals close to Lori, like her confused roommates and parents. At first, Lori's parents deny that she is mentally ill. Depression is acceptable, understandable -- it is within the realm of normal, thus parents can deny that their child is sick. Schizophrenia, in contrast, is undeniably a mental illness that divides an individual between the sane and insane, the normal and the abnormal. The denial of her parents ran deep, surprisingly yet understandably so. Lori's father was a psychologist, and could not understand how he was unable to spot the symptoms in his own daughter. Lori's mother had individuals in her family whom she suspected of being mentally ill, but never believed her own highly competent child could be afflicted. When the family discusses treating Lori with clozapine, an anti-hallucinogenic drug with potentially deadly side effects, they decide the risk is worth it, given that they feel they no longer have the daughter they knew. This moment, which illustrates the degree to which schizophrenia can alienate individuals from their families (despite the fact that it is a heritable disease to some degree), is both powerful and troubling.

To some extend, Lori's parents illustrate the different worldview of the 1970s, regarding mental illness. As manifest in the perspective of Lori's father, there was still a tendency to blame parents for 'creating' schizophrenia in their children: Lori's father blamed himself. And as is notable in the perspective of Lori's mother, the role of heredity in schizophrenia was not fully understood. Today, a family with a genetic legacy of schizophrenia might be more apt to be watchful of the possibility of an adolescent such as Lori developing symptoms.

Yet other facets of Lori's treatment indicate that some aspects of the mental health experience of schizophrenics have not altered. Drug treatment is often 'hit or miss' in terms of how it remedies the sufferer's condition. The drugs that control the disease are often emotionally flattening and cause severe weight gain and motor spasms that 'mark' the individual as 'different' just as much as the illness itself. At the end of the Quiet Room, Lori portrays herself as saved by a drug, not a psychiatrist: the clozapine's lack of severe side effects, in contrast to other drugs, set her free and allow her to eventually return to a normal life.