The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
Lori Schiller, Amanda Bennett
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0446671339
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child -- the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her.
In this new edition, Lori Schiller recounts the dramatic years following the original publication -- a period involving addiction, relapse, and ultimately, love and recovery.
Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perserverance and courage.
London with me, on her own junior year program from Skidmore College. We wrote reports together on Disraeli and Gladstone. We studied British history, painting and sculpture. We stopped in Trafalgar Square to have our pictures taken with the lions. We went to pubs and drank beer, ate tea and crumpets and tried to make the Queen's Guards laugh. At one time during the semester we cut our fingers and smooshed our blood together. We'll be friends forever, we said. Blood sisters. Nothing will come
would never admit she had problems. Often she said she didn't want to bother them. What's more, just being with them seemed to make her happy. When they were around she always seemed more normal and the vivacious, funny, lovable Lori would just seem to take over for a while. So they never knew about the days she wouldn't get out of bed. But sometimes I got so concerned myself that I called them. Lori's mother would listen to my stories, and in a very friendly motherly way, brush them aside. “Oh,
house every morning at 8:45 to be there by 9:00. The morning was filled with nonsense. We had art therapy, assertiveness training, group therapy, and classes in leather, wood and jewelry working as well as grocery shopping and cooking. I felt they treated us like morons. I'd sit for forty-five minutes sanding a piece of wood. Then a staff member would give me the okay to sand another piece of wood. I had lunch there every day—every day an ice cream sandwich—and by 1:45 it was over. Then my
I could write it. All through my various times in the hospital, people had been urging me to keep a journal. This time I decided to listen to them and try. I had always loved writing. Back before I had gotten sick I had been good at it. All through my younger days I had kept journals off and on. I loved the fat spiral notebooks and the feel of the pen in my hand. This time, though, the journals meant much more to me. In my journals I could tell myself all the scary things I could tell no one
unit and she would ask me how the Voices were. “Well, Doc, I'd give it a one.” That meant I was feeling relatively okay. When, later in the day, I would report to her that the Voices were climbing into the 2 plus range, and I was beginning to panic and feel suicidal, she would remind me that only a few hours earlier I had been feeling much better, and that I would feel better again. I even mastered the Quiet Room. The last time I was in the hospital the Quiet Room had been such a