After decades of darkness, light

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

Her history is hospitals. They're where she lived, where she grew up and where parts of her died.

They were the best hospitals, the Ivy Leagues of psychiatric care. Her father, a heart surgeon, trusted these places, with their names that overshadowed their failures. They had big reputations and bigger price tags. He took her to one after another. But his daughter slipped deeper into herself and further away from him.

He wouldn't give up. He refused to accept the "We're sorry, but there's nothing more we can do" he kept hearing. "If you try something four times and it doesn't work, then you try it again," says Dr. Frank Spencer, now in his 80s.

And so he kept trying until he found a path that would deliver his daughter from the voices in her head.

Today his daughter, Pat, is 54. They sit beside each other at a table at Boston University's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation and tell their story. He has taken a train from Manhattan. She has taken a bus across town. He admires his daughter's determination, and he says so. "Pat never once said, `I can't do something."'

She was 6 when she fell and hit her head on a cement floor. She had convulsions. Her father believes this may be the cause of her illness. She nods and says she felt "different" after the fall. How different she can't explain, except that where things had been clear before they were never clear after.

She was in high school when whatever was wrong went seriously wrong. Depression. Paranoia. Bipolarity. Schizophrenia. She was diagnosed and misdiagnosed.

She says she couldn't concentrate, couldn't relate. She says, "I felt lost." She was hospitalized. She got better. She came home. She got worse. Her doctors persuaded her to attend college. Four months later she attempted suicide.

She was admitted to another hospital. She hallucinated. She despaired. She had shock treatments. Nothing worked.

When she was 22, she entered McLean Hospital in Belmont. She lived there for five years, then moved up and out to Hope Cottage, still on hospital grounds, but in a more home-like setting.

In 1990, a drug changed her life. Her father calls Clozaril "a miracle drug. It's like insulin to a diabetic. It saved Pat."

Larry Kohn, development director for the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, agrees. He says that before Clozaril, the drugs used to treat mental illness were "major tranquilizers that produced a medication haze. Clozaril controls the thought disorder. It has turned some people's lives around."

Pat was one of them. After 20 years of failed therapies, the voices in her head were finally still.

Don't rock the boat, the experts told her father. She's stable. Let her go on living the life she knows, sheltered and safe.

But the father wanted more for his daughter. He wanted her to grow. He learned about the center at BU, whose mission is to improve the lives of persons with psychiatric disabilities by respecting that they have goals and dreams like everyone else. And he was hopeful.

"We teach people how to step out of the role of being a patient," explains Kohn. "We start to get them thinking of themselves in terms of skills."

Pat enrolled in a career counseling course. "I began to feel a sense of hope," she said. "I began to think, `I can do this. I can go to school.' It was like coming alive."

Pat's success gave her the courage to sign up for a college course. "I was just going to audit it," she says. But when she got a B, she decided to take it for credit. Then she took another course. Then another. "I never thought about graduating."

But she did, last summer, after 14 years of studying "every waking moment." She graduated from BU cum laude, with a bachelor of science degree in psychology.

In movies, psychiatric patients are cured in two hours. Pat's journey has taken decades. And she isn't cured. She lives with her illness the way diabetics live with theirs.

But she's part of the world now. She lives in an apartment with three other women. She cooks her own meals. She does data entry for a former teacher. She has goals. And she has dreams.

She hopes to work in human services and counsel people. "This is the next phase of my life, helping other people not be trapped by this illness."

People never gave up on her, she says. "My friends. My classmates. My exceptional father."

"They showed me that there is always hope for a better life. Everything that I went through finally has a happy ending."