San Francisco, California
October 12, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is the first of two installments from M., a twenty-three-year-old Irish woman who has been hospitalized three times in the last three years because of her schizophrenia. It’s part of our weeklong series of letters from correspondents whose lives have intersected with the mental-health system.

In June, when I was asking around about writers for Open Letters, I spoke to Margie Borschke, a journalist in New York who’d written for Saturday Night when I worked there, and Margie suggested M.

This is Margie’s explanation of how she came to know M.:

M. and I met onschizophrenia.com. I was looking for interview subjects for an article I was writing for Janeabout young women who were coping with schizophrenia. M. sent me this amazing letter about her first psychotic episode. She really wanted people to understand what schizophrenia was and wasn’t. She was what psychiatrists call a high-functioning patient. She was living a relatively normal life, DJing at a pirate radio station and working at a part-time job, and she was about to go on a several-month-long trip to Australia.

M. and I broached some difficult subjects in our emails and phone conversations: was it okay if I thought her delusions were funny or interesting; how does someone with a mental illness distinguish their eccentricies from delusions; was she able to be at once delusional and aware that she was delusional.

Of course, so little of this could make its way into a 2,500-word piece with three or four other subjects, plus quotes from medical experts and advocates. Suddenly hours of email and phone interviews with M. became a couple of quotes. M. said to me later that while she was pleased with my piece, she was disappointed she didn’t get more of a chance to tell her story.

When Open Letters launched I remembered her letters and emailed her again. It took her a while to get back to me because she wasn’t well. She’s been up and down of late.

M.’s up-and-downness made the editorial process more complicated than it had been with Jessica Willis or Miriam Toews. For instance, at one point, after Margie sent a draft to M. for her approval, she wrote back,

I am a bit embarrassed about certain ways I felt when I wrote the letter. Admittedly, I was wrapped in delusions then.

A couple of days later:

I had a really bad day today. I collapsed into tears for hours. My mum says she will get me a counsellor…I showed her the draft of the letter last night and she said she would talk to me about it tonight. I rang my psychiatrist’s office which I never did before so I must have been in a really bad way.

The most memorable passage, for me, from the emails that Margie and M. exchanged during the editing process was this one, which M. wrote at a point midway between her more delusionary and more rational state. The first sentence, especially, is about as poetic a definition of schizophrenia as I’ve read:

To be schizophrenic is to treat life as symbolism. To understand symbols, you first get paranoid and then understand life’s symbols as being Natural. I read things into things alright but little psychic messages like music and people’s lyrics help me understand the state of consciousness and current evolution of humanity. I am “with it.”

(Part of what I like about it is the way that M.’s “little psychic messages” resemble the “signs and auguries” that I wrote about noticing in my coincidence letter, back in June. We all have moments when we read things into things.)

After Margie forwarded me the note in which M. said she’d had a really bad day, she and I discussed whether publishing M.’s letter might be a mistake, whether we might be taking advantage of her in a moment of confusion. So Margie asked M. if she had any reservations, and she wrote back,

I don’t have any reservations. This is my story and who I am and I would like to tell it and should anyone be interested in reading it, I am blessed.

I have been to sz.com recently and I so badly see the need to make schizophrenia understood. There is so much ignorance around it and so many people feel alone in the dark because of sz.

M.’s letter will conclude tomorrow.

In the spirit of M.’s desire (and ability) to tell her own story, here’s another journalistic endeavor you should know about: if you live in the United States, and own a radio, please tune in today at 4:30 or 6:30 to National Public Radio and listen to “Witness to an Execution,” a documentary by Open Letters contributing editor Stacy Abramson and her partner David Isay. It is an audio profile, in their own words, of the men and women who carry out and witness executions in Huntsville, Texas. You can read more about it at the Sound Portraitsweb site.

Next week we plan to announce two new distribution methods for Open Letters – one high-tech, one low-tech. And speaking of distribution: If you don’t already receive the weekly PDF version of Open Letters, consider a subscription; you can visit this page if you want some pep-talking before you take the plunge.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough