The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  There have been many plans and a few stabs at making the farm a full-time operation again, but nothing that’s amounted to much. Now it’s mostly a pleasant retreat for Simon and his Vancouver friends. It’s hard to say what happened in between our all being so sure we had found some forever and our recent talks about signing the place over to some free school. The apocalyptic visions that drove us there softened as time failed to bear them out. As soon as the newness and challenge that made it fun wore off, the impact of being so isolated set in. Add that we could each expect to live another fifty years or so and you’ve got some powerful incentive to transcend the doubts about whether or not you could hack it out there. I’m just guessing. It was probably different things at different times for each of us. The one thing I’m sure of is that none of us was driven away by the hardness of the life. It really wasn’t very hard, and if any of the things we feared were happening ever do happen, it’s nice to know it’s there.

  Myself. I came East, kept writing, got more and more disgustingly healthy, did substitute teaching and masonry, went back to school to learn more about the biochemistry I was suddenly so enthusiastic about, danced around love a bit before falling, and am now trying to get into medical school.

  Zeke became Virginia’s dog. He managed to survive several stays in Powell River, but in September 1974, after a car-free summer at the farm, Zeke was struck and killed by a car his first day back in town. Farewell, noble, beautiful, true true friend.

  4

  LETTER TO ANITA

  Dear Anita,

  Headly has told me you’re going through some bad times that sound like bad times I’ve been through. I hope you find some of what I have to say helpful.

  Schizophrenia is so awful from so many different directions all at once, it’s hard to know where to start. The important thing to keep in mind is that others have gone through it and come out in good shape. As nightmarishly dreadful an experience as it is, many recovered schizophrenics wouldn’t trade having had it for anything. I feel that way myself, though I would certainly never wish schizophrenia on anyone under any circumstances and would do anything to avoid having it again.

  One of the hardest parts of dealing with schizophrenia is believing that there’s any such thing. It would be so much simpler if you had a broken arm or even cancer. What was “wrong” would be immediately obvious. You and those around you would make appropriate allowances, get the best medical help available, and hope for the best. Although there have been some hopeful advances in objective diagnostic testing that point up biochemical abnormalities in schizophrenia, I doubt if there will ever be anything with the eloquence and simplicity of an arm in a cast. And while more and more is known every day, what are appropriate allowances and what is the best medical help are much more difficult questions for schizophrenia than for most diseases.

  I myself was a Laing-Szasz fan and didn’t believe there was really any such thing as schizophrenia. I thought it was just a convenient label for patients whom doctors were confused about. I even worked in a mental hospital for several months without being convinced otherwise.

  All that’s beside the point. The point is that there’s overwhelming evidence that there is a very real disease called schizophrenia (actually probably several very real diseases with overlapping symptoms), and, as you yourself suspect, it’s very possibly what you’re suffering from. There’s no percentage in your wasting energy wondering whether or not you’re crying wolf, Anita. What you’re suffering from is very real.

  Krishna Murti said, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Laing has called schizophrenia a reasonable response to an insane world. While there is certainly plenty to be upset about in these strange times, and as much as I tried to place the blame there when I went under, there is precious little evidence that our troubled world can be realistically blamed for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia occurs in all cultures in all times, displaying a remarkable consistency. What this means is that while some people at some times may have better reasons for going nuts, about the same number go nuts regardless. Translated to your situation: your mental health is not dependent on the moral, sociopolitical health of the world. Thank God for little things like that. It also means that getting well doesn’t involve selling out or becoming any less angry with things as they are.

  World-mess theories are only the beginning. You’ve doubtless already run into several theories of what is causing your problems and will run into many more. Everyone has a field day explaining schizophrenia. It’s your parents, your childhood, your love life, your religion, your life style, and on and on. Usually each theory will contain just enough truth to make it irritating, but the vast majority of these theories end up giving you explanations of why you are sick rather than clues about how to get well. Besides which, most theories on this level have only poetic attractiveness and scanty, if any, objective evidence backing them up.

  Love, insight, talking about your feelings, creative expression are all valuable commodities in their own right, Anita, but don’t expect them to make you well or let anyone con you into believing that some lack of these is responsible for your troubles. Freud himself said that psychotherapy wasn’t of any value in schizophrenia and all subsequent studies have borne him out. Case histories that seem to show the opposite are more than likely a reflection of the fact that a great number of schizophrenics—approximately a third—improve without any treatment. Whatever shrink happens to be standing around when such remissions occur is usually willing to assume credit.

  A more serious problem with most psychological theories and therapies is that they usually involve placing blame. According to their model, your parents or your friends or you yourself or someone else has screwed up. The fact is, there is no blame. You haven’t done anything horribly wrong and neither have your parents or anyone else. Everybody’s just sort of bumbling along and everyone makes mistakes. But mistakes aren’t the reason you’re having trouble. Anita, I’d be all for making someone feel lousy and guilty, even wrongly, if there was the slightest evidence it helped schizophrenics, but there isn’t. More often it just further terrifies and alienates those who most want to help you.

  If you fail to benefit from psychotherapy, you stand a better than even chance of being accused of “resisting therapy.” As if things weren’t bad enough already, you are now accused of subconsciously or even consciously wanting them that way.

  If on the other hand you do recover while under psychotherapy you may come away feeling that honesty and other forms of virtue were at the root of your problem and that if you and those around you are not always wise and pure, you’ll go nuts again. Truth and beauty are wonderful things, but I want to assure you that, once recovered, a schizophrenic can lie, cheat, and be dense with consequences no more dire than those faced by anyone else.

  Doctors, family, and friends will inevitably get into figuring out which parts of what you do and say are “crazy” and which are sane. It would be a harmless enough diversion if it weren’t such an irritating distraction from the real problems. It’s impossible to sort out the sanity of any given thought or action. Every fantasy and hallucination has at least a germ of truth and often more. Everything I did, even at my craziest, was “appropriate” with a little imagination. The dead-end route I kept traveling was working hard on figuring out exactly how my thoughts and actions made sense and then trying to get others to see it. Since I was acting “appropriately,” there was nothing wrong.

  What I finally caught on to was that there was something very wrong and that whether or not my thoughts and actions were “appropriate” had very little to do with it. What was wrong was that I had lost control of my life, and not just because I had been locked up. The simplest way to describe it is that my stress tolerance had been whittled down to nothing in a process that went back far beyond the time when everyone got so interested in the appropriateness of my actions. Appropriate shmappropriate, the problem is that schizophrenia make
s you so goddamed fragile. I was reacting appropriately but to so many different things, so strongly, and in such a personal way that it didn’t look that way to anyone else. More important, my being that fragile and reactive meant I couldn’t do many things I wanted to do. I was so distractible that even very simple tasks were impossible to complete, so sensitive that the slightest hint of negativity was utterly crushing, so wired that no one could relax around me.

  Like you, Anita, I cracked in very hip surroundings. While it has advantages in terms of people being willing to go the extra mile, having more respect and sympathy for the terrors you’re going through, it can also add some new problems. I was often afraid to tell my friends what was going on, not so much because they’d think I was nuts, but more because it might sound like bragging. Many of the things that were happening to me were things I was supposed to like: ego death, communicating with the supernatural, hypersensitivity of all sorts. If there’s anything worse than bragging about such things, it’s not liking them.

  It’s been suggested by many that a schizophrenics is a failed mystic. The same thing happens to both, but in the face of God, infinity, or whatever, mystics keep their cool but schizophrenics end up in such rotten shape because they cling to their egos, refuse to accept their own insignificance, or some such sin. Let me say this: It seems more than likely that there’s a relationship between the two, but what sets them apart is far more a matter of degree and circumstance than wisdom and virtue.

  Most descriptions of mystic states, while they include feelings of timelessness, actually cover very little clock time. For the schizophrenic it’s a twenty-four-hour day, seven days a week. Realizing the transient nature of material things helps for a while, but it’s got its limits.

  There’s no denying that much of the content of my experience came from childhood experiences, my sexuality, my culture and situation within that culture, and so on. The content of hallucinations and fantasies is so fascinating it’s easy to overlook the question of how the frame of mind came about in the first place. People suffering from high fevers also sometimes suffer from hallucinations and delirious thinking, but I have yet to hear anyone suggest that understanding the content of such delirium could bring down the fever.

  There’s also no doubt that psychologically traumatic events often trigger off a schizophrenic episode. Just prior to my crackup, my parents were splitting up, the woman I had been virtually married to took off with another man, my father was becoming more and more outlandishly famous. But these things and much worse happen to lots of people who never go crazy, and I doubt very much that maturity, insight, or understanding is the missing ingredient. Working out these “traumas” had nothing to do with my recovery. To tell you the truth, Anita, all three issues and lots else still puzzle the hell out of me.

  So what is it that’s different about me and possibly you? The only decent answers I’ve been able to come up with are biochemical ones. Admittedly biochemistry is boring as mud next to psychology, religion, and politics, but the objective evidence for schizophrenia’s being biochemical is overwhelming. The literature I sent you via Headly is a good introduction if you’re interested in the details.

  Simply realizing that the problem is biochemical can be enormously helpful. That in itself can cut much of the pain and frustration for you and your friends. No one’s to blame. Psychological heroics are not required to improve things. But beyond this the biochemical model gives you many helpful clues about how to get better.

  As poetic as schizophrenia is, I know of very few cases in which poetry was of much help. It’s unlikely that any understanding you can reach, or love that anyone else can give you, will have much effect on how things go. As irrelevant as it may seem, what you eat, how much sleep you get, and similarly pedestrian factors are what matters.

  While schizophrenia makes keeping any sort of schedule difficult, try to eat and sleep regularly even if you don’t feel like it. I got it into my head that I had attained enlightenment that made me above eating and sleeping. That was no help. My diet before I cracked up probably contributed to my problems. I was more or less vegetarian-macrobiotic for economic-political-religious reasons all mixed in together. While some people thrive on such a diet, it’s a disaster for me and many schizophrenics. A high-protein diet with a minimum of starches and sugars is generally best, though there are exceptions. Simply be aware that what you eat or don’t eat can be terribly important and try to notice which foods are helpful and which are harmful.

  Coffee is nearly always bad for schizophrenics. Grass, hash, and especially the hallucinogens and speed can be real trouble. Good old alcohol, interestingly enough, can be helpful in a pinch. A good many alcoholics are probably schizophrenics who drink to keep schizophrenia away. Don’t depend on it too much, however, as there are better ways and you could end up with two problems instead of one.

  There is nothing permanent about any of these restrictions. As soon as you get yourself together, you can do whatever you like. I now have coffee occasionally, and could probably eat tons of sugar and smoke lots of dope with no worse effects than anyone else. But for now, give yourself every break you can.

  Some of the literature I’ve sent you deals with orthomolecular therapy. It’s a cumbersome phrase which simply means restoring normal brain chemistry with high doses of vitamins and minerals, dietary adjustments, and, more recently, allergy desensitization. This approach focuses on making “normal” behavior possible rather than the usual attempts to make “crazy” behavior impossible.

  Unfortunately, an up-to-date, comprehensive book on the subject does not exist. This is mostly attributable to rapid changes within the field and is usual for any new medical approach. But I think you would find these two books interesting:

  How to Live with Schizophrenia, by Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond (University Books, New Hyde Park, N. Y., 1966), may be hard to find but is well worth the effort. It is an excellent introduction to the field even though some of the technical information is out of date. The therapy available today has become considerably more sophisticated and individualized than the simple niacin and vitamin C regimen it describes.

  The Schizophrenias, Yours and Mine, by Carl C. Pfieffer (Pyramid Books, New York, 1970) contains some of the more recent work and is also very helpful.

  There are a number of organizations that may be helpful. There are chapters of the American Schizophrenia Association in many states. The Huxley Institute, 1114 First Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021, is an excellent source of information. Many of its pamphlets and reprints are quite good. The Institute will also be able to tell you what organizations are available in your area.

  More and more doctors and clinics are using the orthomolecular approach, but they are still, especially the good ones, few and far between. Most of them are overworked and are booked solid for months in advance. At the moment, finding good orthomolecular treatment is a matter of patience, luck, and hard work. I hope that this will change soon.

  Orthomolecular therapy is considered controversial by many doctors, but you have nothing to lose and possibly a great deal to gain by trying it. Many schizophrenics and many doctors have found vitamins highly effective, and the worst that critics have been able to say is that they don’t work. They don’t cost much, which means the worst you could do is waste a little money. The vitamins used are all water-soluble substances that your body is well accustomed to. The dangers are very limited, as you will simply piss away anything you don’t need.

  There are several problems with the vitamin approach, the principal ones being that it doesn’t work for every schizophrenic, and that with many of those it does work for the results are long in coming. I responded positively in a matter of weeks, and so do many others, but six months to a year for positive results is not uncommon. Many doctors involved with vitamin therapy freely admit that their treatment is far from what they wish it were, but it happens to be the best thing going at this point. Much more research is needed before we have any fas
t, easy answers to schizophrenia. Doctors using vitamin therapy don’t do so to the exclusion of other approaches. They are generally experts in drugs and other therapies and don’t hesitate to use them when called for.

  While I very likely owe my life to Thorazine, I doubt if I will ever develop much affection for it or similar tranquilizers. They act very quickly and are invaluable in many situations, but have numerous unpleasant side effects. I don’t see them as an attractive long-term solution but more as a way to buy time for the vitamin, dietary, and other less coercive approaches. The heavy drugs can make your illness somewhat less troublesome to yourself and a lot less troublesome to others, but what I like so much about the vitamin approach is its utter lack of coerciveness. If your body doesn’t feel the need for a vitamin, it simply gets rid of it. Things aren’t so simple with substances like Thorazine, which it’s unaccustomed to. There is no way the vitamins can be an infringement on your individuality. They simply make sure your body gets whatever raw materials it wants.

  Suicide is a very real danger. It may sometimes seem like a rational choice. I tried to kill myself a number of times, but was luckily so screwed up I couldn’t do a decent job of it. I had heard that schizophrenia was incurable, which is most definitely untrue. I would much prefer death over life with my head in such desperately bad shape. It’s very possible to recover, and you must try very hard not to lose sight of that.