The Day the Voices Stopped: A Schizophrenic's Journey From Madness To Hope is a 2001 posthumous memoir by Ken Steele and Claire Berman about Steele's life with schizophrenia and his recovery after the invention of risperidone, an atypical antipsychotic. Published by Basic Books, The Day the Voices Stopped follows Steele as he moves from his hometown to New York City and eventually becomes a gay prostitute. Cycling in and out of homelessness, psychiatric hospitals, halfway houses, jobs, alcohol use, and suicide attempts across the United States, all the while with inner voices hectoring him, Steele eventually recovers to quiet the voices and form a get out the vote organization and a newspaper in NYC.
Reviewers noted how the book provided an insider's account of the disease, including accounts of psychiatric hospitals from a consumer perspective, and found his eventual recovery a compliment to the book's earlier grim tone. Publishers Weekly stated many readers will feel drained by the time he becomes a spokesman for the mentally ill, while the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education listed the book as one of six autobiographies to engage students of neuroscience, psychology, and general education for a neurobiology of disease course. A revised edition (paperback) was published in 2002.
Author and background
The authors of the book are Ken Steele (1948–2000), a mental health advocate and consumer, and Claire Berman, author of several books about family relations. Steele founded a get out the vote organization called the Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project, which registered 28,000 people to vote in New York City for the 1996 United States presidential election and operated nationally, and founded New York City Voices: A Consumer Journal for Mental Health, a newspaper with a circulation of 40,000 as of the book's publication. During her senate campaign, Hillary Clinton sought Steele's advice on mental health issues. He died in October 2000 from heart disease in Manhattan.[1][2]:front and back flap,ix–xii,219–220[3]
Basic Books published the hardcover first edition of The Day the Voices Stopped in 2001.[2]:frontpiece A revised edition (paperback) was published in 2002.[4]:frontpiece
Plot summary
Note: plot summary based on non-revised edition
The book is a memoir of Steele's life with schizophrenia, including his early life, hospitalizations, stints in homelessness and halfway houses, suicide attempts, his times as a gay prostitute, and his eventual recovery with the help of risperidone, an atypical antipsychotic. The Day the Voices Stopped begins with a forward by Stephen Goldfinger, a psychiatrist who met Steele in San Francisco in 1981 when Steele lived in an alleyway,[2]:ix and a prologue, in which Steele wins the 1999 Clifford W. Beers Award from the National Mental Health Association.[2]:xiii Steele starts to hear internal voices in October 1962, when he was fourteen years old; they instruct him to kill himself.[2]:1 Several months later, Steele unsuccessfully attempts to die by suicide three times in one night.[2]:10–11 He meets with his family physician, who diagnoses him with schizophrenia.[2]:11–12 Steele drops out of high school after he fails courses and skips classes.[2]:26–27
Manhattan Psychiatric Center (pictured), where Steele was hospitalized
He moves to NYC[2]:35 and becomes a gay prostitute for Ted, a man in his early thirties Steele met at Grand Central Station, and Ted's associate, Nick.[2]:43 Steele is hospitalized at Manhattan State Hospital[2]:52,59 after climbing a building to jump off of it.[2]:48–50 Several men gang rape Steele in a seclusion room at Harlem Valley State Hospital, to which he transfers after escaping Manhattan State but later returning.[2]:75,80
He cycles between hospitals and homelessness: from Harlem Valley to Manhattan State,[2]:87 to homeless, to Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts,[2]:90–92 to homeless, to Westborough State Hospital. At Westborough, he describes himself as "K. Shannon Steele", a name that would he would use officially from then on.[2]:95–97 He leaves his job and home at a halfway house after eight months when a new admission attacks a pregnant nurse he liked, leaving her in critical condition and her baby killed.[2]:104–105
Steele meets Karl, a man in his early thirties, at a gay nightclub (the Napoleon Club) in Chicago.[2]:106–107 Karl leaves him in Denver and kills himself.[2]:109–110,113 Steele leaves his therapist and halfway house at Fort Logan Mental Health Center due to the voices.[2]:115 From Pueblo State Hospital,[2]:116 Steele returns home to his parents and younger brother,[2]:122–123 but attempts suicide by ingesting "a lot" of Valium, Librium, and "some" Thorazine with alcohol.[2]:130 He blacks out and police arrest him for lewd act, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and breaking the peace; his father bails him out of jail.[2]:130–131 In Hartford, Connecticut, Steele is committed at Norwich State Hospital, where he remains for two years.[2]:133–134
Steele takes a bus to San Francisco, where he intends to jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge.[2]:135 He checks in to Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center after telling a workmate in San Francisco about his plan to kill himself; upon discharge, Steele volunteers for Dianne Feinstein, who is running for mayor of the city.[2]:140–142 He joins the Citywide Alcoholism Advisory Board (CAAB) from Alcoholics Anonymous,[2]:143–144,147 though he resigns from CAAB due to paranoia that others will discover his lies about his background (Steele claimed he had business degrees from Harvard University). He quits his job,[2]:148 and is admitted to San Francisco General Hospital after meeting Goldfinger in 1981.[2]:150
Steele elopes from the day program to which San Francisco General released him[2]:152–154 and cycles through Loma Linda Medical Center,[2]:155 to a halfway house, to another hospital, which manumits him after his Medi-Cal coverage ends.[2]:157 Hawaii governor George Ariyoshi appoints him as the first consumer on the State Council on Mental Health following another hospitalization and halfway house after Steele took a flight to the state.[2]:158–160 His fear of others discovering his lies leads him to return to NYC, where he climbs a tall building and attempts to jump off. He is committed to Manhattan State (now Manhattan Psychiatric Center).[2]:161–163
Steele applies for Supplemental Security Income to "financially support the move to housing". He moves on to a community rehabilitation program and progresses to an apartment (living with a workmate) in Park Slope, Brooklyn,[2]:172–173,181 later beginning therapy with Dr. Rita Seiden.[2]:187 In August 1994, a doctor prescribes risperidone for Steele: the voices stop for him on May 3, 1995.[2]:193,196 He begins a voter registration project for the mentally ill, the Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project, which operated in thirty-six states as of the book's publication.[2]:194,197 Steele takes over a newsletter at the mental health center to which he goes and renames it New York City Voices: A Consumer Journal for Mental Health; at the time of the book's publication, it had a circulation of 40,000.[2]:219–220 The book concludes with an afterward by Steele, with "the good news" sections describing issues such as the Americans with Disabilities Act contrasted with "but" sections describing issues remaining within the community.[2]:241–243
Reception
The Day the Voices Stopped was reviewed in a number of publications. In the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, Phyllis Solomon stated the book offered an insider's perspective on schizophrenia, while The Outsider by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer offered just that, an outsider's perspective on the disease. Solomon notes overlaps between the two books include being "abandoned by their families, out of ignorance and an inability to cope, with no intended malice; numerous rehospitalizations, periods of homelessness, frequent police encounters, and self-medicating with alcohol". She called Steele's recovery story inspirational.[5] In the journal Beyond Behavior, former Kansas state legislator Tom Thompson called the author's insights as a consumer into psychiatric hospitals very compelling.[6]
Publishers Weekly stated many readers will feel drained by the time he becomes a spokesman for the mentally ill.[7] Similarly, in Psychiatric Services, Jeffrey L. Geller noted that Steele's life was a recurrent cycle with no positive advancement until the end of his life.[1]Kirkus Reviews wrote when the risperidone took his voices away was a "remarkably powerful moment in the story, written with a combination of awe, appreciation, and grace--the perfect antidote to the grim, urgent tone of the earlier pages".[8] Geller, however, questions the quality of psychotherapy and psychosocial rehabilitation in Steele's life prior to the medication taking effect as a factor for his late recovery.[1] Writing for Booklist, William Beatty stated "[h]is account of the day the voices stopped will surely remain with everyone who reads it, and the whole book should inform and affect other victims of severe mental illness and their families".[9]
In the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Palissery et al. (2018) list The Day the Voices Stopped as one of six autobiographies to engage students of neuroscience, psychology, and general education for a neurobiology of disease course. The authors called the book "the one [...] that we feel best accomplishes our goals in teaching with memoirs and realistic fiction: helping students see a human side to unfamiliar or misunderstood diseases and motivating them to learn more about the biology of the disorders we teach".[10] The book was also reviewed in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by Theodore A. Petti.[11]
1 2 3 Geller, Jeffrey L. (October 1, 2001). "The Day the Voices Stopped: A Schizophrenic's Journey From Madness to Hope". Psychiatric Services. 52 (10): 1400. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.52.10.1400.
↑ Steele, Kenneth; Berman, Claire (2002) [2001]. The Day the Voices Stopped: A Schizophrenic's Journey From Madness To Hope (reviseded.). Basic Books. ISBN978-0-465-08227-8.
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