The first time he heard the voice, he was a child and it was a whisper.
“I thought it was just my imagination,” says Brian*, who first heard the unintelligible voice when he was 4 or 5. “It only happened a couple of times in my childhood that I can remember.”
Otherwise, life was mostly good. Brian had loving parents and good friends but struggled with school. He could do the work; he just didn’t want to. He quit when he was 16 and still in the seventh grade. “I didn’t find it challenging or interesting,” he says. So Brian moved on, working long and hard to make a living.
But the voices eventually came back. Over the years, they got louder and began to sound like his. They would tell him he was going to go to hell, or direct him to move a glass or sit a certain way. Amazingly, he mostly didn’t listen.
Brian was listening to his parents, who kept urging him to take the General Educational Development exam. Even with some goofing off, he managed to prepare for the high school equivalency test and pass it within five months. He was 21 and working as a security officer, a job that was a solid fit for his natural curiosity.
In the next few years, the voices grew impossible to ignore. He could no longer focus on work, so he started losing jobs. “I don’t know how I got through it. I give a lot of credit to my God. I wanted to go into a closet, real dark, and just stay there. It’s like I had a shove each and every time I felt like that to get out, do things, work.”
Bad got worse and Brian eventually became homeless. “It was scary. I didn’t know where I was going to get my next meal, where I was going to sleep.
It’s not something anybody should have to go through. I don’t see why it happens, but it does.”
He went to the Salvation Army, where once again he was able to put his life back together. The voices subsided and he went to work for the institution that gave him shelter. One day, a young woman in need came to the center. Four months later, they married. “It was one of those things, just love. That’s it,” he says.
Their lives were awesome for a time. “I was working. I was doing well, [no longer in] financial constraints.” They had cars, food in the refrigerator and money for vacation.
Then, in 2003, the couple had to move quickly. Brian thinks stress set off another episode. The voices started again... loud this time, and telling him to kill somebody.
“One morning, I was supposed to go to work. I told my wife I would be back that afternoon. I got in my truck and instead of making my usual right-hand turn to go to work, I took the left fork and went to the hospital.”
At the hospital, Brian, then in his late 20s, was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia.
A psychiatrist he had seen back when he was struggling with school had diagnosed depression. But Brian had stopped taking the antidepressants almost as soon as he started. A book about mental health his wife had given him made him suspect this second doctor was right.
“It was a relief,” he says of finally understanding why he heard voices ... why sometimes he would feel a presence standing behind him, even feel a hand on his shoulder. “I finally found a weapon I could use to beat those episodes back and have a clear mind.”
While many people with schizophrenia won’t take their medicine, Brian happily takes his. “I don’t want to go through what I have been through again. There are a lot of things I want to do. I want to work again. I want to take care of my family [without] my wife having the worry of all the bills on her shoulders.” While he’s grateful for a small disability check, he’d rather work.
Brian daily ponders how to make those dreams come true.
He steps into his own world sometimes, replete with Harry Potter books, when the realities of this one get to be a little too much.
In his world, the voices are not gone, but they are once again a whisper.
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* Last name withheld by request.
-Toni Baker
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