The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

Lori is happy to be home. She reveals that she felt suffocated by the hospital staff’s assertions that she was sick, and that she actually feels that there is nothing wrong with her. The revolving door of varying diagnoses and prescriptions—with the eventual consensus of schizophrenia or manic-depression, too—make her feel like her diagnosis was merely a catch-all and a phony designation. She feels stigmatized by the words “psychotic” and “hallucinations.” She believes that the voices in her head are real, and that the doctors’ constant pronouncements that they are not are counterproductive to curing her, which is why she wanted to leave the hospital so badly while she was there.

However, her life outside of the hospital—her job, her friends, her independence—is long gone. Her medications make her simultaneously fatigued and antsy, and she is unsure about how to interact with people outside of a patient-doctor dynamic. She does not even wish to see Lori Winters, whose youthful beauty reminds Lori of her own shortcomings. Lori’s childhood friend, Gail Kobre, marries and, contrary to the girls’ earlier plans, Lori is not her maid of honor. Both of her brothers, too, have moved on with their own lives, and the 6:30-sharp family dinners—consisting now only of Lori, her parents, and heavy silences—are nowhere near what they used to be.