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

Steven reflects that the first time Lori was hospitalized, he was 17; now, three-and-a-half years later, he is 20, tall and lanky after his growth spurt, and in college.

He originally enters Johns Hopkins as a political economics major, but quickly switches his major to psychology. Although he does not excel in his classes, he loves being able to discuss and pinpoint the reasons for peoples’ actions. He feels that all of his knowledge can be used to cure Lori, while his own fears about developing schizophrenia also do not subside.

However, when Steven goes to visit Lori during the winter after he has spent his junior year abroad, he witnesses an incident that makes him realize that he does not want to be a psychologist. While he makes note of Lori’s obsession with her status within the hospital and her obvious agitation, a different patient begins to have a crisis in the hallway outside of Lori’s room. Steven sees that the patient, a woman appearing to be in her 50s, has no shoes, which he knows is a sign that she is a flight risk. The orderlies threaten the woman with The Quiet Room, but this does not calm the situation. Soon, alarms are blaring and chaos descends as medical staff rush to the scene to help restrain the woman, who is screaming curses. Other patients become stressed, and Lori grows increasingly upset. Lori quickly pushes Steven out of the unit.

While on his way home, Steven realizes that the woman who caused the crisis in the unit could easily have been Lori—as Lori has clearly been treated in the same manner—and that also it could have been him. This realization leads Steven to the knowledge that he cannot fully face both the reality of Lori’s condition and the mental health facility, and that if someone is going to cure Lori, it will not be him.

Lori recounts that as she grew increasingly volatile and reckless at New York Hospital, the staff began to issue threats that she would be discharged to a state hospital if she could not bring herself to heel. She recalls:

[state hospitals] were grim and depressing. They were where people went forever. Every time they threatened me, I made an effort to control myself. But sooner or later the pressure built, the anger of the Voices rose, and off I would go again (161).

After Lori punches a window out during a fire drill, she is told that she will immediately be transferred to a state hospital. Although Lori has been pushing the New York Hospital staff to this resort throughout her stay, she suddenly panics: she realizes that, while she hates the hospital, it does prevent her from hurting herself and others. There is also a tiny glimmer deep inside of her that tells her that she does, indeed, need help—after she has spent so long fighting that fact.

Lori frantically tries to improve her behavior. She obeys all rules, attends meetings, takes her medication without protest, and silently bears the Voices without acting out against them. She eventually earns off-unit privileges, and then off-ground passes, with which she watches a movie and spends a weekend with her parents.

In the meantime, everyone (including Lori) is discussing where she should go next. Lori is, with a “dim self-awareness,” realizing and beginning to accept that she truly needs help for the first time (162). She is therefore going along with the ideas of the medical staff and her parents instead of fighting them. They settle on a day hospital program because it gives her a place to go during the day, in addition to therapy and general direction.

Lori chooses a halfway house called Futura House. Because Lori’s reputation is known, they impose the condition that Lori must spend two months out of the hospital on her most excellent behavior before being accepted. Lori is determined to earn early entry into the House, and, at five weeks out of the hospital, she is accepted.

Lori feels deeply conflicted. On one hand, she has begun to understand the importance of articulating her thoughts and feelings. On the other, she knows that if she ever were to act on anything the Voices told her, she will be banished to a state hospital. She also knows that all of the medical measures—the cold-packing, the various medications—are ultimately a form of control that is imposed upon her, over and above the control that she must exercise to keep appearances up and battle the Voices entirely on her own, or act upon them and be sent to a state hospital.

Futura House is actually composed of two apartments (one for men and one for women) in a building. It’s located in White Plains. There are nine women in Lori’s apartment. Although everyone has housekeeping duties, it is a careworn and often-messy space.

In contrast to the days she spent in the hospital, pacing, Lori must now learn how to structure and fill her days. Every day, she drives fifteen minutes to the day hospital. In the mornings there, she attends classes that she feels are nonsense, and within which she feels that she is being treated like a fool. After being fed there and ending the day at 1:45 p.m., she struggles to fill her time until 4:00 p.m., when Futura House locks its doors.

Lori rules out going back to work at Rye Hospital, due to the fact that too many New York Hospital staffers moonlight there. Also, the staff at Rye Hospital have been notified of Lori’s previous hospitalization, and they even sent her flowers. She doesn’t feel comfortable working there with everyone knowing about her condition, and she feels that she must put her “patient days” behind her (164).

Lori then begins to spend most of her free time in bed at her parents’ home. Her father is always at work during the hours she spends there, and when her mom sees her occasionally, Lori manages to charm her. However, once Lori’s social worker, Deanna, finds out, Lori is prohibited from going to her parents’ home, except on the weekends. She then spends most of her free time in the park, having nonsense conversations with “the bums, the crazy people, the bag ladies and druggies” (165). Once Lori tells Deanna about her time in the park, Deanna becomes very upset and bans Lori from going there as well. Together, they formulate a new plan: Lori will stay at St. Vincent’s Hospital until 3:00PM and then spend one hour at the library. However, this routine fills her with meaninglessness as she watches the end of soap operas she has no investment in at the hospital and then stares pointlessly at the pages of books at the library.

Lori senses a great chasm between herself and everyone else in the world, and grows deeply lonely. Her old friends, Lori Winters and Tara, are living their lives, her brother Mark is in Chicago working a new job, and Steven is in college. She even feels distant from her parents, who only come sparingly to Futura House to visit her. She feels that they are ashamed of her. Even her newly-resumed sessions with Dr. Rockland do nothing to ease her loneliness. She feels disconnected from her roommates at Futura House as well—they seem to have much higher-functioning lives than her—including expanded creative pursuits and jobs. She can only engage them with her most extreme stories from her hospital days, which is unfulfilling. She then turns to watching TV for hours in order to drown out the Voices while she sits and giggles unceasingly, and is therefore shunned by her housemates.

The only two people she can rely on are Deanna and Robin, who are “like [her] good angel and [her] bad angel” (167). Deanna, her social worker, is attractive, in her late thirties, and has an active, fulfilled life. Lori strives to be like her. She and Lori have a warm dynamic that Lori could never attain with Dr. Rockland, and Lori feels safe, unthreatened, unforced, emotionally supported, and able to open up while she speaks with Deanna. Deanna helps motivate Lori to get better.

In contrast, Robin—a tall woman with long blonde hair and a pockmarked face—is Lori’s fellow resident and is “clearly a bad influence on [Lori] (168). Although they have nothing in common except their diagnosis, schizoaffective disorder, they become inseparable. While she can be emotionally open with Robin, their relationship is still dysfunctional. Robin, who likes to shoplift, goads Lori into doing so as well. Lori also gives Robin her own prescribed Xanax pills in exchange for Robin doing Lori’s housekeeping chores for her. Lori understands that, despite her new self-awareness that she needs help to deal with her condition, she is still pushing the boundaries of her treatment.

The following summer, Lori steps over the line. She convinces herself that taking medicine means she is sick and that if she ceases taking it, she will become well. This, of course, does not work. Lori succumbs to the Voices when they tell her to use the thorns within a bouquet of roses to hurt herself. When hospital staffers find her bloodied among the flowers, the doctor tries to coax her into committing herself. She refuses and her father is called. He approves Lori’s involuntary commitment.

Lori physically fights her commitment, but in the end she is subdued and placed in St. Vincent’s inpatient program. There, with medication, she manages to calm herself down so much that she is released within nine days, and summarily returned to the day program. However, she is furious at her father for committing her, and at her mother for her refusal to visit her at St. Vincent’s even once.

Lori enrolls in an undergraduate nursing program at Pace University’s School of Nursing because her test scores are not high enough for the graduate program. She fights her way through classes with sheer will, earning a C+ average. However, her sense of calm is frayed and not genuine, as she is “holding back the Voices by dint of superhuman control” (171). She feels that they are about to come raging forward again.

Mark has been dating a young woman named Sally for almost a year, and they have decided to marry, but Mark has been consistently backing away from opportunities for her to meet his family. His parents have only managed to meet Sally after they flew to Chicago. However, with Thanksgiving approaching and their wedding announcement looming, Mark decides that Sally will come home with him for the holiday. Further, he realizes that the thing he has been running away from is Lori.

Mark is the middle child, and accustomed to thinking of Steven as the baby and Lori as perfection. Her stellar childhood and adolescence full of accomplishments and praise is what Mark, a depressed misfit during his early life, had always yearned for. He chose Tulane for college, a school uncharacteristically far from his hometown, given the proclivities of his peers, and a party school. There, he finally earned the academic achievements and acceptance of his new set of peers—and also stepped out of the shadow of being “Marvin’s son” or “Lori’s brother” (175). Mark now feels much more well-adjusted and content in his life.

However, at Thanksgiving, seeing a clearly-medicated, “lethargic...goal-less and aimless” Lori who must step away for frequent naps and whose physical appearance has jarringly deteriorated is very difficult for Mark (177). He must finally accept that the sister he placed on such a high pedestal for so long—including during her various hospitalizations—is truly sick; he cannot recognize the person standing in front of him as the same sister whom he idolized for so long.

When the family enacts their Thanksgiving tradition of going around the table and naming that which they are grateful for, Marvin emotionally states that everyone in the family is lucky to have each other, and that they must stick together no matter what. When Mark’s turn comes, he half-heartedly says “the right thing”: that he is “glad to have [his] sister home, and that she [is] feeling better” (178). However, he truly wishes he could say, “I can’t take this. Get me out of here” (178).

Lori’s control over herself and the Voices is wearing thin. She begins using cocaine—which she knows how to procure easily—again, and pining for Raymond. Raymond, however, never wanting to be anywhere near Lori’s illness, is evasive. She and Robin, who has her own access to drugs, share cocaine and marijuana at Futura House. They rendezvous late at night, when no one is around.

However, she and Robin grow too arrogant and do lines of cocaine on the dining room table. They are spotted and reported. Deanna coldly questions Lori, and Lori eventually confesses, angering Deanna. They are both suspended from the program for one week. Lori spends the week, tensely, with her parents, who are also angry and disappointed with her.

Futura House accepts her back under a zero-tolerance policy for drugs. Lori feels herself slipping and cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel: “I didn’t know how long I would last, and I didn’t know how to communicate my suffering to anyone else. My anger was returning. I was screaming for help, but the language I was speaking no one seemed to understand” (181). She begins playing a game with herself: she sneaks out at night and wanders the streets shoeless, weaving into traffic to cross streets. But she soon tires of this game. She smashes a window and punches her closet door. The staff tells her in no uncertain terms that if she has one more incident, she is out.

In her nursing program, she zooms through tests by choosing the answers that the Voices tell her to, and believes that she will pass. However, she fails the exams and also flatly walks out of others when she does not know the material. She flubs patient charts because she cannot quiet the Voices for long enough to actually take measurements, and pulls other dangerous stunts with patients. Her thoughts become chaotic and uncontrollable, preventing her from concentrating on anything, least of all class lectures. Pages 183-184 of this chapter contain a stream-of-consciousness rendition of Lori’s disorganized and taunting thoughts.

Robin, who watches Lori give away all of her possessions to Futura House residents, grows watchful and worried. Lori conceives of a suicide plan: she will go to her parents’ home during the day, when no one is home. She will park her car in the garage next to her mother’s car, close the garage door, and leave the ignition to both cars on. She will listen to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” while she dies.

The night before she is set to execute her plan, she takes ten tranquilizer pills because she cannot rest. Robin accosts her in the hallway as she staggers about, and helps her back to her room. Robin, crying, tells Lori that she loves her. Although Robin does not want to snitch, she ends up alerting the staff. The counselor on duty does not hesitate to call a cab to take Lori to the White Plains Hospital emergency room. Dr. Rockland and Marvin are also immediately there to receive her. In her sedated state, she entreats them to allow her to die. Then, she suddenly awakens—not in hell, as she halfway expected to, but (to her dismay) back in the hospital.