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To the Editor:

My name is Luo Jing. You can call me Nori. I'm a Chinese girl. I'm 18. I'm so glad that I can meet everyone of you.

Just now, I read your website, which took me a lot of time to find. But after I found it, I felt happy because I can communicate with the people who I've known from the book The Day the Voices Stopped.

I read Ken Steele's book at the age of seventeen. At that time I was in grade three of senior middle school in Sichuan Province in China. This year is really important to me because I want to go to a good university to study. But I'm not a very clever girl, so I was always self-abased and also because I'm a fat and ugly girl and often been laughed at…I even lost the hope of living.

Luckily, I've read Ken's book! I was moved so much by him, I felt shy because Ken had overcome more hard difficulties! After I read his book, I found the hope and the courage to go on living again! I really feel thankful to him! At the same time, I think his death is a big loss for this world, but I'm sure he will live forever in our hearts!

I've read all of your memories to him in your articles. I can see how much you are missing him and I hope he can feel how I am too.

In fact, I want to join you so much! But now I'm in an economics college and I'm studying auditing. Although I have no chance to study mental healthcare [in college], I will study it by myself! Then I hope one day I can come and join you!

At last, I'm afraid I have to say sorry to you because my English is not good. Perhaps I've made much mistakes in this letter, but I really want to tell my opinion to you!

Thanks for reading my letter!

Nori Sichuan Province, China

Those Little Town Blues

To the Editors: I live in a small town (population 10,000) and it was nice to actually talk to someone who had been through similar events as me. I don't get to do much of that around here. I joined NAMI Roanoke Valley back in 2003 but sadly I'm working second shift right now. I work at a factory where they make summer's eve and enema. They even have a mascot that shows up at events around the world shaped like an enema bottle. He had to quit recently though because he was getting into crack.

I start a new job next week that will not be manual labor, thank goodness, and it pays almost twice as much.

I still get NYC Voices and I really appreciate it because there's nothing like that around here. I hope someday that Roanoke and the surrounding areas will have clubhouses and such. I would love to help out on the psychiatric wards as a volunteer, but they are about an hour away.

When I lived in El Paso they had a Schizophrenics Anonymous chapter that I went to, although in this area it would be hard to be anonymous. I'm doing really well nowadays. About the only thing that I have left of the schizophrenia are the negative symptoms. I'm still married and we have a two-year-old...beagle.

Adam Babb Roanoke, Virginia



Consumers as Employees Deserve More Respect

To the Editors: When I worked, I didn't get in trouble for anything I did but I lost my job because I just could not get to work because I was so depressed. I think I was lucky there that people didn't all know I was mentally ill (although the person who hired me knew) and no one treated me as if I was different. When I was a volunteer, on the other hand, the social workers were constantly treating consumer-volunteers as if they were subnormal and they accused me of being symptomatic when I was following a social worker's orders but the thing we were doing turned out badly-the social worker didn't want to second-guess her own judgment and accused me of being manic when I was not at all. I have found that people are more judgmental and accusatory to consumers in consumer-jobs and often accuse the consumer-worker of acting mentally ill, whereas in real jobs (like jobs where you aren't hired as a consumer) you are treated with much more respect. It should be the opposite of course-consumers deserve extra help when they are trying to work-but in my experience they get extra criticism more often.

On the other hand, I haven't been able to work reliably at all…I think maybe even if I hadn't been ill I would have had trouble going to an office on a regular schedule. I can do jobs for people (on my own time) but I am bad at showing up every day on time.

Millie Niss New York, New York



The Ecstasy is in the Suffering

To the Editors: I am a gay man. I am looking for people who have known lives of extreme suffering through almost constant melancholy (depression) and in whom (perhaps in their late 30s or early 40s, on a certain day, over a certain number of hours) the inner shadow or darkness, which had been seen by the mind's eye, deepened, blackened and brightened. So what is now being seen is a bright blackness or a blackness that shines.

Such people have entered the negredo (a cycle of even more intense suffering) and…if it is written, will know Divine Madness or the Second Birth or Birth Into Eternity in body vessel and in this world. A light will appear.

These people have been experiencing for most of their lives a mental pain of such unbearable intensity that the thought of death has never been long absent from their minds. They must never, ever, ever, ever give up.

These people are experiencing a loneliness which would fill the universe if it could. These people are locked into a state of anger which requires constant effort to tolerate and which makes finishing tasks inwardly explosively difficult. This anger is fed by the awareness, always present, that one cannot will this suffering away…This is truly a dark night of the soul where the weight of being presses down crushingly, so that one cannot go on, one goes on, one cannot go on, one goes on.... I leave it to such people to tell us what this condition does to your concentration, memory, control over one's thoughts, physical health, etc.

These people will come to have an understanding of this thought: "in the suffering is the ecstasy." They will also have an understanding of the following: "if the darkness isn't there, the candle isn't lit." I came by this way. The light made its appearance near the beginning of October 1981.

To learn more about Leland or to contact him, you may visit his website www.eonymous.com. Leland Mellott Mount Vernon, Washington



There is no Cure for Schizophrenia

To the Editors: I am writing in response to Meera Popkin's article in the Summer 2005 issue of New York City Voices.

Consumers like Ms. Popkin who are both full of denial and hope always fill me with a pang of remorse and a twinge of sadness. I too as a schizophrenic had a period of time in my life when I swore I was "cured" because I was functioning at an optimal level. I was working full-time at a major conglomerate and was attending the most prestigious university in New York City, an Ivy League institution where I was obtaining my Masters degree. In addition to this I had just purchased my first home all by myself at the age of 32 and was very active in the film community. I also had a very active social life.

Needless to say my head was in a very good space...until something as small as a little round pill that I stopped taking made my world come crashing down and made my symptoms come back.

I say to Ms. Popkin that I believe that you are very happy, but I think that if you think you are completely cured you are confused. We are not cured from illnesses like schizophrenia. The sad truth is that we manage them, some of us better than others. If we did not take our meds, then unfortunately our symptoms would come crashing back into our lives.

Patrice Bradshaw Brooklyn, New York



Be Your Own Doctor and Therapist

To the Editor: I was particularly impressed by a letter to the editor in the winter 2006 edition from Jerome Frank and am prompted to write this letter as a response to it.

I have met Jerome…we belong to the same psychosocial club. I want to recount some of my experiences over the almost 40 years of psychiatry that supports Jerome's letter. I too do not think much of therapy. Here are the reason's I agree with Jerome.

When the first psychiatrist pronounced me a paranoid schizophrenic, I felt like I had been told I had incurable cancer and the news shot through me like a bullet. The injections [gave me] the worst experience I have ever had in my life…we are all guinea pigs to the pharmaceutical drug companies and their stooges, the psychiatrists, whom they brainwash with news of the latest expensive drugs they invent through their literature and salespersons.

I saw a number of psychiatrists including one who I stayed with for a dozen years in private therapy and in group therapy…who gave me medication…I concluded after 12 years with him, that it had been done not a bit of good. No one got transformed, but I had become hooked on the psychotropic medications and dependent on talk therapy…essentially wasting my time and my life in it. I let the Medicaid psychiatrists use me as a guinea pig for many of the drugs that newly came out. Then they gave me other drugs to counter the side effects, which gave me even more side effects.

Through all these things that would make even Job hate God, I have managed to get off the atypical psychotropic drugs my shrink was prescribing…and I don't feel any the worse for it. Different, yes, but not in any way sicker!

About nine months ago my therapist got sick and left practice and I never replaced her, so I am not seeing a therapist anymore and I am no worse off in life. I have come to the conclusion that psychiatry…is the biggest rip-off of Western civilization. Psychiatrists and especially the pharmaceutical companies are getting rich off of diagnosing people as mentally ill…as in Thomas Szasz's The Psychiatric State and The Myth of Mental Illness. My friends, we are all on our own. Life is what you make of it. There is no one who can give you the answers that are unique only to you. There is no book you can read (including the Bible), no religion or philosophy to absolutely turn to. Look inward, friends. Be a light unto yourselves. How you cope with your suffering should be up to you no matter how weird or crazy it may seem to anyone else….Psychiatry and its medications are a crutch. Even my present psychiatrist admitted that to me. I meditate for peace…and think of God and talk to Him often.