Schizophrenia, the Family and... Video Transcript

Participants

, Joseph Battaglia MD, Nathaniel Lachenmeye , Marty Moss-Coane , Anthony Salerno PhD

Summary

With the distorted understanding that comes with schizophrenia comes drastic changes in relationships with other people, from close friends to people on the street. Join our panel of experts, along with Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, author of The Outsider: A Journey into My Father's Struggle with Madness, as they discuss the impact of schizophrenia on family, friends and society.

Webcast Transcript

MARTY MOSS-COANE: I'm Marty Moss-Coane. Welcome to our webcast. Schizophrenia can be a devastating disease that warps your understanding of the world and your place in it. With this comes a distortion of your relationships with other people, from your closest friends to people you pass on the street. For families, the pain and confusion of schizophrenia can be exhausting and isolating. On our webcast today, the impact of schizophrenia on family friends and society.

Joining us today is Nathaniel Lachenmeyer. Nathaniel's father, Charles Lachenmeyer, was one of the homeless suffering from schizophrenia. For some time he lived a middle-class life with his wife, son, with a good job and a comfortable home. Inside, though, he was losing his grip on reality. In 1981, Charles and his wife divorced, and he moved out, traveling from city to city, living on the streets, even spending time in psychiatric hospitals, where he was finally diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. Even though Nathaniel Lachenmeyer had no face-to-face contact with his father through those years, the fact of his father's diagnosis wore on him and on his family. He has written a book about his father called "The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Madness," and he joins us on our webcast. Nice to have you here.

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: Thank you.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: Our other guests are Dr. Joseph Battaglia, clinical director of the Bronx Psychiatric Center. Welcome. And our third guest is Dr. Anthony Salerno, director of rehabilitation services at Rockland Psychiatric Center in New York. Nice to have you with us as well.

Nathaniel, I'd like to begin with you because you write a lot about the relationship that you had with your father through correspondence. Once he left the family, he really kept in touch with you through his letters. What was he trying to say to you? What do you think he was trying to do?

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: It was very explicit was he was trying to do. With me, he was really, even under the burden of his disorder, trying to maintain a father-son relationship. His letters, which came often, were intermittently parental. They were sort of advice, and very good advice. I think that he was drawing from his own experiences. But also, in between that, there would be delusional references to the government, and one of the problems was also that he included my mother in the scope of the conspiracy, which presented obvious problems for me growing up, but also further limited his ability to get help from people.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: What did you write back to him? You didn't include your correspondence in there. Did you want a father relationship with him?

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: Yeah. I did, although it was mitigated by my limited ability to understand what was happening to him. I would respond probably to every third letter. There was one other type of interaction that was sort of more dramatic and more damning in terms of our relationship. He would leave messages all the time on the family answering machine. Some of the messages would be to me, some would be to my mother. But many -- he believed by that point, as a function of his delusional system, that whatever he said into this machine was immediately transcribed and disseminated by the FBI and the CIA. It was a strange thing.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: At one point he did write you a letter and you wrote him back, essentially cutting off contact with your father. Why did you do that?

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: I did that, ironically, at one of the more stable points in his life.