“When Quietness Came: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey
with Schizophrenia”

by Erin Hawkes
Excerpt contributed by Bridgeross Communications Publishing

When Quietness Came is the true story of a young woman studying neuroscience who, in her final undergraduate year, has a psychotic break, attempts suicide and ends up in hospital. Her struggles to get well and to pursue her PhD are described in this book.

Her story is geared to people from a variety of backgrounds. As a neuroscientist, Erin reaches out to the medical community who need to hear this side of the patient. As a schizophrenic, she reaches out to others struggling with this disorder, hoping to draw alongside and offer empathy and hope. Finally, she wants the general public, family and friends of people with schizophrenia to be better able to understand and sympathize with those afflicted.

The following excerpt appears in her book and was an article that Erin wrote for the world- renowned academic schizophrenia publication “Schizophrenia Bulletin”;

Being Rational

I was awash in a sea of irrationality. The Voices swirled around me, teaching me their Wisdom. Their Wisdom was of the Deep Meaning and I struggled to understand. They told me their secrets and insights, piece by piece. Slowly, I was beginning to make sense of it all. It was no delusion, I knew – in contrast to what the doctors said.

“Erin, you are a scientist,” they’d begin. “You are intelligent, rational. Tell me, then, how can you believe that there are rats inside your brain? They’re just plain too big. Besides, how could they get in?”

They were right. About my being intelligent, I mean; I was, after all, a graduate student in the Neuroscience program at the University of British Columbia. But how could they relate that rationality to the logic of the Deep Meaning? For it was due to the Deep Meaning that the rats had infiltrated my system, and were inhabiting my brain. They gnawed relentlessly on my neurons, causing massive degeneration. This was particularly upsetting to me, as I depended on a sharp mind for my work in Neuroscience. They spent significant periods of time-consuming brain matter in the occipital lobe of my brain. I knew, from my studies, that this was the primary visual cortex. And yet, I experienced no visual deficits.

Obviously, I realized, I had a very unique brain: I was able to regenerate large sections of my central nervous system – and to do so extremely quickly. I relaxed a bit, but not entirely. Surely no good could come of having rats feed on my brain cells. So I sought means of ridding my body of them. I bled them out through self-cutting and banging my head until the skin broke, bloody. Continually, I kept my brain active, electrocuting the rats that happened to be feasting on the activated neurons.

“As a neuroscientist, how can you believe all this?” the doctors queried.
“Because it is all of the Deep Meaning.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. It’s irrational. You surely know that.”
“Because,” I replied deliberately, as if talking to a child.
“The Deep Meaning transcends scientific logic.”

How else could it be true? I did know all the logical limitations of my ideas, but I was also receiving such intense messages that the rats and my regenerating brain were also true. So I rationally concluded that the one supersedes the other. Still, I could use some of my scientific understanding to deal with that which the Deep Meaning imposed on me. Like the electrocution: I knew that when neurons are activated, they transmit signals using electrical current. I therefore reasoned that, since the rats were so small, on the order of magnitude of a neuron, they would experience the electricity as violent and perhaps fatal.

My understanding of my regenerating brain was similarly based on biological knowledge. If function, such as sight, is not impaired despite significant cell loss, there are two possible explanations: remaining cells may compensate for the damage, or there is rapid regeneration. My logical mind gave me these possibilities and then the Deep Meaning proceeded to inform me, which was true. I thus learned that I was part of a Great Experiment.

Since no other case of such capacities for regeneration in the brain are known in the scientific community, there would be considerable interest in studying mine.

Scientifically, I knew that the proper examination of my abilities was of immense value, and therefore did not object to the more bothersome aspects of the Great Experiment – like a diet restricted to foods with Deep Meaning such as carrots (a car rots the environment), cereal (to “c” (see) what is real), or cookies that, at different coffee shops, are alternatively known as “Morning Madness” or “Morning Glory” (what some – i.e. doctors – called my madness was actually my glory).

The rats weren’t the only thing that bothered me. My neighbour across the alley spied continually on me. He wanted to kill me, I learned from the Voices and the Deep Meaning. Scared, I put up some dark curtains. I slept well that night but awoke to a terrifying truth: the night before, he had entered my room and installed a tracking devise into my abdomen. Now he could track me everywhere; there was no more hiding.

The doctors latched onto this story, eager to show me the irrationality of it all. How could he have gotten in? My door and windows had been locked and there was no sign of tampering. I answered from the Deep Meaning that had revealed it to me.

“He atomized himself.”
“Atomized?”
“Yes. You know – when you dismantle something into its component atoms, pass these tiny pieces through the barrier, and reassemble them again on the other side.”
Didn’t physics have some similar concepts?
“And the tracker in your abdomen?”
“Atomization again. Otherwise there’d be an incision,” I reasoned, rational. But the doctors concluded differently.

Delusion and paranoia were their words, their explanations.
And there are many other such stories. Each time, I would be able to evaluate things from two perspectives: my scientific logic and the explanation from the Deep Meaning. As the doctors would say, these corresponded to rationality and irrationality, respectively. But, given the input I had from Voices (auditory hallucinations, the doctors say) and the immense feelings of truth from the Deep Meaning, I was in fact fighting to preserve my rationality in the face of the irrational.

I valued my logical mind so dearly that when it began to be challenged by schizophrenic hallucinations, delusions, and disorders of the ability to ascribe meaningfulness, I used everything available to me to try and figure out what were the most rational explanations. I craved rationality, and rationality to me was taking all evidence and making conclusions. Even if they didn’t conform to everyone else’s ideas of what is rational, I was fighting to maintain, at the very least, the integrity of my own rationality.

Anti-psychotic medication has helped to distance me from the Voices and the Deep Meaning. While I never quite give up these as irrational, I am aware that they influence my ideas of, and my actions in response to, rationality.

I have come to believe that in order to truly understand others, be they schizophrenic or otherwise, we must not only discover their thoughts, feelings, and actions but we must look to understand how they connect these into a coherent structure, and to recognize that no matter what this structure looks like, it is the product of a rational mind.”

Erin has been featured in newspapers and radio in both the US and Canada, writes a regular column for the Huffington Post and has written for the Tyee and the National Post.

To read more, you can read samples online at: www.bridgeross.com

It is also available in e-book formats for Kindle, Kobo, Nook and via the Apple I-book store and Google Play.  Hard copies available at Chapters/Indigo, Barnes and Noble as well as from any other bookseller with titles from Ingram Publishers.

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