My American Life by Price M. Cobbs M.D

Author:Price M. Cobbs, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ATRIA BOOKS
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

One day during the summer of my second year at Meharry, I was back in California on vacation. I was driving with my sister, Marcelyn, up the San Joaquin Valley to San Francisco, to inquire about a possible internship at San Francisco General Hospital. As we were driving, Marcelyn suddenly began acting in a way that I had never seen before. She was hearing voices, responding to them out loud, as though suddenly she were in some place other than the car in which we were riding. I drove on, glancing at her, trying not to be panicked by her behavior as she appeared to be having a complete psychotic episode. She acted as if I was not there. Even when I spoke. When I spoke to her, she did not respond. The voices in her mind were stronger than mine, and she lost herself to them.

We came up on a drive-in hamburger joint off the highway where I was able to stop the car. We were near the town of Modesto on Highway 99. But fundamentally we were isolated in the middle of nowhere. The San Joaquin Valley was entirely agricultural then, and I did not know what to do. I sat quietly and watched my own emotions become a riot of fear and waited for Marcelyn to come back to herself. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

Once she settled down, we set out again. But the shock of the event, and the worry that another would follow, continued to frighten me as we drove on toward San Francisco.

Marcelyn was about thirty years old and then a teacher in Los Angeles. I had not been with her much since high school, having visited with her only a few times. After one semester at UCLA, she transferred to Howard and graduated there. She had been married and divorced during that period and living in Washington, D.C. We had not discussed a great deal about any of those experiences. Really, we hadn’t shared much of our emotional lives with each other at all. When we arrived in San Francisco, I phoned my mother and father, to tell them what had happened. They were of course alarmed and instructed me to get Marcelyn back to L.A. immediately.

For the next thirty years or so Marcelyn was in and out of the hospital. This initial episode, and others that followed, set up all kinds of preoccupations and challenges for me. Why was this happening? Where had her troubles come from? In those early years of her affliction, there were many theories that schizophrenia followed family lines, and there was much speculation about the influence of parents, particularly mothers, on schizophrenic children.

This was over fifty years ago, when such events were much less well understood than now. At the time a prevailing theory held that the disorder was caused by significant family malfunction or might even be genetic. I worried about this as, I am sure, my parents did. Such a thing could be a very ominous cloud hanging over you and your family.

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