The Cliffs of Schizophrenia: A Mother and Son Perspective

By Jake McCook and Laurette McCook

"The Cliffs of Schizophrenia"

At the age of 30, Jake found himself hospitalized, grappling with the weight of anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Soon, he received the life-altering diagnosis of schizophrenia. In this intimate and illuminating book, you are invited into Jake's world, a world he shares with his mother, Laurette, through alternating chapters written in an accessible and larger font for clarity and simplicity.

As you journey through the pages, you will witness the inner workings of Jake's mind, at times clouded by the darkest shadows of paranoia. With remarkable insight and humor, Jake opens up his thoughts, offering readers a window into the complexities of schizophrenia. Laurette, with a mother's wisdom, adds her perspective, striving to be the beacon of logic that might prevent her son from plummeting into the abyss.

Together, they paint a vivid portrait of the modern challenges surrounding mental health, seen through the filters of uncertainty and shades of gray. Yet, "The Cliffs of Schizophrenia" is not merely a tale of struggle; it is a testament to resilience and the enduring hope for a brighter future. For those bound by this brain disease or standing steadfast as loving caregivers, this book is an indispensable bedside companion—a source of comfort and a reminder that you are never alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350925975

Book preview

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The Cliffs of Schizophrenia

Jake & Laurette McCook

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN 979-8-35092-596-8

eBook ISBN 979-8-35092-597-5

I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff, I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Contents

The Disorder

Untethered

To The Reader

Introduction

In the Beginning

For Parents

Movie Making for the Soul

Expression of the Soul

A Taste for Insanity

Ode to Depakote

Topamax

Pocketing Pills

I Love My Family

And Your Family Loves You Too!

Self-Medicating

Meds and Booze

Full Metal Jacket

First Step into the Abyss

Lucid Dreaming

Phantoms, Ghosts, and Aliens, Oh My!

Brain Waves and Vague Memories

DESA and the Blue Glasses

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS What Is My Purpose?

What Is Your Purpose?

Cabaret

Homework Exercise

Deadly Orange Juice

Orange Juice and Dad

Loving Kindness Meditation

To Let Go or Not to Let Go

Moving Out

To Control or Not to Control

Moving Out (Last Word)

Selective Paranoia

Whistling

Just Whistle It Away

The Girl and Glendale

A Mother’s Nightmare

The Girl and Glendale A Last Thought

Days of Thunder

Shame

Opposite Action

My First Hospitalization

Snake Pit

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Subconscious Eloquence

On the Ledge

Seeking Yoda

Distraction Is the Key

Escape

Merry Christmas, UCLA

High School and Persistence

Looking for Jake

Executed

End of the Line

Battle Weary

Disneyland

Requiem for Fantasyland

Sacramento

Beer Brawl

Promises and the Emo Girl

Babies for Sale

Crazy Pills

Jackson Pollock Inspiration

The Truman Show

Suspicion

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Super Bowl

Free Thoughts

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Yawn

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS War Zone

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Walking Away

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Haircut Challenge

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Paranoia

Candle

Triggers that Flicker

Starting Over

Mysterious Musings

Rainy Day Thoughts

Jake’s Choice

Poisonous Loop and the Maximum Drunk

Zero Credibility and the Weed

Sinister Blood Draw

Heaven Is What?

Art in Times of COVID

Adrift on a Sea of Uncertainty COVID-19 and Chaos

Riots and COVID-19

Losing Ground

Ambivalence

Hope and Faith

Gathered Thoughts

Helpful Information

BIO

A Tribute to Dr Mark DeAntonio

The Disorder

Jake

You stop everything to decode yourself.

The world stops for you to slow down.

Everyone is polite. Everyone is still.

You break yourself down until there is nothing left,

Until nothing makes sense.

You are exhausted. You are cornered.

Everyone holds back their frayed emotions as they play

verbal ping-pong with you for the thousandth time.

You are angry. You are empathetic.

You love them, and they love you.

Their lies are the foundation of your truth, the building blocks

of your stunted emotions.

Untethered

Mom

His clean-shaven face radiates the ragged goodness of a ten-year-old boy, but late afternoon light flickers its epiphany of manhood, and my eyes sting with all that is lost. Purity of baby skin and clear-eyed innocence, a subterranean beast to haunt my days and nights.

Messages on trucks and T-shirts and the Nightly News, a searing reality of delusion that perches uneasily upon a fragile surface. His face gazing back at me through staircase railing as he sits silently seeking answers to riddles no mother should have to answer.

Silent and useless, there is palpable pain that runs like umbilical cord between us wearily pumping a haunting refrain of maternal promises unfulfilled. Earthbound, while he soars to places, I cannot follow. Sweet eyes that linger a moment, then are gone.

Clarity is hope and hope is . . . what?

To The Reader

Jake

I want this book to be a safe haven for you, a place to be open and honest about your own issues with schizophrenia. Find a cozy spot, sit with your worries, and let this book swallow them up and temporarily rid you of them. A transference. A swapping of stories for stories. I’ll take yours in my hands and hold them for a short while, as you read mine. I hope this will give you some relief.

Introduction

Mom

Are dinosaurs real? My twenty-eight-year-old son appeared in the room where I was folding laundry. He drew in a labored breath. It seemed as though he might spontaneously combust right there in front of me, so his tight exhale came as a relief for both of us.

Hey, kiddo, what a nice surprise. What’s up? His visit was unexpected, as it was only mid-day and he’d not been home much since the move to his new apartment in Burbank the previous month. Something felt amiss. His lanky frame stooped forward; his hands jammed into his pockets.

The dinosaurs . . . I mean, I’m not sure, he whispered, his eyes darted right to see if anyone else was in the room.

Instinct slowed me. Sure, honey, they’re . . . they were very real. He didn’t speak then, so I continued. Right? I mean you’ve seen so many cartoons and Jurassic Park type movies; it’s probably easy to forget that you learned about dinosaurs in school. I watched him draw in another breath while nodding his head. He turned away from me and clicked on the television. The moment passed quickly.

I have no recollection of how I processed that. I guess I didn’t. A door had slammed shut in my head, and I simply blocked the dark thing that had announced its presence as a mere flicker of fear on my son’s face. Those early years were filled with bits and pieces of abstract information that would come and go. It was a clue that tweaked my logic and yet . . . I had to let it go.

Looking back, twelve years is a long road—an information overload on a journey both terrifying and bewildering, but as in any crisis, life comes at you one day at a time so as not to break you all at once. It took years for Jake to be properly diagnosed and medicated. Schizophrenia is a brain disease. It has taken so much from all of us, and recently it occurred to me that writing a book might be the answer. He’d always had a way with words and of uniquely expressing his ideas . . . but could he stay focused on a project these days, long enough to see it through? And could dredging up the past open the Pandora’s box of paranoia that dogs Jake every moment of the day and night? This book was his idea, the concept of schizophrenia from a family perspective, a journal moving back and forth between mother and son. He felt it should be written in brief chapters so as not to overwhelm a reader who has symptoms like his. This would be a comfort food for those lonely moments when you feel different from everyone else on the planet.

The writing process was cathartic for Jake, as well as disruptive, in that reliving his experiences did indeed kick off some pretty substantial waves of depression and paranoia. Nevertheless, he persevered, saying that he wanted and needed to keep writing to get his story out there. It is this bravery I am in awe of every day.

During the time it took to finish this book, all of us have gone through a great deal: political unrest, a worldwide pandemic, and environmental chaos. To the average person, we are shaken . . . but for those with mental illness, it is a minefield of triggers to the dark side. With so much yet unanswered in the quest to find peace in a brain that is at war within itself, we journey on together ever seeking the path that will bring mental illness out of the dark ages and into the light. Oh, we’re waking up, and it’s in vogue to make statements on social media declaring allegiance, but we’re searching with a flashlight. If you or a loved one is experiencing this battle, then you are well aware what we are up against, and it is a lonely and scary war indeed. This book is for Jake and for you.

In the Beginning

Jake

Everything that occurred prior to the onset of schizophrenia was perfect. A dream. A vanilla sky of creation. Since I was nine years old and on into my twenties, before there were YouTube careers and Instagram advertising partners, I was churning out videos by the hundreds in hopes of getting a laugh from my parents, sisters, or friends.

I had a solid troupe of actors at my disposal. Mainly my family. My youngest sister, Molly, was the Meryl Streep of the bunch. She was passionate, devoted, and able to take direction like nobody’s business. Today, she’s a successful television actress. My sister Becky took a little more arm twisting to be in a video, but she was always hilarious. These days she’s a television producer.

One of the best McCook movies was Grandma Baba. Molly wore an old man mask with a wig and a prim dress and wreaked havoc on her grandkid’s social life with constant flatulence and raiding of the family fridge. One cannot forget the unsettling trilogy I made with my best buddy Stomachache where two friends binge eat and then vomit on screen for an uncomfortable amount of time.

These were the bookmarks of my emotional life. If I was frustrated with my social life, I would make a movie about twins that worked out their relationship issues on a split screen. If I needed to exorcise my demons, I would make a music video and spastically dance or wildly lip sync to some current pop song.

It was what I needed. It was my drug of choice, and I couldn’t stop. I was hooked. Maybe it was being able to control people. All of it. My true friends were a video camera, a computer, and a jumble of studio lights. It was insulation that protected me from the outside world—the distraction from an adult life that would one day steal my joy, my independence, and my dreams of a world where anything was possible.

For Parents

Mom

When did I know that my son had a mental illness? Hindsight unearths little red flags that lie just beneath the surface of his childhood. But can you really know what’s ahead, and are there markers you should watch out for?

Perhaps my first flickering of a problem that barely registered at my core was during nursery school when the school director called us with a concern regarding Jake’s tendency to play alone. He would be so focused on his toys, she said, that he blocked out everything else. So what, I asked? A child can’t be focused? We were angry that she suggested medication might be the answer. He was four, for Lord’s sake. How dare she! Right?

The years going forward had plenty of kid-type drama but nothing concerning or abnormal. His grades were fine. He excelled in vocabulary and creative writing. Math and foreign language were not his thing. Nor mine, as I recall. By fourth grade, he was lucky enough to have a sharp teacher, who midway through the year, suggested we have him tested. He ranked high in visual perception, writing, and really all things that would soon lead him to his lifetime love of film and editing. Now and then, I found myself using the term, falling between the cracks when describing Jake’s gifts as well as his learning abilities. It was obvious to all that he was highly creative, and he had his own special way about him. We were always proud of that.

Social interaction was sometimes an issue, but this is where it got confusing. Kids in his class loved him and included him. He was shy and very kind. We were amused by his need for order in school and home. If the family was going somewhere together, Jake always needed to know exactly where his sisters were and if parents and grandma were all accounted for. We got used to reassuring him. It’s still that way.

When did I know my son had a problem? The answer is that I didn’t. It is only now that I can go back, in hindsight, when one is suddenly omniscient. How can a mother or father know absolutely that their child will one day be mentally ill? Who among us can pinpoint the moment as it happens because it is never one moment. It is a collection of moments . . . an entire childhood and then some, until some doctor shatters your world with the words, Your son has schizophrenia. There were many diagnoses before we came to that road, and they all left