Two Sides of Schizophrenia by Rebecca May Hope

November 25, 2025

Two Sides of Schizophrenia by Rebecca May Hope

About a quarter of American adults report having experienced some type of mental health problem within the past year. That’s remarkable, especially for those of us who remember when mental illness was stigmatized. Pendulums swing, and now some young people, especially on some online platforms, seem to gain acceptance and identity from their diagnoses.

For me, the word schizophrenia held both fascination and shame. I first heard it in 1963 when I was in first grade. That’s when my mom was institutionalized again. Before that, the last time she’d been hospitalized for schizophrenia was in 1950, before most of my siblings and I were born.

As a child, I didn’t want to talk to anyone about the trauma of Mom’s schizophrenia, but I did want to learn about the illness. So when my sixth-grade teacher allowed us to choose a topic for a written report, I found some encyclopedia articles in the library and began my research.

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Mom and I had a good relationship, but I’d grown up understanding the unwritten rules for which topics my eight brothers and sisters, my dad, and my relatives would discuss with Mom. They didn’t mention The Fire or Esther, and they didn’t talk about schizophrenia.

As the youngest, I often had more time alone with Mom, and I occasionally bent the rules by asking about taboo subjects. One day, I found Mom’s ancient “autograph book” and showed it to her. “What does this mean: ‘When we get older and you have twins, Come over and borrow some safety pins”? I asked, struggling to decipher the delicate cursive.

Mom remembered her high school friend who wrote the humorous couplet, so I decided to probe more—into unexplored territory. “What was Esther like?”

“She was cute. We called her Squeegie. She climbed up on the table and got into the butter.”

That was all I could get. Mom didn’t remember The Fire, it seemed. Their house had burned down, causing the death of my sister, Esther, the second-born. That event precipitated Mom’s mental illness. Not surprisingly, shock therapy and the passage of time had erased her memories of saving the other two children and sustaining widespread third-degree burns herself.

I knew it wasn’t kind to ask Mom to remember those days, but sometimes I let curiosity get the best of me.

I felt the same when I chose to do my report on schizophrenia. I couldn’t resist telling Mom about it. It was a backdoor route to learning what she knew about her own mental health. I’d never heard anyone say the word in her presence. So my heart was beating hard when I told her, as casually as I could, “I’m writing a report on schizophrenia.”

“That’s nice,” she responded.

For a moment, I thought I’d zoomed into a dead end.

Then she added, “That’s what they said I had.”

She phrased it in the past tense. I hadn’t learned much yet, but every article made it sound as if the condition was permanent and incurable. Did she know that?

When she didn’t say anything else, I asked, “Do you know anything about it?”

“Not really. Just that they put me in the hospital because of it.”

And that was it. As a twelve-year-old, I was more informed about my mother’s mental condition than she was. Would it help her to understand what was going on in her brain? Why she heard voices?

Then again, I wasn’t sure she knew she heard voices. She often whispered to herself, but when I asked her who she was talking to, she’d say, “No one,” and she could never repeat what she’d whispered. Still, when she wasn’t checked out to that invisible, unknowable somewhere, she was loving and supportive of me and her other kids. In fact, I never heard her say an unkind word about anyone—except during her most severe breakdown when I was thirteen.

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By that time, my older siblings had all moved away from home, and I was the only one who needed a mother anymore. Although she came out of the mental hospital better than ever that time, I never had a chance to enjoy her improved mental state because she moved into a nursing home. Not because she needed care, but because she and my dad made each other worse.

That’s how schizophrenia stole my mother.

From that point on, I only wanted to forget there was such a thing as schizophrenia. That became easier when Mom and Dad retired to Texas to live near my brothers and one sister. I saw them when they came to Minnesota in the summer or when I traveled to Texas in the winter, and we kept in touch by mail and phone.

My closest sister, Ruthie, who was three years older than I, filled in the gap that Mom’s schizophrenia left during my childhood and adulthood. She mentored me, connected me with people who advanced my career, and hosted family gatherings at her lake home.

By the late 1990s, the stigma toward people who suffered from depression and anxiety disorders was easing in the U.S., but oddly, it had actually grown toward people with schizophrenia. In 1994, the medical community recognized ADHD in adults. That year, Ruthie had married again after a divorce. She’d met her husband, an energetic gymnast-turned-dentist, through swing dancing. They were the cutest couple.

Ruthie had always been intellectually brilliant and artistically talented. She definitely had her eccentricities, but I expected that from an artist. One of her hobbies was learning about ways to manage ADHD, which both her sons had as children. It didn’t take her long to see the similarities in her new husband, so she introduced him to her boys’ psychiatrist. Shortly after that, I learned that she’d received the same diagnosis.

Just when Ruthie was happier than she’d ever been—starting over with a new husband and expecting her first child with him—schizophrenia made another unwelcome appearance in our family.

Shortly after starting the ADHD medication, Ruthie fell into serious psychosis, which ruined her marriage and estranged her from all her friends and siblings. Twenty-five years after schizophrenia had stolen my mother, it stole my sister.

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Our siblings, Ruthie’s husband, and I traveled a rocky road as we tried to reclaim her from the grip of mental illness. We were unsuccessful, and she died too young.

In 2018, four years after her death, I began writing the story of the toll schizophrenia took on me and our family. This year, I released my memoir, Stolen by Schizophrenia, published by Gabriel’s Horn Press.

Early readers of my manuscript insisted it must be released to a wide audience. I’m not an expert on schizophrenia, but I’ve seen two versions of it up close—and both were strikingly different. Loving and hopeful, Mom kept one foot in reality for as long as possible. Angry and paranoid, Ruthie immersed herself in her fantasy world.

Like Joni Mitchell’s take on clouds, love, and life in her poignant song “Both Sides Now,” I confess I really don’t know schizophrenia at all. All I can do is add some insight from one who felt its effects from two different sides—daughter and sister—for fifty years.

If you have a friend or family member who has struggled with mental illness, I hope our story will touch your heart and encourage you to keep loving, even when it hurts.

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Rebecca May Hope is an English professor and an award-winning author. Her previous novels have focused on historical attempts at utopian communities in America. She lives in Minnesota with her husband, Bob, who is also an author.