re an award-winning book on homelessness/mental illness

[Guest guest]

I am writing to bring to your attention my book, THE OUTSIDER, which takes as

its subject my father's struggle with schizophrenia and homelessness. THE

OUTSIDER, published six months ago by Broadway Books, a division of Random

House, is already being used as a training tool for outreach workers in many

states, and is required reading in psychology classes at Georgetown

University, Baylor College of Medicine, and Baruch College, among other

universities.

 

THE OUTSIDER is the 2000 recipient of The Bell of Hope award, presented

annually by the Mental Health Association of Southern Pennsylvania

(Philadelphia) to honor " significant and far-reaching contributions

benefiting those facing the challenge of mental illness. " The current issue

of the NAMI Advocate--the newsletter of the National Alliance for the

Mentally Ill, the largest mental health advocacy organization in the

US--calls THE OUTSIDER: " an extraordinary book, one of the best about

schizophrenia to have come out in recent years. "

 

Several newspaper reviews of THE OUTSIDER follow.

 

Sincerely,

 

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

 

NY NEWSDAY REVIEW:

 

IN THE MIX

 

By Jamie Talan. STAFF WRITER

 

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER'S extraordinary book- " The Outsider: A Journey Into My

Father's Struggle With Madness " -is a chronicle of a son's struggle to

understand the mental illness that took over the life of his father, a

college sociology professor who developed schizophrenia and ended up

homeless.

 

The son lost contact with his dad for years as Charles Lachenmeyer roamed

from city to city, in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Charles never gave up

his pursuit of returning to teaching. His son finally found that his father

had died in 1995, homeless on the streets of Burlington, Vt.

 

The young Lachenmeyer has given his father a rare gift: a memoir that helps

enlighten readers that homeless, mentally ill people have lives beyond what

we might ever hope to see. In the end, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer learned that

there were many people along the way who tried to help his father-and who

knew the gentle, loving man who raised a little boy in the suburbs of New

York.

 

 

Des Moines Register

 

A son's struggle to come to terms with father's mental illness

 

By REKHA BASU

Register Columnist

05/23/2000

 

--

The boy's father was a college sociology professor with an IQ of around 150

and two published books by age 31. The boy's mother is a psychologist. In the

late 1970s, the family lived in a New York City suburb, and enjoyed a rich

cultural and intellectual life that would be the envy of many of us.

 

But the professor, Charles Lachenmeyer, would become paranoid and delusional.

And in 1995, at age 51, he died alone in Vermont, a transient who had spent

most of the previous year homeless, filthy and lice-infested.

 

Only after his death did Nathaniel Lachenmeyer learn his father was

schizophrenic.

 

Charles Lachenmeyer's mental illness and his resulting descent are the

subject of a remarkable book by his son, now 30 years old. " The Outsider " was

published in March by Broadway Books, a division of Random House. In his

struggle to come to terms with what happened to his father, Nathaniel

researched and retraced his father's life from childhood until his tragic

end. It's not only a first book for this gifted young author, but a

groundbreaking window into the world of a mentally ill person.

 

Today, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer will be in Webster City to talk about it. He

spoke to me by phone last week from his new home in Washington, D.C.

 

It was guilt that first got him trying to piece together his father's life,

initially for a film that never was made, and then for the book. He regretted

not being there when his father most needed him. But his goal, he says, is

education. He hopes to humanize those people we turn away from when we pass

them, unkempt and babbling in doorways or coffeehouses. Mostly he wants us to

know the illness is not their fault.

 

Nathaniel was 11 in 1981 when his parents split up, and he saw his father for

the last time three years later. " He was an extremely good parent, extremely

caring, extremely involved in my life, " he told me.

 

Though there were earlier signs, it wasn't until Charles was 34 or 35 that

the illness really took a toll. He became obsessed with conspiracies against

him. After the divorce, he spiraled downward, moving around, ending up in New

England, being institutionalized various times and diagnosed with paranoid

schizophrenia. The son, unaware of his father's illness, broke off contact

five years before his father's death.

 

Nathaniel now believes it's significant that his father had done research on

schizophrenia in graduate school. But as the illness worsened, Nathaniel once

tried to broach the subject with him, and Charles got furious. Forty percent

of those who have it don't recognize it.

 

Writing the book, Nathaniel told me, was " the most difficult thing I will

ever willingly do. I became clinically depressed. The better the book got,

the closer it came to what I wanted, the harder it became. "

 

He'd have to listen to a police officer in Vermont describe the lice covering

his father, the bartender recount throwing him out for having conversations

out loud with his dead mother.

 

He had to see an arrest photo that showed his father bearded, wild-eyed and

wild-haired.

 

And real life would intrude even during the writing phase. Nathan- iel would

be holed up in his Manhattan apartment all day, then walk out into New York's

streets only to have the subject thrust back in his face by the homeless

mentally ill people there.

 

" It was like spending four years at a funeral, " he said. " I was angry,

bitter, unhappy. The great challenge was to let none of that enter the book. "

 

Though written partly as a memoir (a format he normally considers

self-indulgent), he calls the book " the biography of a forgotten person. "

 

There is no cure for schizophrenia, which affects about 1 percent of the

world's population, and around 2.5 million Americans. But Nathaniel now

understands the importance of sufferers maintaining social contacts. He

points out the irony of homeless mentally ill having to get arrested to find

shelter when shelters won't take them.

 

Unlike depression, a topic only now coming out of the closet, people with

schizophrenia continue to be social outcasts - blamed, stigmatized and very

much alone. With his honest, unsentimentalized account, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

has gone an extraordinary way toward breaking the silence and throwing light

on their world through a child's unconditionally loving eyes.

 

 

LOS ANGELES TIMES REVIEW:

 

A Downward Spiral Into Gripping Paranoia

THE OUTSIDER, A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness, by Nathaniel

Lachenmeyer

 

By MICHAEL HARRIS, Special to The Times

 

     Nathaniel Lachenmeyer aims to draw lessons from his father's 14-year

battle with paranoid schizophrenia that apply to society as a whole. It was a

tragic mistake, he confirms, to empty U.S. mental hospitals a generation ago

without providing a safety net to keep ex-patients from becoming homeless. In

an age when other forms of prejudice have ebbed, the mentally ill are still

ridiculed and feared. People like his father are believed to be violent,

Lachenmeyer says, when in fact most schizophrenics are a danger only to

themselves: 10% commit suicide.

     Still, this is a very personal memoir. In 1992, the 18-year-old

Lachenmeyer broke ties with his father, Charles, a former sociology professor

at Hunter College in New York, who by then was well into his downward spiral,

bouncing between lesser jobs and hospital wards, believing himself to be the

victim of a conspiracy by the CIA, the FBI and his ex-wife to control his

thoughts. " I can't live in your world, and you can't live in mine, " Nathaniel

wrote, dealing his father a blow whose severity he came to realize only after

Charles died in a shabby rented room in Burlington, Vt., in 1995 at age 51.

     Nathaniel discovered that this hovel was actually a step up for Charles,

who had nearly frozen to death on the streets the previous winter. In his

writings and in remarks to police, hospital staff and fellow transients,

Charles had affirmed, over and over, his love for his lost son.

Guilt-stricken, Nathaniel set out to trace his father's wanderings, first in

a documentary film in 1997 and now in this book.

     Transients, we would think, leave few tracks. But Nathaniel was able to

find out a surprising amount. People remembered Charles. Even lice-ridden and

in rags, talking to his dead mother (whose Christian Science beliefs,

Nathaniel says, introduced him to the notion that everything he experienced

might be an illusion), he kept his proud bearing and his erudite vocabulary.

He never stopped applying for college teaching posts, never stopped writing

pamphlets to expose his tormentors.

     If the " conspiracy " against him was imaginary, it caused Charles as much

suffering as if it were real, Nathaniel points out. And it took just as much

courage to fight. Charles believed himself to be living in a world like " The

Matrix " or " The Truman Show, " in which every passerby might be an actor and

every chance remark might be scripted to " jack him up, " trigger odd or

violent behavior, and get him recommitted. To stay free in such a world took

enormous self-control.

      " Whatever I accomplish in my life, " Nathaniel says, " will never equal

what my father accomplished as a mentally ill transient. Most of us are so

used to defining ourselves and our self-worth in relation to our possessions

and the perceptions of others that we would not have the necessary strength

to insist that we still are who we once were if we found ourselves stripped

of everything and everyone in our lives. "

     Unfortunately, his disorder kept Charles, a gifted scholar who had once

studied paranoid schizophrenia as if " preparing to do battle with a foe he

expected to meet in the future, " from recognizing that he was insane. He

viewed hospitals and medication as part of the conspiracy. When a legal

guardian withheld Charles' disability checks to force him to seek treatment,

he preferred to freeze.

     Can such self-destructive behavior have dignity and meaning? It did in

his father's case, Nathaniel asserts. Charles' uniqueness shines through the

pop-novel banality of his delusions. True, there are public-policy

implications in " The Outsider, " an appeal for us to be kinder to the next

smelly street-corner mutterer we see. But it all begins with this one man,

painstakingly brought back to life.

 

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times

[Guest guest]

Excuse me... spam, this early in the morning?

 

I think I have indigestion.

 

Goodbye. Find somewhere else to advertise.

Crow

 

Gaslightera wrote:

 

> I am writing to bring to your attention my book