Robin Cunningham's grandfather had schizophrenia and hung himself in a state hospital. His uncle met exactly the same fate, while his aunt tried to kill her three children and was institutionalized for the rest of her life.
At 13, in 1956, Cunningham began to think that Satan was putting blasphemous thoughts into his mind. His mother got him help as quickly as she could. "I got sick on a Sunday, and by Friday I was in to see a psychiatrist."
His doctor prescribed Thorazine. The drug didn't completely control Cunningham's delusional thinking and hallucinations, so the psychiatrist worked with him to develop strategies for coping with his illness and fitting in with the rest of the world. "He backed that up with a strong conviction that he believed I would recover," says Cunningham, now 65, who ...
