"Take it one step at a time," is how Pam Wagner described her attitude toward all the excitement. "That's the best thing I can do, the only thing I can do. "
Wagner is a published poet; her work has earned the 1993 Connecticut Mental Health Media Award, two first places in the "Tunxis Poetry Review," and the 2002 BBC International Poetry Award. She's also schizophrenic, a diagnosis she received around 1985.
Spiro, a Wilton resident, said back then that diagnosis was a word like cancer doctors didn't want to give families.
"My reaction was basically they're calling me crazy," said Wagner in a phone interview from her Wethersfield home. "How dare they?"
She defined the diagnosis metaphorically, "I'm seeing a basket. Everything is put in a basket. Schizophrenia is the basket."
Symptoms of schizophrenia vary, but common characteristics are delusions and voices. It almost always starts in adolescence or young adulthood.
Pam Wagner's voices began in sixth grade after JFK was assassinated; they told her that somehow she was responsible for his death. Even in high school, the voices never completely went away.
In 1970, the sisters went to Brown University. Determined to establish their own identities, they took separate classes and had different social circles. But as the semester passed, Pam Wagner grew more withdrawn and isolated until in January 1971, she overdosed on the sleeping aid Sominex. Wagner didn't finish the semester.
"At that point, I knew it was not just a get-over thing," said Carolyn Spiro over the phone. "In our family you don't just get up, drop out of school because you want to."
Wagner thought she might have schizophrenia then. Her dad, a medical professor at Yale, discouraged that belief, Spiro feels, to protect her.
"He thought I could pull myself up on my own bootstraps," she said.
Wagner did go on to graduate from Brown magna cum laude, but the years ahead saw frequent hospital stays. Until the nineties, she and her twin stayed in contact mostly through the phone with their mom taking over much of Pam's care as Carolyn did a residency in psychiatry, got married and started a family. Always, she wondered how she could help her sister.
"Here I am a psychiatrist, I'm her twin sister," she said. "I don't know how to manage it."
"Divided Minds" has done much to bring the sisters closer. The book started 13 years ago when Wagner wrote about her experiences and shared them online. She was encouraged by the positive feedback.
"If I write this book, I could write it for them and give a voice to the voiceless," she said.
"And write it vividly enough about my experience, people who don't have it perhaps [could] empathize more."
Carolyn Spiro got involved when E. Fuller Torrey, sometimes called America's most famous psychiatrist, suggested a memoir with alternating chapters by both sisters. They spent the last three years on the book. Writing the epilogue was painful for Wagner as she faced a past she often couldn't remember, behavior that now embarrassed and humiliated her. That was balanced by working with her sister.
"Even though we would fight, we would cry, talk, and then finally laugh," she said.
Carolyn Spiro enjoyed the editing process. As the sisters read and critiqued each other's work, they'd often fight over the other's changes then after rereading the edits agree that the writing had improved. Reviewing the past also brought understanding.
"We got through a lot of things we hadn't gotten through," said Wagner. "We even resolved the crowns' issue."
Although Wagner described their childhood relationship as the "best of friends, absolutely as close as two pieces of cardboard glued together," the crowns incident typified Pam's misinterpretation of innocent events Pam's first-grade teacher celebrated birthdays with crowns, one for the boy and one for the girl. When Lynnie's teacher brought Carolyn to the class for the birthday celebration, Carolyn selected the girl's crown, sticking Pam with the embarrassment of the boy's crown.
"I think Pam interpreted some of my behavior as being intentionally hurtful," said Spiro. "It had less to do with her than my own being a kid."
Carolyn Spiro often felt embarrassed by her older twin's weird behavior while growing up, fearful that kids would confuse the two.
"I had absolutely no idea. I wish somebody had known. How could I have known?"
She's grateful for the chance to work with her sister, "an incredible person . . . an incredible sister."
Pam Wagner is doing well now. It could be her medication.
Carolyn Spiro said, "I don't know what it is - [the] book coming out? It's like we have our sister back."
While Carolyn Spiro said the family is pleased at the possibility of the book's success, they have concerns about the story going public. She hopes "Divided Minds" will bring support for the family as others identify with their struggles.
"So far it's been an incredibly positive experience," said Spiro. "We just hope that the book will have a positive effect on families and patients."
|
|
