The Inspiration Behind A Tiny White Light: A Memoir of a Mind in Crisis

By Linda Bass

A Tiny White Light: A Memoir of a Mind in Crisis is not an academic analysis of psychosis, but instead, one woman’s story. It gradually immerses the reader in the interior of a psychotic episode that I experienced over forty-three years ago and then kept secret for most of my life. But why write about something so sensitive, so embarrassing, something that still carries a tremendous stigma and could tarnish my reputation and possibly compromise my own sense of dignity?

Picture Cersei in Game of Thrones as she is forced to walk naked through the streets as the masses deride and defile her. Like her, I am revealed and vulnerable to humiliation by others, despite my own belief that there’s more to me than this one experience and that it does not define me. Yet I persist—I feel compelled to tell this story. Partly I feel I owe it to my brother. And to myself.

When I was twenty, my brother, a year younger, started behaving oddly and saying bizarre things—he was communicating with apes at the San Diego Zoo; a witch was controlling his mind. He eventually was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. When my divorced parents were unable (no money for therapy) or unwilling (he wasn’t ill, but “just trying to get attention”) to step up to help him, I became a periodic surrogate parent and a sometime therapist with my growing but still basic knowledge of psychology. 

I loved my brother and felt terribly sad for his loneliness, his isolation, his lostness, but also had conflicting feelings. I wanted to be there for him, but sometimes resented his need for my help; I was embarrassed as I watched him behave awkwardly and say strange things among my future in-laws and friends; I was scared of him when he talked idly of thinking he was meant to kill certain people, to get revenge. I berated myself for not being able to rise above these feelings and always be compassionate.

I also carried the tremendous weight of feeling helpless to make a difference in the trajectory of his life, and I ultimately I felt inadequate because I couldn’t save him. Me, a self-professed problem-solver, a budding psychologist. But I don’t think my feelings were unique. We are afraid of behavior we don’t understand, that is illogical, outside the norm, and we react in ways we are not always proud of. Most of us walk right by those muttering unhoused people sitting along the sidewalk; they are invisible to us because we need them to be.

The stigma of mental illness was not only attached to my brother, but to our family. When he unexpectedly and brutally ended his life, we held a small service at the funeral home in our home town, discreetly marked his grave with a small flat stone, and rather than share what had happened, let attendees speculate about the cause of death, as if to corral the taint of our shame, not let it become too widespread. And, in my case, guilt was added into this mix when I worried I might have contributed to his death.

I also wondered whether I might share the same proclivity for mental illness, and then eleven years later, when my life had gone too far astray, I too succumbed to psychosis when too many stressors converged and there was no escape. I couldn’t run away or consider suicide as I could never abandon my kids, but nor could I see my way forward—when my rational mind failed me, I was swept into an alternative reality by, I imagine, a precognitive self that was working intuitively to preserve me.

It later bothered me that I had no control over what happened to me, that I wasn’t strong enough to stand firmly inside the real world, since that meant I might have another episode. My recipe to prevent recurrence was a basic one—sleep, eat, and talk to people, and I wasn’t sure it would be enough.

I first thought of writing this book while awestruck in the middle of a transcendent (peak) experience which directly preceded my slide into psychosis—everything was imbued with meaning, even concrete objects. I felt no barrier between my own essence, my self, and the world; I was immersed in it, one with it. I felt amazement and great joy. I was also functioning at an elevated level—seeing higher-order solutions to problems, having ideas that others remarked upon and wanted me to share. I wanted to record some of my insights, e.g., “what is within is without” or the ways in which “the microcosm and macrocosm mirror each other.” 

My subsequent psychosis, only weeks later, provided a wealth of additional material to depict in a book, and as a psychologist, I found it fascinating, but still was stymied by the question of whether the associated stigma would harm me. But not long after I returned home from the hospital, a friend of mine from graduate school, a psychotherapist herself, visited. When I confided that I’d experienced a psychotic episode, she surprised me by saying she wished she could have one—to understand what it was like, that it might be helpful in working with her clients.

Her comment transformed my feelings about writing the story—it would not just be a revelation of what was both an intriguing experience and at the same time my secret shame, but it might also serve a greater purpose. Sharing my own experience, as a case history in story form, might be helpful to clinicians or to the professors who teach them, but I also hoped it would be meaningful to anyone whose life had been touched directly or indirectly by mental illness. I also thought my story might particularly resonate with women who, like me, might have unintentionally fallen into the traditional role of mother/wife and found it was not nearly enough.

One revelation clearly emerged as I wrote about my experience: the psychotic content was meaningful; both my behavior and my thought patterns were laden with symbols (not unlike dream content) and acted as metaphorical representations of the core issues that led to my psychosis. A good detective/psychologist could identify and mine such symbols/metaphors and use them to connect with clients in the midst of psychosis and perhaps begin to guide them back to reality. 

I couldn’t save my brother, but just maybe other lives might be saved through sharing my experience and showing it is possible not only to survive such an episode, but to go on to thrive and lead a meaningful life. In fact, while my brother’s death had seemed to divide my life into a “before” and “after,” I came to see my psychotic episode as transformative, another major turning point in my life. I also hope my book might spur others to talk openly about their mental crises, which are far more common than people think, and that it might prompt or contribute to new treatment approaches, and perhaps help chip away at the stigma attached to mental crises.

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Linda Bass holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UCLA and a master’s degree in psychology from UC Berkeley. She worked in the workforce development field for thirty years, most recently as the executive director of a regional workforce board in Cambridge, MA. Now retired, she devotes her time to writing, painting, solving puzzles, reading, singing (to herself), enjoying friends and family, and feeling grateful for the life she has now. She currently lives in South Hadley, MA, and is working on a second book.

A Tiny White Light: A Memoir of a Mind in Crisis

From an author with a psychology background, a candid memoir about the interior of her own psychotic episode and its origins in guilt, lost purpose, conflict between mothering and career, and the ambiguity in her relationship with her therapist.

After the culture shock of moving from a small Wisconsin town to the tumult of Los Angeles in 1967, Linda’s family disintegrates: her parents decide to divorce, and she and her younger brother, Brian, suddenly must fend for themselves. While she finds a foothold in academic pursuits, Brian spirals downward into schizophrenia and, finally, commits an irrevocable act. Plagued with guilt, Linda loses her sense of purpose, abandons a promising career in psychology, and finds herself in a life she never envisioned—poor, alcoholic, an accidental parent in an unhappy marriage, feeling invisible and alone.

When Linda sees a psychologist, Sam, he helps her recover what she has lost: her sense of self. Feeling truly seen, she falls in love with him and suspects her feelings might be reciprocated. This ambiguity, mingled with other overwhelming stresses, triggers her descent into a psychotic episode—one that echoes her dreams, Brian’s experience, and Sam’s own phobia.

Will Linda follow in her brother’s footsteps, or is this the wake-up call she needed to correct her course?

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Category: On Writing