At 21, Bruce Ray attempted to jump through a window of his upstairs apartment. His landlady and other tenants found him wearing only a t-shirt. "You are all going to die,"; he told them. "By spontaneous combustion.";

Doris Ray's The Ghosts Behind Him (Caitlin $16.95) is a mother's memoir of her son's subsequent battle with schizophrenia from 1984 to the present. It is a story of heartbreak and hope, but mostly the former.

Hospitalization. Group homes. Multi-vitamin therapy. Delusions. Anti-psychotic drugs. Paranoia. And a horrible descent into violence. It's the stuff of a family nightmare that is all too real for many of the 40,000 British Columbians whose lives are directly affected by the disease.

"You are damned,"; said the bad voices in Bruce Ray's head in 1993, "We will make you kill someone whether you want to or not."; When he alerted a caregiver to his rising panic, he was given an anti-anxiety pill (chlorpromazine) that made him feel worse. Bruce got himself sent to Nanaimo General Hospital.

The psychiatrist at the hospital was prepared to admit him but there were no empty beds in the psychiatric ward. The caretaker from the Christian group home arrived at the hospital and returned Bruce to the Nanaimo Care Unit where Bruce tried to slash his wrist in the bathroom.

"The knives, the sharp knives,"; the voices called. Forty minutes after being discharged from the hospital, Bruce Ray stealthily approached a young man sitting watching television. He leaned forward and plunged a knife into the man's upper abdomen. The victim of the attack died later that evening.

Doris Ray is a home-support worker in Fraser Lake who also writes a humour column for her local paper. Her wrenching tale of confusion and compassion is an attempt to dispel some of society's bafflement with schizophrenia. 0-920576-77-X

[BCBW WINTER 1999]