Sarah Marzen, PhD

Overcoming Schizophrenia: Sarah Marzen

I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth. The house I grew up in is situated in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and currently worth about four million dollars. It has a sweeping acre lot and a beautiful English garden. We were in the best school system in the country, at least at the time. I went to magnet school after magnet school.

I started out in AP Calculus BC in 9th grade– unusual for the school, but not unheard of. I was on the varsity math team, My mom accelerated me so that I also took AP and post-AP courses long before I normally would in the school sequence, and my dad watched proudly. But something was wrong.

In 11th grade, I stopped trying as hard as I used to. Nothing was going wrong, but everything was going wrong. I wasn’t top 24 in the United States in Physics like I seemingly was in 10th grade anymore– only top 200. I got a B+ in AP Chemistry because I was struggling to memorize the information normally. I only made it to 3rd place at the State Science Fair, failing to make Internationals.

Overall, none of my teachers thought that my 11º grade performance was dismal. However, my mom was dismayed. My dad became convinced that I had entirely failed. They said they weren’t going to pay for my college, despite having an entire fund set up for it already that could only be used to pay for my college expenses, or my child’s college expenses. I was, according to my mom, just going to party it away.

She later apologized, but this all made me feel so guilty. I felt like my brain was broken, and that I should be the one apologizing.

At that time, I started having bizarre dreams and experiencing visual hallucinations, I thought I was Ariel, the Little Mermaid, in dreams, and in real life, I thought I could make a vase wobble with my mind, like Matilda. The beginnings of a psychotic episode that didn’t quite happen were taking hold. I cried constantly. I felt I had disappointed my mom, who was my best friend.

Finally, I realized that I simply had to get out of my parents’ house. My mother was completely unsympathetic and unknowing that I was in this very sad, guilt-ridden emotional state. She thought I was just mad at her for “catching me not working.” I finally decided I was going to go to college and get out of the house, even if I had to pay for it myself. I felt that if I didn’t leave, I would end up committing suicide.

There were two colleges I wanted to attend that had full merit scholarships. One college was Caltech. The other was the University of Chicago.

I applied for those awards and received them, so I had my choice of school. My parents congratulated me on working so hard and offered to pay for MIT or Harvard, which I had gotten into as well. But I decided to choose either Caltech or the University of Chicago.

Off to Caltech I went. Despite the brokenness of my brain from the agony that my mother had put me through, I was quite social, active, and successful. Physics classes were easy for me. I took a lot of math. I dated all the smartest men I could find and picked up everything I could about their fields, a pattern to be continued in graduate school.  As I approached my graduation, I chose the University of California, Berkeley, where I would pursue a PhD in physics.

It was at the University of California, Berkeley, that things really started to go wrong with my mind. At first, things seemed to be going great. I was happily dating a new guy, one of the members of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, learning computer science and math from him. But my mood fluctuated. Some days I wrote songs about how poorly he treated me, and other days I felt we were deeply in love.

Love is love, but there was an actual problem in my life. The social ringleader of Redwood started insulting me at times for no reason that I could decipher while insisting that he loved me. I decided to leave Redwood and never came back, only to find out a year later that there were other women who didn’t want to join the Redwood Center either because of him. We complained to faculty, and again, I felt incredibly guilty.

This was when my psychotic break first happened. Suddenly, I thought people were following me. People were watching me. People were looking at every paper I was writing. I was sure of it. I had also become isolated and had stopped seeing my friends because I was so focused on my thesis.

As an unreadable paper of mine got mixed reviews, I began to develop even more paranoid delusions. I was sure the paper was genius, and somewhat in line with that, one reviewer did call it a badly-written “tour de force.” Other reviewers misunderstood the point of the paper and called it a “parlor trick.” This added fuel to the fire, and I thought that more people were watching my every move as a result of this paper getting rejected from the first journal we submitted to. (It did get accepted at the next one.) Eventually, I told my then-boyfriend that we couldn’t talk in the apartment because people were listening, and he drove me to a deserted part of San Francisco. He said, “I can’t live like this.”

I was sure, just sure, that a powerful secretive organization had been infiltrated by people (mostly hackers) who were after me, and that they were telling America that I had very bad motivations for complaining about the social ringleader of Redwood. I was sure they had made up an entire email that I just didn’t write. I wasn’t sure what was in the email, exactly, but it had something to do with what Harvard Business Review posted on the daily, or so I thought. I was sure elites and intellectuals and everyone else around me was in on the secret. I thought everyone I met had heard from the organization about this or that. I was too paranoid to function.

I was so sad about this conspiracy, which I believed had ruined my reputation, that I decided to kill myself with aspirin. That day, I was taken to the hospital where they pumped my stomach, and eventually sent me to a psych ward. I was then medicated for paranoid schizophrenia.

Nothing worked medically. Finally, they let me out of the psych ward. I was  zonked on Haldol and exhausted, but I still believed the hackers were following me. I stopped taking my medicine as soon as I could. I thought I didn’t need it, and that I was just fine.

I believed I had figured it out– some weird organization was after me, and they were liars. They were taking pictures of me taking my top off in the psych ward. My then-boyfriend tried to buy me books on schizophrenia. I first resisted the idea that I had it, while my then-boyfriend did a deep dive into what schizophrenia was and how to treat it. I tossed all the books on schizophrenia that he got for me into the dustbin, thinking that the symptoms described were not me.

But the symptoms got worse. One day, I “spotted” that the organization had figured out that the social ringleader was incompetent by looking at blog posts on Psychology Today. The voices soon stepped everything up to physical torture. I felt pinpricks of laughter on my skin and whirring in the back of my head. I felt like my head was seizing. My face was sometimes on fire. Everyday, there was something new, and my friends and family had no clue what to do.

The voices talked to me on and on. I was sure they were human and related to the organization. I had to figure out how to get them to stop. I wanted to commit suicide sometimes, and my relationship with my then-boyfriend suffered as a result.

Soon after, while my boyfriend was away, I swallowed 98 pills of meds that I hadn’t taken, and washed it down with bourbon. The voices told me to call 911, and I did. The last thing I remember was an attractive male EMT scornfully asking whether or not I had swallowed about five pills, thinking that I was one of those crybabies. I laughed maniacally and fell into a four-day coma.

When I woke up, there was a tube in my throat to enable me to breathe. My then-boyfriend was there, working on a paper. But he couldn’t take it anymore. Just a few days later, as he visited me in the psych ward for dinner, he broke it off. “Why did it have to happen to you?” he asked, rubbing my face. I got it. This was unlivable. I was switched to clozapine in hopes that the miracle drug could save me, but I was still completely psychotic, if more sedated.

Somehow, throughout it all, the voices made me work. They insisted. Sometimes, they tried to block my thinking, but they always wanted me to publish paper after paper after paper. So I was quite accomplished-looking by the end of my Ph.D., even getting an award for excellence in the middle of it as everything was crashing down. I had managed to nab a fancy MIT postdoctoral fellowship. Getting this postdoc was probably a good thing, because then I lived with my little sister.

The first year I came to MIT, I published ten papers in decent journals. At the same time, I was completely out of it. I never came into work. I constantly talked to the voices like they were people. Sometimes, I couldn’t see my credit card, and then it would randomly reappear in the same location just a day later.

I just knew I had to kill myself and tried to use the MIT credit card to buy a gun. The person who hired me didn’t know what to do, and asked my previous mentor what on earth was going on. All he could say was, it’s a terrible disease. That wasn’t the end of it. Again, I just knew that I had to commit suicide, so I tried. When my sister was on a long trip, I saved up all my clozapine and shoved it down my throat.

She came back just in time. One day later, and I’d have been dead.

This psych ward stay was different than previous psych ward stays because for the first time ever, I tried Latuda, and it did something. All my voices collapsed into one. My brain, being trained in physics, was logical enough. If the voices were people, they wouldn’t have collapsed into one. Therefore, the voices were voices. This was a disease. It wasn’t magical.

I spent the next two years of my postdoctoral fellowship trying to be more normal– coming into work, finding a new boyfriend (who is now my fiancée), reading the newspaper, eating breakfast, just doing normal things. Interestingly, I was far less productive scientifically. To this day, I am unsure why.

But my record was good enough that I was competitive for faculty positions all over the United States. I eventually got a competitive job at the W. M. Keck Science Department at the Claremont Colleges. I had never seen myself as more of a teacher than a scholar, but I had aced the mock office hours, and the students there loved me. It just felt right, so off to Claremont I went.

My disease was in and out, in and out. It stopped for a while, mostly, and then somehow came back. One fateful day, I wrote down something about what had happened at Redwood, and it was wrong, and I trashed it. I threw it in the toilet and flushed it away.

But then, everything started– the paranoia flared up in every way. The voices wouldn’t stop talking in my mind. I felt magically compelled to write texts to myself at certain times for certain things and for reasons that I couldn’t quite explain. I could barely think about anything correctly but science, and even there, things were getting worse.

One other fateful day, it got way worse than that.

I could barely think. I could barely work. I tried so hard. I was able to keep my job, with psych ward stays and medical leaves. But finally, after my second medical leave, I said, enough is enough. I went deep into Voiceland and basically acted like it was all true. I responded by doing “plays” that would get the voices to allow me to sleep and stop ruining my brain.

Somehow, out of the crazy comes some of my best work. My best science, my best writing, my best songs. I can’t hate it completely. At the same time, the psychosis comes with suffering.

But when the voices clear up enough to allow me to live, my life is fantastic. I’m lucky enough to have friends and family that love me and take care of me as best they can, a fulfilling and intellectually demanding job that loves me as much as a job can love a person, and a fiancée who doesn’t care that I’m 100 pounds overweight from antipsychotics and depressed binge eating and drinking.

Even with this disease, I’m surprisingly successful. The biophysics community actually knows about my disease to some extent, because I was profiled in Physics Magazine for my work on opinion dynamics. (The basic idea with opinion dynamics is that if we model people as not quite rational, but trying to combat their cognitive biases, chaos ensues.) Part of the profile was that the opinion dynamics research came out of a psychotic episode. The new model was grounded in cognitive science and psychology, but treated using dynamical systems, finding that transient chaos emerged in a really simple model of interacting agents sharing information.

This is not the only thing I’ve done; I travel all over the world talking about my work on causal states, machine learning, information theory, and biology. I managed to be elected to the American Physical Society Division of Biological Sciences Executive Committee as an Early Career Member, to be nominated for a school-wide teaching award and to win twice the school-wide Mary W. Johnson Faculty Scholarship Award, and also to win a nomination as a Scialog Fellow (an early-career research award).

So in a way, everything is okay. But in another sense, I am so far away from the carefree child with the silver spoon in her mouth that I wonder what will happen to my child, when I have one.

With new medications—for me, Latuda and Seroquel—and continuous therapy and psychiatric treatment, my life keeps on getting better. Today, my life is filled with love and support and kindness from strangers—even if they only ever know about me as the biophysicist who invented an opinion dynamics model out of psychosis.