The day the voices stopped : a memoir of madness and hope

Recounts the author's three-decade struggle with schizophrenia and reveals how he was able to overcome the disease and create a new life. For thirty-two years Ken Steele lived with the devastating symptoms of schizophrenia, tortured by inner voices commanding him to kill himself, ravaged by the delusions of paranoia, barely surviving on the ragged edges of society. In this powerful and inspiring story, Steele tells the story of his hard-won recovery from schizophrenia and how activism and advocacy helped him regain his sanity and go on to give hope and support to so many others like him. His recovery began with a small but intensely dramatic moment. One evening in the spring of 1995, shortly after starting on Risperdal, a new antipsychotic medicine, he realized that the voices that had tormented him for three decades had suddenly stopped. Terrified but also empowered by this new freedom, Steele rose to the challenge of creating a new life. Steele went on to become one of the most vocal advocates of the mentally ill, earning the respect not only of patients and families but also of professionals and policymakers all over America through his tireless devotion to a cause that transformed his life and that of countless others. The Day the Voices Stopped will endure as Ken Steele's testament for all who struggle with this heartbreaking disease. Taunted by voices from the age of fourteen, in and out of hospitals and halfway houses for three decades, schizophrenic Ken Steele eventually emerged from madness to become a leading mental health advocate A nationally known spokesperson for the mentally ill offers hope and inspiration in this moving story of his decades-long struggle with schizophrenia and his remarkable recovery THE VOICES ARRIVED without warning on an October night in 1962, when I was fourteen years old.