Learning to Cope With a Mind’s Taunting Voices
Living With Voices: Joe Holt, a computer consultant and entrepreneur who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, describes how he’s learned to manage the voices in his head.
LEE’S SUMMIT, Mo. — The job was gone, the gun was loaded, and a voice was saying, “You’re a waste, give up now, do it now.”
It was a command, not a suggestion, and what mattered at that moment — a winter evening in 2000 — was not where the voice was coming from, but how assured it was, how persuasive.
Losing his first decent job ever seemed like too much for Joe Holt to live with. It was time.
“All I remember then is a knock on the bedroom door and my wife, Patsy, she sits down on the bed and hugs me, and I’m holding the gun in my left hand, down here, out of sight,” said Mr. Holt, 50, a computer consultant and entrepreneur who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia.