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CRAZY - MY 7 YEARS AT THE ORTHOGENIC SCHOOL

Chapter 1
Still Crazy After All These Years

The nightmares had occurred frequently for over thirty years. I went back to the school to visit and became trapped somehow. I was told I was still crazy and had to stay, or the door was locked from the inside and there was no way out. When James first e-mailed me in the spring of 2005 about the reunion, I gave him an unequivocal "no".

"There's no way I'm going to see those people again. It was horrible while I lived it and why would I want to bring all that up again?"
"I'd like to see you." he wrote.
"I'd like to see you too, but still"
I just wasn't up for dredging up the past.
It wasn't until I received an e-mail from Mark, who I hadn't heard from for years, that my thinking began to turn around.
"I've heard from Brooke," he wrote. "She wants you to call her."
Brooke had saved my life in 1972, and she insists that I saved hers too.
I had entered the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Emotionally Disturbed Children in 1967 three weeks before my sixteenth birthday. Brooke had arrived in the summer of 1972, just after her sixteenth birthday. For two years we were the best of friends, until I left the school in 1974 at age twenty-three.
Now, after all these years, about a hundred ex-staff and "kids" were having a reunion.
Where I had refused James, I absolutely had to see Brooke. I was going to grapple with ghosts, but I had the feeling that it was time.
I was both excited and terrified. I had been angry for so many years, both at various members of the staff, and at the school's director, Bruno Bettelheim, who we had called "Dr B."
So in May I found myself heading east to Chicago, ready for a head on collision with all the things I'd been running from for over thirty years.
At the motel it seemed just like old times, and Brooke and I picked up our conversation exactly where we had left it off, finishing each others' sentences and laughing over everything.
At night, back in our room, we fell asleep in mid-sentence and finished the thought when we woke up in the morning.
Our first evening in Chicago, about a dozen of us met at downtown restaurant. We all sat at one long table, Brooke and I side by side. The men were mostly all from one dorm called The Mohawks, and they seemed like long lost brothers to us. They had been little kids when I'd last seen them. Now they were businessmen, computer experts, investment

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