Residence: This chronology begins in 1991, when Tessa lived at our home in Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Occupation: Studied for a BSc honours degree in chemistry at Massey University in Palmerston North. (The photograph was taken in May 1991 at the time of her graduation with her ordinary BSc degree.)

March-April-May: This was the period in which, we realised later, Tessa took on too much. As her fourth and final year at university began, we expected it to be much the same as her third year — in which academic success had followed academic success with consummate ease. And for a month or so, things did, indeed, appear to be progressing according to plan. Then, one day in March or April, Tessa told us she had bumped into Katie — a member of the Fitness Foundation that Tessa had trained with years earlier. (I had put Tessa into this sports organization when she was about eight, and she had remained a member until she was 12. She had then dropped out, partly because of the awkward hours of the senior meetings and partly because she recoiled from the required sparring sessions.) Katie, she said, was a keen member of FF, and had urged her to rejoin the organisation. We raised no objection. Why should we have objected? Taking a break from one's studies to participate in physical activities is a good thing, isn't it? But within weeks of Tessa's reenrollment in FF, we noticed a change in her. She was less happy — whatever she might have claimed at the time, if we had stopped to ask her about her mood — and she was more tense. She was impatient, irritable, and intolerant of perceived shortcomings in others. Her criticism of me — she never missed an opportunity to claim that I was "dopey", "senile", etc. — was extremely distressing. I couldn't understand why she was constantly harassing me in this manner, and felt myself losing my self-confidence. Often, when I have spoken to people about the early stages of a loved one's mental illness, I have said: "All you know is that your relationship with the person is deteriorating disastrously, for no perceptible reason." You do not, as some pseudo-psychologists suggest, rush to judgment, and write the person off as "mad". In fact, you do the exact opposite: You extend the bounds of "normality" to accommodate the person's increasingly aberrant behaviour. And in my experience, you continue to do that until something happens that is so serious, so bizarre, that you simply can't do it any more. At that stage, you reach out for help — but probably find, as we did, that the mental health professionals are skeptical. After all, who are you to tell a man with a diploma on the wall what sort of diagnosis he should come up with? You are only a parent. You don't know anything. "That's just a 'domestic'," I was told by a Palmerston North psychiatric nurse in early 1995, after I had described an incident in which Tessa had erupted in anger. Such professionals apparently don't understand that, as a parent, you probably know your offspring well, and actually don't need a diploma to able to distinguish between in-character and seriously out-of-character behavior.¹  They also don't understand that, as a parent of a young adult who is sliding into psychosis, you yourself are not showing signs of abnormality by jumping up and down, banging on doors, and demanding attention. These are normal, not abnormal, reactions — however bothersome they may be to the professionals. But I am getting ahead of myself. Tessa was still two years away from the kind of behavior that, by any measure, was beyond the bounds of normality. All that can be said about her at this stage — apart from what I have said above — is that she appeared, at times, to be driven, almost frenetic. I remember watching her as she danced at her 21st birthday party — a crass occasion that was made almost unbearable by hideously loud rock music — and thinking that she seemed like a thing possessed. (That party and her almost simultaneous graduation with her ordinary BSc degree were the other big stressors of the period.) In hindsight, I realise that there were a few signs of the approaching paranoia (see Article No 2). There was also a complete loss of her sense of humor. But I was probably too preoccupied by her inappropriate rudeness (which is, in itself, a sign of schizophrenia) to notice these. Tessa's comment (June 11, 2006): At the beginning of my Honors year, everything was going so well and things were just falling into my lap. But being very successful can be just as stressful as failing. I felt I had a lot of pressure on me, because every day my Honors supervisor and others I worked with said: "Tessa's going to get First Class Honors."

¹ In early 1996, after Tessa had returned to Palmerston North, I received a letter from the degree merchants at Massey University inviting me to enrol in a course that would teach me how to recognize the incipient signs of psychosis and/or of relapse into psychosis.

May-December: Tessa remained obsessed with the Fitness Foundation. Ten years later, all I can remember about this period is that there was almost no communication between us, as Tessa withdrew into her shell and spent countless hours drawing diagrams of arcane exercise routines. If she talked about anything at all, she talked about FF. She bought more and more of the gear she needed to advance in the organization, and even an "FF Bible" that was printed, if I remember correctly, in Russia. FF gradings came and went, and impressive certificates of achievement and coveted badges of rank were assiduously acquired. (All of these would be lost during the calamitous trip to Australia.) Meanwhile, she seemed to lose all interest in her studies, and was saved, in her final exams, only by her exceptionally good memory. But she didn't get the first-class honors that the university had expected her to get — or even second-class honors, division one. Her marks, which I believe the university rechecked for accuracy — were only good enough for second-class honors, division two. It was, however, an increbible achievement. That Tessa could continue to pass exams, and even get A and B grades, well into 1994, never ceases to amaze me.

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1992
Residence: Flatted with some other young people in Palmerston North.
Occupation: Worked at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (later HortResearch) in Palmerston North.

January: With her science degree, Tessa soon found a job in a section of the DSIR that was working to improve the country's apple crop. This sometimes involved going to Hawke's Bay to collect samples for analysis. She flatted with some friends during the holiday period, and came home in January to start looking for a place of her own. The place she eventually found was a small room in a small house she would share with two others, about a kilometre from where we lived. As this was, we supposed, the start of her life as an independent person, we thought we would ease the transition to responsibility by buying her a complete set of pine furniture — the kind of furniture she would someday be able to use in the children's room of a proper home. I'm not completely sure what happened next, as we walked toward the furniture shop. I was a little apart from Tessa and her mother, and didn't hear the remark that prompted Tessa to explode, turn around, and angrily stalk off — with her mother in pursuit. But even today, in 2006, I remember my feeling of utter dismay. I also have in my mind a clear picture of her unusual gait, as she strode away from us. I remember thinking vaguely: "That's an odd way to walk." As she lifted each trailing foot, it flicked slightly sideways before being brought forward to make the next step. In early 1996, her landlady in Dunedin, who knew a lot about schizophrenia, having been married to a sufferer for 20 years, said to me: "She walks with a gait." This might, the landlady said, have been the result of suffering a small stroke during birth. (She did not know, of course, that Tessa's birth was a "frank breech" birth in which the bottom emerges first and the head last — the kind of birth in which oxygen deprivation can occur. I was there, watching, as the doctor pulled her out, wiggling her tiny body from side to side in much the same way as you wiggle a nail to free it from a hole.) Anyway, I waited on the footpath until, after some pleading, Tessa's mother persuaded her to resume the (now rather gloomy) shopping expedition. The furniture was bought, but never ended up in a children's room. After a year in Palmerston North, it was trucked to Auckland, then back to Palmerston North, and then back to Auckland, before being sold to a secondhand dealer to raise cash for the trip to Australia. It turned out to be the most expensive furniture we have ever bought.
August: One day, Tessa suddenly announced that she had decided to quit her job and go to Japan, where she was born, to learn Japanese. Her mother was appalled by this proposal, and transmuted her alarm into a massive attack on me. Matters from 30 years earlier — from the time I settled in Japan in 1962 — were dredged up and comprehensively condemned, in an exercise of stunning irrelevance. And it was all to no purpose, for Tessa was easily persuaded to explore other possibilities for her future. I suggested she consider a career in journalism, and when she seemed agreeable I took her to Wellington to be interviewed for a position in a Canterbury University course. The trip was a total waste of time. The lecturer asked her: "Why is a free press important in modern society?" and she had no idea what to say. She is clever, but she is not a philosophical thinker. She is largely oblivious of the big issues of the day. That's why I always laugh when I read about how the 1960s pop psychoanalyst R D Laing characterized schizophrenia as a sane response to an insane world.¹  Tessa has never been concerned about the world, or even understood a great deal about it. And if you define the word "world" differently, and say that it can also mean the child's effective environment, I can only point out that the conditions she found in New Zealand, after she arrived here at the age of two, were conditions she thrived in until the age of 21.²  If her social milieu was "schizophrenogenic" (to use a Laingian term), I would like to know in what way it was.
December: Towards the end of the year, Tessa reached a decision about her future: she would enter Auckland University and study Japanese there. Fortunately, we had friends in Auckland, who kindly agreed to let her stay with them until she found a place of her own. At last, things seemed to be settled! She would finance her first year of study, we would finance her second year, and she would take out a student loan to finance her third year. Continued

¹ Ironically, when I was studying psychology in the 1970s, I was a fan of R D Laing, Joseph Berke, Thomas S Szasz, and other luminaries of the anti-psychiatry movement. I still have The Divided Self (1960), by Laing, and The Myth of Mental Illness (1962) and The Manufacture of Madness (1971), by Szasz. In my library, I also have The Radical Therapist (1974), a collection of essays from which I have culled the following gems: (1) "We, of the Mental Patients' Liberation Project, are former mental patients. We've all been labelled schizophrenic, manic depressive, psychotic, and neurotic — labels that have degraded us, made us feel inferior. Now we're beginning to get together — beginning to see that these labels are not true but have been thrown at us because we have refused to conform — refused to adjust to a society where to be normal is to be an unquestioning robot, without emotion and creativity..." (2) "There's no condition called schizophrenia: it's a term of personal and social invalidation...we can clearly see that the diagnosis of schizophrenia is made because of the problems the doctor has, rather than the patient..." — Joseph Berke.

² In a review of 188 studies on schizophrenia, from 46 countries including Argentina, China, Iran, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and the US, a research team headed by University of Queensland psychiatry professor John McGrath, MD, PhD, found that schizophrenia rates were nearly twice as high for immigrants as for native-born people. — Public Library of Science Medicine, May 2005.

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