2012 essay details the hell of schizophrenia

ner as brilliant, funny and determined.

“Incredibly intelligent, very well read,” Hargreaves recalled. “We discussed books and art.”

Danner wrote in the essay about the lack of consistent support from relatives and some old friends. At the time of her death, her sister Jennifer was serving as Danner’s guardian over the now-slain woman’s objections.

Her mom died about a decade ago.

Danner held down jobs as an information technology and management information system professional, a high-stress business in which she dealt with tight deadlines, budget constraints and complicated problems.

Despite her successes, the stigma attached to her illness led to several firings.

“Even people who know you, when informed you are mentally ill, assume things about you that aren’t true,” wrote Danner. “Mental illness is just that, an illness, a treatable illness and most of the public needs to be educated about that fact.”

By 2012, she had already endured more than 10 hospitalizations and bounced from clinic to clinic seeking help, according to a friend.

But she was also in therapy with a trusted mental health professional and optimistic about the future.

Even in the good times, separating reality from her perceptions became a constant, exhausting struggle.

“Was that sound I heard, I ask myself, really carried through sound waves or was it all in my head?” she asked in the essay.

She posed other, larger questions too: Why aren’t the homeless mentally ill housed and treated? What about mentally ill prison inmates? How about diagnosing at-risk groups like veterans before the illness strikes?

Danner described how she was aware of her disease only when she felt well, and never when afflicted by one of the episodes that turned her life upsidedown. Disorienting flashbacks came during life’s mundane moments — as she took a shower, washed dishes or cleaned her apartment.

“Memories of roaming the streets of New York in the wee hours of the morning are particularly disturbing because one (sic) more than one of those occasions, it was my intention to kill myself — I carried a knife, you see, and was working up the courage to slice through a vein,” she wrote.

By the end of her treatise, Danner expressed hope that the readers leave with a better understanding of what life is like for a schizophrenic.

“Flashbacks, depression and stigma,” she wrote. “It tends to break relationships that should last a lifetime, provides for a stupefying amount of isolation and, if allowed to, can significantly affect one’s self-esteem.”