Schizophrenia speaks

A66-year-old woman is dead, felled by two bullets from a police firearm. A schizophrenic, she was perceived by the sergeant who shot her to be a threat as she swung a baseball bat in her Bronx apartment. Deborah Danner was a psychiatric patient and a casualty. She was also a human being with intelligence, anxieties, aspirations and a complex inner life — all revealed in a 2012 essay that achingly described her battle with a mental illness that drags millions into darkness and confusion.

The essay, which Danner shared with her legal services attorney, surfaced this week. It is a bracing education on how the ailment, still a mystery to many, grips the psyche.

“Any chronic illness is a curse,” Danner begins. “Schizophrenia is no different — its only ‘saving grace,’ if you will, is that as far as I know it’s not a fatal disease.

“One of the reasons that it’s a curse is that the nature of the beast is a complete loss of control — of your emotions, of your intellect, your instincts, your common sense — basically of your sense of yourself.”

So haunted by the possibility of losing herself was Danner, she eerily wrote: “We are all aware of the all too frequent news stories about the mentally ill who come up against law enforcement instead of mental health professionals and end up dead.”

Unknown thousands, struggling with serious schizophrenia, live among those of us lucky enough to consider ourselves mentally healthy.

Many are treated. Being undiagnosed or falling off medication doesn’t necessarily make patients a danger to others — but sometimes it does, and more often, it makes them live in fear of themselves.

Look with decency upon the afflicted. Be sensitive to the civil war raging inside their minds.