Review of W.J.T. Mitchell, Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020). Pp. iii + 176. $22.50.

Little did I know when I met Tom Mitchell in the summer of 1983 in Evanston, Illinois that we would both have children who would later be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Tom was one of my professors at the School of Criticism and Theory, held at Northwestern University that summer. His son, Gabe, was just turning 10 at the time, my daughter 3. Both would be struck with this devastating illness in the prime of life around the time of their 21st birthday, as are many others. It is difficult enough to know that one’s child will probably never be the same again, that his or her dreams will likely never be realized.  It is something else, however, for parents to see their child’s life—or for siblings to see their brother’s or sister’s life—come definitively to an abrupt end.

The entire Mitchell family is contributing to what is nothing less than a lasting tribute to Gabe and his life. Tom has written this book, to which is added a postscript of fourteen poems by his wife, Janice. Their daughter, Carmen, is creating a film about her brother’s life.  Schizophrenia can break families apart, so it is indeed touching to see that it can also bring them together in a unified purpose.

Any book on the subject of mental illness and suicide has to be extremely difficult to write. The structure of this book reflects some of the decisions Mitchell has made. He chooses to divide his narrative into two roughly equal parts. The first outlines the evolution of the illness itself with all of the unanswered questions that go up until the time of the psychotic break, followed by a creative period of eighteen years, which then ends suddenly. The psychotic break has the “advantage,” if one can even call it that, of lending clarity to a previously confusing set of behaviors, but it also usually brings with it a tragic sense of lost future opportunities. The first part of the book concludes with Gabe’s suicide at the age of thirty-eight by jumping from the balcony of his apartment on the fifty-ninth floor of his building. One senses a kind of relief from the author to move on past this painful point to the second part of his book, which turns to everything Gabe was trying to achieve in his life.

Mitchell does a great service to the families of children with schizophrenia by making very clear that although one may be labeled with this diagnosis it does not define the person suffering from the disease. Every person is unique, and this is all the more true of those with schizophrenia. Mitchell’s son, Gabe, is simply not ‘a case’ of this illness. Gabe was not one to take his diagnosis as the final word.  A highly intelligent and artistically gifted individual, he fought the disease with every ounce of mental fortitude he could muster. He studied film and produced a number of screenplays, which at once strove to rise above his mental illness, portraying his capacity for tremendously insightful observations, but which also reflected dark undercurrents in his psyche.  As Mitchell puts it, alluding to the title of his book: “Gabe lived on the border of a world that most of us know only fleetingly—a world of suffering and shattering both relieved and exacerbated by grandiose fantasies, expressed by a fierce determination to put those fantasies to work and build a world out of the ruins. He was a mental traveler” (88).

The book traces not only Gabe’s journey into madness, but his father’s journey with him along the way, supporting his son’s ideas as much as he reasonably could. Whereas the first part of the book touches upon the inevitable frustrations of parenting a child with schizophrenia, its second part takes a much more sympathetic view of the son. The father and the son develop an extraordinarily close relationship. Mitchell goes so far as to call Gabe “my best friend” (73). The roles of caregiver and patient are reversed during one six-week period when Gabe takes care of his father after the latter is confined to a wheelchair because of a back injury. Gabe becomes a collaborator with his father in his research, helping him better understand a number of iconic images and leading him to websites his father wouldn’t have normally known about. A highly regarded University of Chicago professor, Mitchell even considers leaving his job at one point and making movies with Gabe. He admires his son’s tenacity in proving Michel Foucault (author of an important history of madness) wrong about the “unproductive” nature of madness. Mitchell saw firsthand how hard his son worked to produce a considerable body of artistic work. Mitchell rightly suggests here the value of the lives of those suffering from such a debilitating disease as schizophrenia. We will never understand how hard they struggle, and they deserve our respect for everything they accomplish, however great or small it may be.

Understandably, Mitchell has a difficult time letting his son go, as does his wife, Janice. Her poems, attached as a postscript, express the constant longing she feels for her son’s presence. “You are still with us,” she writes in a poem written three days after his death. There is also the haunting thought of what might have gone through Gabe’s mind before he jumped over the railing of his apartment. She thinks of him as a newborn baby and on important dates such as his birthday, family holidays, and the anniversary of his death. In one poem, she can’t help simply asking ‘Why?’ and, at its conclusion, entreats her son directly: “Stay with us now/In some way/Stay with us.”

I recommend this book strongly to any “fellow traveler” who has a son, daughter, or sibling with schizophrenia. It is also a poignant lesson to any reader about the uniqueness of every human life.