Saturday, January 14, 2006
Taming a defiant mind: Lori Farmer's recovery from mental illness opens window on insanity defense - Seattle P-I
... She was sick. The voices weren't real. God would never urge her to hurt someone -- least of all her 4-year-old son ... She believed, with a rigid certainty she can still barely express, that she was saving him. She tried to die with him. Instead, a Pierce County judge ruled her criminally insane.
Now, after a decade at Western State Hospital in Lakewood -- most of it in a locked ward with other mentally ill people sent there instead of prison after committing crimes -- she is free.
She has struggled to get hold of a defiant mind and is trying to rebuild a life.
...
Years ago, Farmer's parents misread the early hints of mental illness as signs of their daughter being a teenager.
She always thought people were looking at her and whispering behind her back. She often seethed with anger. Her father, Deane Farmer, remembers how she sometimes planted herself on the couch and glared at him, inexplicably fuming.
Then one day, she began screaming that demons were coming out of the bathroom mirror at her. She started seeing "shadow people" and feeling evil spirits brushing against her skin, crawling lightly on her arms.
She began talking about things that didn't make sense to her family. That an unseen camera had been clicking pictures of her every move. That Jon Anderson, lead singer of the rock group Yes, was her father in a previous life. That he had brought her to Earth in a spaceship.
...
Farmer knew something was wrong. Other people didn't spend full days sobbing. She would go to church but otherwise isolate herself in her Tacoma apartment. She didn't have any friends. She'd sit alone and play her guitar.
Some days she felt almost normal. Some days she couldn't pull herself out of bed.
"I felt like somebody hit my soul with a Mack truck," she recalled.
...
... She was sick. The voices weren't real. God would never urge her to hurt someone -- least of all her 4-year-old son ... She believed, with a rigid certainty she can still barely express, that she was saving him. She tried to die with him. Instead, a Pierce County judge ruled her criminally insane.
Now, after a decade at Western State Hospital in Lakewood -- most of it in a locked ward with other mentally ill people sent there instead of prison after committing crimes -- she is free.
She has struggled to get hold of a defiant mind and is trying to rebuild a life.
...
Years ago, Farmer's parents misread the early hints of mental illness as signs of their daughter being a teenager.
She always thought people were looking at her and whispering behind her back. She often seethed with anger. Her father, Deane Farmer, remembers how she sometimes planted herself on the couch and glared at him, inexplicably fuming.
Then one day, she began screaming that demons were coming out of the bathroom mirror at her. She started seeing "shadow people" and feeling evil spirits brushing against her skin, crawling lightly on her arms.
She began talking about things that didn't make sense to her family. That an unseen camera had been clicking pictures of her every move. That Jon Anderson, lead singer of the rock group Yes, was her father in a previous life. That he had brought her to Earth in a spaceship.
...
Farmer knew something was wrong. Other people didn't spend full days sobbing. She would go to church but otherwise isolate herself in her Tacoma apartment. She didn't have any friends. She'd sit alone and play her guitar.
Some days she felt almost normal. Some days she couldn't pull herself out of bed.
"I felt like somebody hit my soul with a Mack truck," she recalled.
...
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