When Did I Die?
"Five thousand years of ignorance have stigmatized the mentally ill so severely that even today in this Age of Enlightenment complete recovery from this illness is virtually impossible. Despite the severity of my own illness I found it difficult to identify with my fellow inmates on that first unforgettable nightmare that was my first 24 hours on the locked ward. I was struck more painfully than any physical blow I have ever been dealt by the thought that I was one of 'them'...the crazies that most people only read about or see in the movies and television. At that very moment of truth I was standing before a sink in the lavatory. At first I didn't recognize the emaciated face that stared back at me from the mirror above the sink. And then came recognition and with it a towering rage. I picked up a wedge of soap that was perched on the edge of the scarred porcelain bowl. Without thinking I swiftly drew a skull around my own image with the wet substance that crumbled between the pressure of my fingers and the glass. I added a solitary tear and scrawled the words, WHEN DID I DIE? below the weeping skull. Later that same day I used a marking pen to duplicate the self-portrait on a section of paper towel. That sketch, the first to reflect my own painful illness, was to become the foundation of my first painting."
Richard M. Lachman
The biography of a man who succeeded in producing the most incredible and powerful collection of art works on the subject of mental illness ever created by an artist - an amazing series of paintings, drawings, collages, and "sculptured portraits" numbering in the thousands... A sometimes ferocious, sometimes gentle, but always a meticulously blended construction of life forms and mind-forms captured on canvas or paper by an artist who literally painted his way out of hell. A man with no training as an artist...or for that matter no thought of becoming an artist as he approached the mid-years of his own unbelievable true-life story. At eight o'clock on the morning of February 23, 1965, Richard Lachman, a 36-year-old business executive, stepped into the corridor of San Francisco's renowned St. Francis Hotel and closed the door of his suite behind him. He did not know that he was also closing the door on the comfortable life that he had always known, that he would not reach the elevators, nor a round of meetings with the staff of his Oakland office, scheduled before his flight North to his Seattle home later in the day. As he rounded a corner in the hallway he was confronted by an iron pipe and plank scaffold that had been erected for the installation of a new overhead sprinkling system. Stepping aside to avoid the structure, his heel caught on the edge of the protective canvas that had been laid over the carpet. The slight tug on the canvas jarred the scaffold enough to cause a short length of iron pipe to roll from the top plank, striking Lachman on the back of his head and shoulders, hard enough to fracture his seventh cervical vertebra. In that instant he was catapulted into a nightmare that was to last nearly two decades, a nightmare of jail cells and courtrooms, medical emergency rooms and mental hospitals, a violent world of broken minds and broken bodies, a world previously unimaginable in the ordered life of Richard Lachman. Lachman was born July 4, 1928. His early years were spent in the affluent comfort of his family home with his parents, one older brother, and a younger sister. He was educated in private schools and was taught to drive by his grandmother's chauffeur in her Packard limousine. Upon graduation from Lakeside, a highly esteemed preparatory school in Seattle, he attended the University of Washington for half a year. Married at 18, he quit the university to pursue other interests: working in the family's century old diamond business, developing industrial diamond tools with the unique talent he demonstrated as both an inventor and designer, His patents had a substantial impact, not only on the jewelry industry, but on the aerospace, mining and construction industries as well. His first patent, for a spring-back watch photo case, was sold to Bulova and led to the development of the first practical Braille wristwatch, a strange prophecy for the role Lachman's concern for the blind would play in the future. He traveled extensively during his early years. One summer was spent touring Europe visiting art museums and historic sites. His mother, a woman with a vast knowledge of the arts, was for several years a director of the Seattle Art Museum's docent training program. Lachman's twenty-two year marriage produced five children. He prospered and was an energetic, productive, and happy man until that fateful February morning in 1965. But his injuries did not seem serious immediately after the accident and he appeared to recover. The fractured vertebra was not discovered until several months later when x-rays were taken to find the cause for recurring headaches and seizures. Fearing post-trauma epilepsy, the doctors treating him prescribed Dylantin, an anti-convulsant drug, to which he reacted badly, with abnormal mood elevations. Mysoline, another anti-convulsant drug, was substituted and a far more severe illness began. Mysoline was developed by the Ayerst Laboratories in 1954, and it was at that time that Ayerst applied to the FDA for a license to market it's new anti-convulsant drug. According to Ayerst the difference between Mysoline and existing anti-convulsant medications was that Mysoline was relatively free of any known adverse side effects. This claim was supported by hundreds of case histories, which Ayerst included with its application. The drug was approved and the license to distribute it granted. What the FDA and the majority of physicians prescribing the drug did not know was that the Ayerst Company had failed to include with its test results the case histories of numerous patients who developed severe emotional and physical problems while being treated with Mysoline: problems that included violent antisocial and destructive behavior, psychotic episodes, and impaired body functions affecting not only the mind but virtually all physical and sensory functions. The Ayerst Company failed to make it generally known to physicians that it's product, when ingested, potentiated and did in fact convert to Phenobarbital, a substance known to have numerous side-effects including status epilepticus when abruptly withdrawn, and the additional side effects of cardiac and pulmonary arrest and sometimes sudden death. It was this drug, Mysoline, that was prescribed for Richard Lachman... and so the holocaust commenced. His 1966 "journal" contained the following statement:
''...I thought I was getting better... My neck rarely bothers me, but now the headaches come and go, and everything seems out of proportion. My memory has gotten so bad that it's become embarrassing. Sometimes I'm asked a question and by the time I start to answer I can't remember what the question was. My handwriting is worse than ever and my thoughts keep wandering... confused... sometimes they make no sense... I dictated some notes for my secretary today... she played them back for me and they didn't make any sense at all... I keep trying to cover up the mistakes but that only seems to make things worse. I don't dare drive my car. It's like living in a daydream that keeps floating off from place to place. There doesn't seem to be any direction at all to anything. I try listening to conversations... but they're filled with empty spaces. In the last couple of months I've passed out three or four times from 'drinking too much Ballantine's'...I know I wasn't drinking anything on at least two occasions that I was 'drunk'...But it was easier to let people think I was than trying to explain what's happening. How the hell can I explain what I don't even understand? It seems like the only time I'm comfortable anymore is when I stay in the bedroom with the blinds drawn and I can't hear the outside noises. It seems like everything frightens me... But what am I afraid of???"
Another entry made soon after this reads:
"We were supposed to go to the Seattle Symphony concert at the new center last night with John and Betty (Col. and Mrs. John C.Hoberg). It was a catastrophe... For two days I tried to go into Frederick's to buy a dinner jacket. The terrible unexplainable fear was all over me. I tried a dozen times to force myself to go into the store but I couldn't do it. I went down to the barbershop on Sandpoint Way to get a haircut, but the same thing happened. I just couldn't force myself to walk into the shop. It was like I was totally consumed by fear. I can't talk to anyone anymore... When I returned home I lied and said they were too busy to take me. I wore my old white jacket. We met John and Betty in the dining room of the WAC (Washington Athletic Club) for dinner before the concert. We sat down at the table and ordered. But before the order even arrived the fear was all over me again. I suddenly announced that I had too much to drink and was sick and had to return home. I just told them to go ahead without me. I apologized and just turned and left without waiting for anyone to comment. I took a cab home. I'm beginning to think there is something wrong but I don't know what... Something IS wrong... Terribly terribly terribly terribly terribly wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong....." And there was. Richard Lachman was taking Mysoline three to four times every day... a drug that should have carried the warning: BEWARE OF BARBITURATE TOXICITY - CAN BE FATAL IF UNRECOGNIZED. Richard Lachman was a barbiturate junkie, prescribed so by his physicians. When the anxiety and the seizures continued, the doctors, seeking physiological causes for his symptoms, diagnosed his illness as multiple sclerosis, a diagnosis that was almost welcomed by Lachman because it removed the stigma of mental illness and gave him a respectable physiological crutch upon which to blame his terrible agony. Even being told he had only ten to eighteen months to live was a relief. Death was an acceptable substitute for the tortured life he was leading. He was in and out of hospitals 49 times between 1966 and 1972. His wife withdrew completely, and turned his children against him. In a subsequent statement made by Richard Lachman after his recovery, he described her actions:
"My former wife of more than two decades was so intimidated by the threat of genetic deficiency and the potential impact of the court's finding of insanity upon the lives of our five half-grown children, that she denied the existence of medical and legal findings and endowed me with a moral deficiency fabricated with the aid of her nephew, her sister and brother-in-law. My children were raised to adulthood believing that I had abandoned them and their mother in favor of a world of high-living luxury -- travels, alcoholism, drug addiction, whoring, and gambling -- financed by my 'doting parents' and from the sale of her family's 'treasured heirlooms' which she claims I had stolen from her at the time of our divorce. During those most impressionable years of my children's lives they were nourished with lies, half-truths, anger and fear, with predictable results. While their hatred of me for 'abandoning' my family was being so carefully cultivated, I was, in fact, a ward of the state -- an insane person committed to various hospitals including the locked ward of Western State Hospital less than thirty-five miles from our family home." Yet Lachman was still struggling to lead some semblance of a normal life. In 1968, at his wife's request, he entrusted a salesman's sample line of diamond and gold rings to her nephew, who had lived in their home and was like another son to the couple. The rings were intended to aid the nephew in establishing his own business in the San Francisco Bay area. Lachman also entrusted a large collection of loose and mounted diamond rings to his wife who was supposed to return them to a New York dealer. Both of these diamond collections disappeared. At the time of the Lachmans' 1969 divorce, both his wife and the nephew denied ever having these valuable items in their possession and claimed that Lachman "enlisted the aid of a prostitute girlfriend to peddle the diamonds on the streets of San Francisco." Richard Lachman, already severely stigmatized by a court's finding of mental illness, lacked any credibility whatsoever in the eyes of the judge who heard their divorce case. Even his own attorney believed that Lachman was responsible for the disappearance of the diamonds. When he left the courtroom, he had not only lost his health and credibility; he was also branded by the court as a liar and a thief. This testimony, by his now former wife and her nephew, and the court's subsequent ruling on this matter, utterly destroyed his reputation, not only in the business world and the economic community, but in the very secure and comfortable position he had enjoyed all of his life in the social community as well. The only future Lachman faced in 1969 was a death by seizure and multiple sclerosis in the locked ward of the mental hospital he would call home. Ten years later, in 1979, the nephew, grown to manhood with a family of his own, recognized the terrible injustice that had been imposed upon the man who had taken him into his home as a son. He not only admitted his own role in the grotesque plot that had cost Lachman so dearly, but also admitted that he had returned the "missing" diamonds to Lachman's former wife, who caused them to be sold and delivered to a San Francisco diamond merchant. Even today, the woman who gave him five children and then taught them to hate their father, continues to vilify her former husband while denying her own misconduct, which included theft, perjury, bankruptcy fraud, forgery, and possibly attempted homicide. Although the proof of this misconduct is now overwhelming, Lachman has, in recent years, refused to take any legal action against the woman who was his wife for twenty-two years, insisting instead that she too was victimized by the same mental illness imposed so painfully upon him for so many years. When Lachman and his wife were divorced in the midst of his terrible illness, his children literally "divorced" themselves from him also. The nightmare continued as he saw his mother withdraw from the world and his father assume the awesome burden of genetic guilt at the sight of his son's mental and physical destruction. In Lachman's words:
"I have looked into mirrors and watched a robust, athletic, successful business man of 37, turn into a rheumy-eyed, wrinkled, toothless old man with skin the color of fish bellies, and chaos where there used to be intellect...I have been beaten with clubs and more painfully with words... I have been shot with bullets and more painfully with drugs... I remember being dead and crying because I was in pain." His attempts to work were futile. He could not cope with ordinary, everyday responsibilities. His hospital sojourns varied from a few days to a year and a half, as he lived in a terrible fantasy world of depression, drugs, suicide attempts, physical injuries, and seizures. Within himself, he adopted the survival technique of many mental patients, by assuming a role. He believed himself to be a doctor with Ph.D. degrees from several universities and that he was at the hospital to do "research." He convinced other patients and even the staff that he was indeed "Doctor Lachman," a role that continued for several years and created an unusual circumstance in 1976. Upon his recovery, his memory was impaired for a long period of time due to the trauma he had suffered, and his assumed role of "doctor" followed him into the real world until, upon investigation, he discovered otherwise. As "Doctor" Lachman he was elected to the Board of Trustees of Matteo Ricci College in Seattle, which became something of an embarrassment to the good fathers who run the college when it was discovered their trustee was an imposter. He was asked to resign. In a 1977 letter to his friend and mentor, Lou Guzzo, former managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and also a trustee of the college, Lachman explained very movingly his interpretations of mental illness and his "academic" background:
"I received your very kind letter – I doubt if you or anyone else will ever fully appreciate the importance of your note to me and Alice. "With respect to your comments on my 'academic' background, several months ago, I asked my attorney to obtain copies of my transcripts as they might be useful in establishing 'damages' in my litigation with the manufacturers of the drug, Mysoline -- the replies to my request for academic documentation left me, at least temporarily, in a state of utter confusion. "It seems that my 'doctorate' did not come from a prestigious university – but rather I graduated with high honors from psychiatric ward of Western State Hospital. Until recently I had attributed my inability to recall any specific details of that period in my life to drug-related brain damage. In the weeks that followed these academic revelations, I spent a great deal of time searching various records for the 'truth of my being'. "What I subsequently learned was enough to keep me in convulsions for the rest of my life... apparently my graduation ceremony took place on the 'King County Custodial Ward in the corridor that runs from the men's can to the Day Lounge.' The President of my alma mater was not only a superior kleptomaniac but an excellent calligrapher as well -- he had an uncanny talent for stealing diplomas and citations off the walls wherever he might find them, pasting the name of his fellow patients over that of the original owner -- running off all the Xerox copies he wanted -- and then returning the original document to the wall from whence it came. In my own case life outside of the protective insulation of a psychiatric hospital had become so unbearable that I physically and mentally retreated from the stark realities of a world that for me had become hostile and intolerable. "Under ordinary circumstances I might have simply, and even successfully, ignored those elements in my life that had become so threatening. Had I done so this built-in protective mechanism which all of us possess to a greater or lesser degree would have been adequate. When we use this protective mantle of self-imposed sensual blindness, our 'modern' society accepts this particular method of providing an emotional sanctuary without reservation -- we call this device our 'blind-spot' and label it neurosis. When we retreat fully into the world of fantasy, which can exist only in our minds, we label this same device psychosis. "Just as our 'physical being' rejects the intrusion of foreign substance, our mental being rejects the pain of reality and fights this reality with the anti-bodies of mental anguish -- fantasy. "Because the dangerous properties of an anti-convulsant drug went unrecognized for nearly a decade, I was left powerless to deal with even the simplest of confrontations. For a number of years the only peace I could find was in the shelter of my own fantasies -- for me fantasy became fact and the nightmare of my own desperation became a fantasy -- the truth as it existed at that time was for me just a bad dream which could neither penetrate nor harm my new world. "Had this sanctuary not existed I would surely have taken my own life. "I do not understand the mechanics of thought any more than I understand the mechanics of faith -- I know only that both exist and for that I am grateful. "Because your demand for integrity is so fierce and because you make this demand firstly upon yourself -- both Alice and I find your friendship valuable beyond any words.
Your friend,
Richard M. Lachman
"P.S. Every time I think of the good fathers' demand for my resignation under threat of exposure and embarrassment, it 'cracks me up,' I'm tempted to write the story myself -- 'Escaped nut from Western State Hospital captured by priest – elected to Board of Trustees".
"Oh, yes -- I nearly forgot -- my colleague from the psychiatric ward promised to make me an admiral if I take him out for a hamburger -- and if I throw in french fries, he'll toss in the 'Croix de Guerre,' the V.C. or the D.F.C.". "I've decided to take your advice and drop the Doctor".
As ever, your friend
Admiral Richard M. Lachman, D.F.C.
A portion of Lou Guzzo's response follows:
"Dear Admiral Lachman: Routine or humdrum letters are quickly answered and dispensed with, but one like yours of a few weeks ago has a sledgehammer impact and cannot be tossed off lightly. "Frankly, I have read and re-read your last letter at least a dozen times. No letter has ever had a greater effect on me. It was the most truthful, soul-bearing, intimate letter anybody has ever written to me, and the net effect is that I am humbled and honored to have you as a friend. In my lifetime I have never come across anyone with your courage and convictions. For you to write what you did in cutting across the grain and investigating your life and yourself took a measure of strength and inner moral fiber the likes of which I have never witnessed. You have enriched me by giving me an example of what can be done with the words, 'personal integrity.' Never tell me again that you might be inferior to others; you are ten feet tall in my book."
A strong friendship between Guzzo and Lachman still exists.
As part of his therapy during a stay at Western State Hospital and on the strength of his background in art history, Lachman was asked to teach an art class to "handicapped" patients. The "handicapped" of many turned out to be blindness. "How do you describe a Picasso to a blind person?" he wondered. The ingenious madman went to a neighborhood drugstore and bought several one-dollar prints of Picasso, Miro, and Chagall paintings. He raised the principal lines and color fields with architectural tape and the blind students were able to "see" the paintings through their fingers. He even taught them to "paint" their own art by using collage techniques that could be "seen" by touch. Intent on his own personal escape, Lachman began to sketch -- on paper towels, any paper he could get his hands on. He sketched sometimes for twenty hours a day, and amassed a huge quantity of art works, His vast collection of drawings, done while a mental patient, has been viewed with intense interest by mental health professionals, art critics, journalists, and laymen alike. They reflect brilliantly the profoundly moving, emotional experiences of the mentally ill person and the thought processes of such an altered mind. Seattle psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond E. Vath, assumed the responsibility for Lachman's care in the fall of 1971. Following an abortive suicide attempt by Lachman, Dr. Vath concluded from his own medical investigation that Lachman's symptoms were not consistent with his diagnosis of seizure disorder secondary to atypical multiple sclerosis. He also wondered why Lachman's blood contained such high barbiturate levels. At the time, Lachman weighed only 120 pounds on a frame that normally carried 190. Dr. Vath suspected Mysoline after reading a pharmaceutical manual different from the one commonly used by pharmacists and physicians, which told of its tendency to potentiate and convert to phenobarbitol when combined with natural body chemicals. Dr. Vath began to withdraw his patient from Mysoline in ten percent increments over a four-month period, a time of hell on earth for Richard Lachman. Withdrawal from Mysoline is worse than that from heroin. Dr. Vath planned to place Lachman in a locked ward during treatment, but a recovering woman patient named Alice Nelson, whom Lachman had met and married six months earlier, volunteered to stay by his side and care for him if he could be in the comparatively more desirable atmosphere of an open ward. So Alice began her four-month vigil over Richard as he went through his tortured agony. Each time the Mysoline dosage was decreased by ten percent, a day later the hell would begin. The sweating, shaking, feeling that he was a volcano about to explode, would last for three to four days and then taper off. And another ten percent decrease would take place with the torment beginning all over again. He slept little during this painful time of endless withdrawal. He was broken in body but not in spirit by the time he emerged from the ordeal. And on May 3, 1972, Richard Lachman walked out of Fairfax Psychiatric Hospital... never to return again. It was time to commence the long, and at times seemingly endless, process of physical and mental recovery. The drawings he started doing in the hospital have evolved into a full time career. A prolific artist, Lachman produces twenty to thirty sketches a day in preparation for the two or three paintings he completes every week. For a while he thought all artists were equally productive. He has never had an art lesson and he has developed his own distinctive technique: raised surfaces using a variety of mediums -- pen and ink, acrylic mixed with glazes, watercolor, enamel, copper stripping, collage, and sometimes slashing the paint across his works using the wood end of the brush for special effect. He told one television interviewer he uses so many different techniques because "...I don't know what the hell I'm doing." Many of his paintings are meant to be felt as well as looked at so that the blind can enjoy his art. Louis Guzzo, who was arts critic for The Seattle Times before he became managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reviewed Lachman's work in October of 1976 as follows:
"On rare occasions a new light breaks through the artistic maze to startle, delight, or captivate those who see it. One such ray is Richard Lachman, who, like many others, has come to art later in life but who, in essence was deeply involved in creativity and esthetics unknowingly through most of his life. His emergence is still too new to measure in full, and his extraordinary potential has only now shown buds on the stem. But his work reflects, alternately, a monumental intelligence, the whimsy of a poet, the playfulness of a free spirit, the painful depths of a man who has seen both hell and heaven on earth, and, perhaps most remarkably, a mating of the scientific or factual with the philosophical or conjectural. He has experimented successfully with materials and techniques that could bring an entirely new dimension to the visual arts. His work -- at least many of the very new efforts -- has a multidimensional feel to it, as if it were created to be felt with the fingertips by the blind. By coincidence, he has in fact developed a medium that will bring visual art to the blind. It is often difficult to determine who Lachman is because of the great variation in moods, styles, and techniques. Some of his pieces could be the work of a superior editorial caricaturist, who combines wry humor with a furious sense of justice. Some are a 'lark,' totally devoid of rancor but not to be construed as being nonsensical because of a wisp of contemporary commentary. And some reach the soul with an enduring grip that remains tight forever in the memory. For example, I defy anyone to try forgetting Lachman's 'Dachau' or his series of paintings of human hands and what they signify. No ashcanner or dadaist, Lachman, with continuing concentration and devotion to his striking innovations, could be an artist to watch because of his ingenious use of chemicals and other materials to produce revolutionary effects on flat surfaces. The careful observer will see behind the surfaces the skills of the geologist, engineer, physicist, chemist, gemologist... all which skills, incidentally, the artist possesses and has mated to a superb creative promise."
Richard Lachman has painted his way out of madness into a highly promising future and a restored comfortable lifestyle. He loves what he is doing and feels as though he is on a perpetual twenty-four hour a day vacation. A multimillion-dollar suit Richard Lachman filed against the Ayerst Laboratories in 1976was settled out of court in late December 1983, for an undisclosed amount. When he is not painting, Lachman and Dr. Vath have lectured on mental illness, and he works long hours to educate the public on problems of the mentally ill and the difficulties of returning to a respected and normal life in a society that generally puts a stigma on mental illness. Former mental patients are often unable to overcome such prejudices and retreat once again to a more secure world within themselves.
Richard Lachman wrote a poem in 1983 that was published in the Bellevue Journal American, which recounts the anguish:
"Mental illness is.....
A head full of pain and a heart full of hurt.
It's searching for gold in a fistful of dirt.
It's being afraid with nothing to fear.
-- A passing parade with no one to cheer.
It's hating the sun for the light of day.
-- And hating the night that steals it away.
It's my parent... my daughter...
my son... and my mate.
It's an island of tears in an ocean of fate.
A moment of pleasure... a moment
of strife.
-- A stigma endured... for
the rest of my life."
Lachman's paintings hang in collections in Europe and the Middle East, in San Francisco and Seattle. It is unlikely that Richard Lachman will ever return to his former business even though he has cleared himself of the injustices done to him by the court system, by family and by friends during the years of his illness. He is a happy and fulfilled man with a successful career as an artist, and a crusade to help those who cannot help themselves.
Allison Cerf Southwick, syndicated columnist and prominent San Francisco journalist, said in a review of one of his shows in September, 1979:
"Lachman's paintings, like the artist himself, have come of age and both have been touched by greatness."