Moving personal account of a 22-year-old war veteran’s fight against the paranoia, mental anarchy and debilitating despair of PTSD with schizophrenia; the “split mind” of the disease is revealed as an internal battle between a long hidden natural self and a false self created to survive a world of childhood illness, physical abuse, emotional repression and the horrors of war.“I was afraid to pull back the drapes on the bedroom window or to open the door to the hallway, fearing I would not see the wooded lot behind the house or the upstairs hallway but rather the black and eternal void that awaited me.”

Moving personal account of a 22-year-old war veteran’s fight against the paranoia, mental anarchy and debilitating despair of PTSD with schizophrenia; the “split mind” of the disease is revealed as an internal battle between a long hidden natural self and a false self created to survive a world of childhood illness, physical abuse, emotional repression and the horrors of war.“I was afraid to pull back the drapes on the bedroom window or to open the door to the hallway, fearing I would not see the wooded lot behind the house or the upstairs hallway but rather the black and eternal void that awaited me.”