A Schizophrenic's Journey from
Madness to Hope.

   One day, when he was 14, voices arrived without warning for Ken Steele.  "Kill yourself…Set yourself afire," they said.  Only moments before he had been listening to rock music on the radio beside his bed.  "Hang yourself," the voices told him.  "You're no good.  No good at all."

   For 32 years Ken Steele suffered from schizophrenia.  He was tortured by inner voices urging him to kill himself and ravaged by paranoid delusions.  For decades he was in and out of mental institutions, and preyed on by street predators.  One day, while on a new antipsychotic drug, Ken was sitting on a couch with his cat, Diva, and the voices stopped forever. 

   Ken Steele went on to become an advocate and spokesperson for the mentally ill.  His tale is a story of great suffering, great courage, and finally, great hope.

From The Day The Voices Stopped:

--"For the first three years, I was at times able to function in both the event world (get up, go to school, help take care of the baby) and my hallucinatory world, but I walked a thin wire.  Grandma would overhear me responding out loud to the voices' demands and think I was on the phone to a friend."

--"Voices dogged my every step.  Look at you, Kenny.  You're really a mess…Look at your hair…it's matted, like a dog that's just come out of water…When was the last time you washed?  You stink, Kenny.  Phew.  Nobody wants to get anywhere near you.  The voices were right.  People made room for me when I passed by.  Catching a glimpse of myself in a store mirror, I was shocked by my changed appearance.  In my twenties, I looked old and weathered… If I'd seen me coming, I would have crossed the street."

--"I remember feeling terrified the day my voices stopped.  I had lived with them for thirty-two years, and here I was, like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to a world that had greatly changed.  And so had I."