For weeks they had practiced dance steps, shopped for formals, fretted about hairstyles and what on earth to say to their partners. Now the Big City band was pumping up the volume, and the whole ballroom was beginning to shake. Brandon Fitch, wearing a pinstripe suit and an ear-to-ear grin, shimmied with a high-stepping blond. Daphne Moss, sporting a floral dress and white corsage, delighted her dad by letting him cut in. The usually quiet Kevin Buchberger leaped onto the dance floor and flat-out boogied for the first time in his life, while Kevin Namkoong grabbed an electric guitar and jammed with the band. The prom at Case Western Reserve University had hit full tilt.
But this was a prom that almost never was. Most of the 175 participants were in their 30s; they had missed the proms of their youth -- along with other adolescent rites of passage. Don't ask where they were at 18 or 21. The memories are too bleak, too fragmented to convey. They had organized this better-late-than-never prom to celebrate their remarkable "awakening" to reality after many years of being lost in the darkness of schizophrenia. The revelers were, in a sense, the laughing, dancing embodiments of a new wave of drug therapy that is revolutionizing the way doctors are dealing with this most devilish of mental illnesses.
Daphne Moss, 30, can barely reconstruct her 20s, when she dwelt in a shadowy land of waking nightmares, fiendish voices and the alarming conviction that her parents were actually witches. What she can recall clearly is the moment two years ago when it all came down to one choice: Should she dive headfirst or feetfirst from the third-floor window ledge of her room in a Cleveland boarding house? Feetfirst, she decided. It meant a fractured hip, multiple bruises -- and survival.
Buchberger, 33, also spent a decade wrestling with inner demons. He was hounded by a frightening spirit -- a golden beam of light -- that he believed, had previously haunted an executed murderer. The spirit never spoke. "It tormented me, but I never knew what it wanted," he recalls.
Fitch's memories are just as scary, but in his case the darkness descended at the tender age of eight. Fitch, now 19, spent his early years imagining that historical figures such as Czar Nicholas II lived at his home. He insisted on dressing formally at all times, in a coat and tie or in historical costumes, and he avoided the gaze of people pictured on magazine covers. Watching him boogie the night away at the prom, his mother recalled the last time she had seen her son near a dance floor, six years earlier: "We went to a wedding, and he hid in an alley most of the evening and begged me to take him home."
Moss, Buchberger, Fitch and their fellow promgoers were awakened from their long nightmare of insanity by a remarkable drug called clozapine (brand name: Clozaril). The dinner dance, organized with help from psychiatrists and counselors at Case Western Reserve's affiliated University Hospitals, in Cleveland, served as a bittersweet celebration of shared loss and regained hope. "Those of us who are ill travel on a different road," said prom chairman Fitch in a welcoming address to his fellow refugees from madness. "We would have liked to have gone to our senior proms, but fate didn't give us that chance."