Brian and I working on his story back in 2005

We’d been working on the story for months when I got a call from Brian’s group home. He’d been hospitalized again and wouldn’t be able to come to L.A. Youth for a while. That was OK with me, I just wanted to know that he was safe and getting the help he needed. But when Brian was out of the mental hospital and back at his group home, we picked up just where we left off. Months later, we published his story, “The voices no one else can hear,” as the cover of our Nov-Dec 2005 issue.

Whenever I’m asked, “What’s the longest time it’s taken for a story to be written?” I don’t hesitate to answer. It was Brian’s story about living with schizophrenia. It took a year. Brian and I met once a week, except for when he was hospitalized or just not doing well. Sometimes we worked for an hour, other days because of his ADHD he could focus for only 20 minutes. His story was written paragraph by paragraph, anecdote by anecdote, testing the patience of both writer and editor. But Brian and I were both committed to publishing his story, for intrinsically the same reasons.