LISTEN TO THE VOICES IN YOUR HEAD
ONE AFTERNOON ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO, Marty Hadge tentatively stepped outside a two-family, white-shingled house in the former mill town of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Hadge, who was pushing 50, lived in one of the units, alone. He wore 280 pounds on his 5-foot-2 frame, a side effect of consuming antipsychotic medication for several decades. His skin was marred by a haphazard array of tattoos and scars from hundreds of small cuts he’d inflicted on himself. Going out in public wasn’t easy for Hadge, but he was desperate to save his own life.
He didn’t have a car and was afraid of taking the bus, so Hadge set out on foot, walking down roads dotted with hand-painted Pentecostal church façades, liquor stores, and auto-body repair shops. Mountains and the smoke-stacked ruins of brick factories sat in the distance. At the end of his mile-and-a-half journey into downtown Holyoke was a cozy room at the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community (RLC), which offers assistance to individuals overcoming trauma, addiction, and other challenges. Bookshelves were cluttered with self-help books, plants, an old boombox, and a clock in the shape of a sun. About eight people, all part of a support group, sat on worn couches and recliners arranged in a loose circle. Hadge was nervous. He took a seat in a stuffed rocking chair set apart in a corner.
What came next, he hoped, would help him silence the urgent voices in his head that had repeated the same cruel refrain for going on 40 years: Kill yourself.
Hadge started hearing voices when he was a small child. Born in West Roxbury, a suburban neighborhood in southwest Boston, his mother was an alcoholic who beat him. A neighbor sexually abused him. When he was 4 or 5, Hadge remembers having a waking vision of four “dark ghosts” on the stairs leading up to the neighbor’s apartment, an omen that he would die if he returned there.
As a preteen, other voices began calling to him. Sometimes, they told him he had to commit suicide or murder his mother. “They said I had to make a choice, that the both of us could not live together,” Hadge recalls. “They could go from being a whisper to yelling so loud it was hard to think.” Once, when he was about 12, his mother hit him with a cast-iron pan. Schooled in Bible verses about honoring thy parents, Hadge had never fought off the beatings. That day, though, a voice urged him to retaliate.
You have to do this, do this right now! it shouted.
When his mother struck him a second time, he hit her back.
In his 20s, while working as a janitor and selling drugs to
