The Day the Voices Stopped

The Day the Voices Stopped: A Schizophrenic's Journey From Madness To Hope is a 2001 posthumous memoir by Ken Steele and Claire Berman about Steele's life with schizophrenia and his recovery after the invention of risperidone, an atypical antipsychotic. Inner voices began for Steele at the age of fourteen. Published by Basic Books, The Day the Voices Stopped follows Steele as he moves from his hometown to New York City and eventually became a gay prostitute. Cycling in and out of homelessness, psychiatric hospitals, halfway houses, jobs, alcohol use, and suicide attempts across the United States, all the while with inner voices hectoring him, Steele eventually recovers to quiet the voices and form a get out the vote organization and a newspaper in NYC.

Reviewers noted how the book provided an insider's account of the disease, including accounts of psychiatric hospitals from a consumer perspective, and found his eventual recovery a compliment to the book's earlier grim tone. The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education listed The Day the Voices Stopped as one of six autobiographies to engage students of neuroscience, psychology, and general education for a neurobiology of disease course.

The authors of the book are Ken Steele (1948–2000), a mental health advocate and consumer, and Claire Berman, author of several books about family relations. Steele founded a get out the vote organization called the Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project, which registered 28,000 people to vote in New York City for the 1996 United States presidential election and operated nationally, and founded New York City Voices: A Consumer Journal for Mental Health, a newspaper with a circulation of 40,000 as of the book's publication. During her senate campaign, Hillary Clinton sought Steele's advice on mental health issues. He died in October 2000 from heart disease in Manhattan.^{[1][2]: front and back flap, ix–xii, 219–220 [3]}

Basic Books published the hardcover first edition of The Day the Voices Stopped in 2001.^{[2]: frontpiece} A revised edition (paperback) was published in 2002.^{[4]: frontpiece}

Note: plot summary based on non-revised edition

The book is a memoir of Steele's life with schizophrenia, including his early life, hospitalizations, stints in homelessness and halfway houses, suicide attempts, his times as a gay prostitute, and his eventual recovery with the help of risperidone, an atypical antipsychotic. The Day the Voices Stopped begins with a forward by Stephen Goldfinger, a psychiatrist who met Steele in San Francisco in 1981 when Steele lived in an alleyway,^[2]: ix and a prologue, in which Steele wins the 1999 Clifford W. Beers Award from the National Mental Health Association.^[2]: xiii Steele finds it difficult to accept that others talk about him in a complimentary way at the award ceremony due to the inner voices that once hectored him for thirty-two years.^[2]: xiiv

Internal voices arrive for Steele in October 1962, when he was fourteen years old; they instruct him to kill himself.^[2]: 1 Subsequently, Steele runs from his parent's home to a forest, where he puts a noose around his neck, but cannot kick the stool on which he stood away. He pours lighter fluid over himself, but does not strike a match, and walks to Connecticut Route 69 to jump in front of a car, but sees a spotlight on top of the car and goes back to the forest, concerned police are after him.^{[2]: 10–11} Steele meets with his family physician, who diagnoses him with schizophrenia.^{[2]: 11–12} He drops out of high school after he failed courses and skipped classes.^{[2]: 26–27}

He moves to New York City and meets Ted, a man in his early-thirties, at Grand Central Station.^[2]: 35 Steele finds work as a copy boy at Fairchild Publications, and Ted introduces him to Nick, a man in his mid twenties whose skin was "swarthy" and breath "diseased".^{[2]: 37–38} Steele loses his job at Fairchild after a promotion due to the voices,^[2]: 40 and becomes a gay prostitute for Ted and Nick.^[2]: 43 He is hospitalized at Manhattan State Hospital for an indefinite period^{[2]: 52, 59} after climbing a building to jump off of it.^{[2]: 48–50} Steele escapes the hospital and returns with Ted to Ted's apartment,^[2]: 73 though he later returns to Manhattan State.^[2]: 75

Steele is gang raped by several men in a seclusion room at Harlem Valley State Hospital, to which he is transferred.^[2]: 80 Now back at Manhattan State,^[2]: 87 Steele escapes and hitchhikes to Boston, where he is committed involuntarily to Metropolitan State Hospital,^{[2]: 91–92} but escapes after two years.^{[2]: 94–95} He is committed to Westborough State Hospital, where he describes himself as "K. Shannon Steele", a name that would he would use officially from then on.^[2]: 97 He moves on to a halfway house at Westborough,^[2]: 99 and gets a job at a nursing home as a cook and then an orderly,^{[2]: 102–103} though he leaves the halfway house and job after eight months when a new admission attacks a pregnant nurse he liked, leaving her in critical condition and her baby killed.^{[2]: 104–105}

After exchanging sexual services to a tractor trailer driver in exchange for a ride to Chicago,^{[2]: 105–106} Steele meets Karl, a man in his early thirties, in the Napoleon Club, a gay nightclub.^{[2]: 106–107} Karl commits suicide in Denver,^[2]: 113 about which Steele learns while in Fort Logan Mental Health Center in Colorado.^{[2]: 112–113} He leaves his therapist and halfway house at Fort Logan due to the voices,^[2]: 115 and is admitted to Pueblo State Hospital.^[2]: 116 Steele returns home to his parents and younger brother,^{[2]: 122–123} but attempts suicide by ingesting "a lot" of Valium, Librium, and "some" Thorazine with alcohol.^[2]: 130

The book concludes with an afterward by Steele, with "the good news" sections describing issues such as the Americans with Disabilities Act contrasted with "but" sections describing issues remaining within the community.^{[2]: 241–243}

The Day the Voices Stopped was reviewed in a number of publications. In the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, Phyllis Solomon stated the book offered an insider's perspective on schizophrenia, while The Outsider by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer offered just that, an outsider's perspective on the disease. Solomon notes overlaps between the two books include being "abandoned by their families, out of ignorance and an inability to cope, with no intended malice; numerous rehospitalizations, periods of homelessness, frequent police encounters, and self-medicating with alcohol". She called Steele's recovery story inspirational.^[5] In the journal Beyond Behavior, former Kansas state legislator Tom Thompson called the author's insights as a consumer into psychiatric hospitals very compelling.^[6]

Publishers Weekly stated many readers will feel drained by the time he becomes a spokesman for the mentally ill.^[7] Similarly, in Psychiatric Services, Jeffrey L. Geller noted that Steele's life was a recurrent cycle with no positive advancement until the end of his life.^[1] Kirkus Reviews wrote when the risperidone took his voices away was a "remarkably powerful moment in the story, written with a combination of awe, appreciation, and grace--the perfect antidote to the grim, urgent tone of the earlier pages".^[8] Geller, however, questions the quality of psychotherapy and psychosocial rehabilitation in Steele's life prior to the medication taking effect as a factor for his late recovery.^[1] Writing for Booklist, William Beatty stated "[h]is account of the day the voices stopped will surely remain with everyone who reads it, and the whole book should inform and affect other victims of severe mental illness and their families".^[9]

In the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Palissery et al. (2018) list The Day the Voices Stopped as one of six autobiographies to engage students of neuroscience, psychology, and general education for a neurobiology of disease course. The authors called the book "the one [...] that we feel best accomplishes our goals in teaching with memoirs and realistic fiction: helping students see a human side to unfamiliar or misunderstood diseases and motivating them to learn more about the biology of the disorders we teach".^[10] The book was also reviewed in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by Theodore A. Petti.^[11]

• Sass, Kurt (September 1, 2020). "Book Review: The Day the Voices Stopped (written by Ken Steele and Claire Berman)". City Voices. Retrieved July 4, 2025. New York City Voices (now called City Voices) review of the book