The roots of madness

Exploring a family's illness leads to Ireland

Patrick Tracey wrote "Stalking Irish Madness" about his family's affliction. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff)

The voices inside her head assured the woman she'd be better off if only she had her teeth removed. So, to her husband's everlasting horror, May Sweeney White persuaded a hapless dentist to pull them all.

When May's grandson, Patrick Tracey, was old enough to ask about his grandmother's long battle with mental illness, Grampa White was characteristically tight-lipped. "She's away with the fairies," he'd say.

If Patrick wanted to know more, he should go to Ireland, the family's ancestral home. Shake the family tree, Grampa White would say, and "lots of lunatics would fall out."

It took Tracey much of his adult life to take his grandfather's advice. After watching his mother's brother and then two of his own sisters fall ill, like May, to schizophrenia, he sank into a wilderness of alcoholism and drug abuse that stretched across decades. A few years ago, clean and sober and living in London, Tracey struck up a conversation with a British doctor. The doctor mentioned the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, in County Roscommon, in Ireland - the home of Tracey's maternal family.

Tracey's new book, "Stalking Irish Madness," which hits bookstores today, grew out of his desire to explore the roots of his family's affliction. "On us sanity rests no more securely than a hat blown off in the wind," he writes in the book, equal parts family history, scientific inquiry, and Emerald Isle travelogue. Even in a culture inundated with recovery memoirs and media-driven survivors' tales, Tracey says, schizophrenia remains a "no-go zone."

"It's a country no one wants to visit," he says. "I want the book to be a conversation starter."

Though the Irish have long believed they suffer disproportionately from mental illness, the fact is, Tracey reports, that people of Irish descent are no more genetically prone to schizophrenia than those from anywhere else in the world. There is, however, a "three-legged stool" of factors that seem to correspond to heightened rates of occurrence: famine in previous generations, pronounced substance abuse, and men fathering children at advanced ages. The Egans of Roscommon, Tracey's mother's lineage, hit the unlucky trifecta.

"At a primal level, I think madness is our deepest fear," says Tracey, sitting outside near the apartment he rents along Revere Beach Boulevard. "I'd rather lose an arm or a leg than my mind."

As the wind picks up and a storm cloud rolls in, he hollers across the street to his sister Seanna, who smiles and waves as she rushes for the bus in her stockinged feet, carrying her shoes. Now in remission after a bout with lung cancer, she is on her way to a checkup. Seanna had her own long struggle with addiction, sometimes sleeping on the streets of Cambridge while her young son, Chris, lived with Patrick in Washington, D.C. "He calls me 'Funcle' " - part father, part uncle, says Tracey. Chris recently celebrated his 28th birthday behind bars, serving a six-month sentence in the South Bay House of Correction for breaking and entering.

Clearly the Traceys' troubled history has taken its toll. It's been a long way down from a once-promising future for the brood.

When they were growing up in a three-story brick house in leafy Milton, their father (also Patrick) ran a lucrative business, Tracey's Religious Artifacts, near Downtown Crossing. His wife, Millie, was noted on the front page of The Boston Globe in 1960 as the first mother of five to be sworn in as a lawyer in Massachusetts.

The girls were treated like princesses, budding fashion models who went to school with some of Boston's best and brightest. One of Tip O'Neill's sons, says Tracey, was an usher for Seanna at her cotillion. Oldest sister Elaine was once engaged to Babson College graduate Edsel Ford II, great-grandson of Henry.

But after the family moved to Providence, and then Patrick and Millie divorced, their unfortunate inheritance began to catch up with them. First it was Chelle, who was training as an actress in New York. After she had a breakdown, friends sent her home on the bus. Telling her family she planned to marry a boy named Jesus Christ, she once marched into a church service in the nude, Tracey writes.

Not long after the onset of Chelle's manic illness, their sister Austine returned home, too, from Florida. Unlike Chelle, whose schizophrenia plays itself out theatrically, Austine's illness is much darker. After her own voices emerged, she once pulled a knife on one of Elaine's boyfriends.

While the book details his sisters' parallel descents into madness, Tracey says he made a conscious decision to limit the number of episodes he recounted.

"There's some harrowing stuff," he says, his blue eyes burning, his forehead tanned and reddened from his morning jogs on the beach. In cargo pants and black Chuck Taylor sneakers, he's wearing a black T-shirt commemorating his book's selection to the Indie Next list, a booksellers' survey. It's a welcome change, he jokes, from the green Paul Pierce T-shirt he has been living in since the Celtics won the championship.

Some of his sisters' wilder incidents, he says, are too outrageous to be believed. Contrary to the liberties taken by certain memoirists, he says, "I've actually soft-pedaled some of it."

He also minimized the details of his own back story, despite a downward spiral that in itself would put readers on the edges of their seats. As a freelance contributor to Washington's City Paper, he wrote some brutally graphic feature stories about hard living, some of them in the first person. "I'd say my beat was high people in low places," he says with a wry smile.

He does acknowledge his alcoholism in "Stalking Irish Madness," if only to explain how he met so many Irishmen in pubs while nursing bottles of sparkling water. "I was gagging a bit for the Guinness," he admits.

But the book is not for himself but his sisters - the only gift he can give them, he says, other than the bottles of purportedly redemptive well water from Glennagalt he brought back.

His new apartment is two floors above Seanna's basement flat, where he slept on the floor as he wrote the book. Chelle and Austine have lived in group homes for years. These days, Chelle talks to Seanna on the phone every night.

"They're very close," says Tracey, who has been living off his $75,000 advance and is working on his second book, a novel. "They have a sweet relationship."

Now that they have stopped running from their family's history, he says, he and Seanna "live in each other's pockets."

"I love it here," he says quietly, cracking open a can of tuna to toss to the gulls.