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There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that.

I have a picture of myself in my mind as I walk around every day, until I look in the mirror-and then I'm stunned.

There was a mental institution near my house, and I would donate time teaching mentally ill patients how to do ceramics. I photographed them as well. So those were my first pictures.

I have so many photos of me where I'm laughing like a crazy person. I don't know what it is, but I just go with it.

You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

I saw a picture of myself when I came out of the hospital. I didn't recognize myself.

I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious.

The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.

They had taken me to an exhibit called 'Psychiatry: Industry of Death' on Hollywood Boulevard, where a Scientologist told me psychiatrists set up the Holocaust. I feared I was being brain-washed. And then I lost it - big time.

My manic depression was ravaging my life, but because nobody could see it, many people thought it was a figment of my imagination.