Chronic Mental Illness: A Living Nightmare A plea for compassion, better understanding, and more funding to help those with mental illness and their caregivers. Eace Bee was a promising young student hoping to become an architect or a rapper when, nearing the end of high school, he was, by his own account, struck down by crippling mental illness. Diagnosed as a severe paranoid schizophrenic, he has for 20-plus years struggled with mood swings that can make him seem menacing, voices from animate and inanimate objects that only he can hear, and behavior patterns that have put him into hospitals...