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.

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