I have been following a series of articles in the New York Times. The series, “Lives Restored,” have all profiled a person living with a serious mental illness. The most recent –published today– profiled a Milt Greek, a 49 year-old computer programmer who also happens to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was watching the reactions to the article as they developed in the comments on Facebook. People’s reactions ranged from support, to a man who angrily recounted the loss of his father to schizophrenia, to a comment which dismissed Greek’s life accomplishments: he (Greek) must “not be severely ill.”
To me, this series of articles is telling a profound story, and one that really is being told for the first time. I wrote my Masters thesis about the psychiatric system in the United States. I have never been one to shy away from speaking publicly about my own experience. The details are ugly, certainly: in the bad times, my behavior was willfully self-destructive, dangerous, and scared the hell out of the people who care about me. However, let’s return to my assertion that these articles are telling a story that has never been told.
In 1994, Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie, NY, consolidated as part of a trend in the treatment of mental illness. The old “kirkbride,” which had formerly housed thousands of the mentally ill, was shuttered completely in 2001. In 1994, I was 16 years old. 1994 was the year I would survive the first of many, many suicide attempts over my life-time. It was also the year, I believe, I had my first experience with professional psychiatry. At the time, my parents were horrified to discover I was self-mutilating, and keeping blood in jars in my bed-room. I was taken to a psychiatrist’s office in Saratoga Springs, and saw a psychiatrist for more than a year (until my parent’s insurance refused to pay for more visits, and I had to stop going). In 2001, I was a college student working too many hours and going to school full-time. I was living with a high-school girlfriend, and had taken a job as a over-night janitor for a grocery warehouse. Over the course of 2001, I worked all night to support myself, went to school during the day, and was student teaching in the afternoon. I rarely slept. At work, I became increasingly disconnected from reality. I started to believe that people were trying to kill me. Wandering the empty warehouse at night I began to hear voices and hallucinate. By April of 2002, I was hospitalized, and it quite literally took years for me to recover.
I don’t really assume there is some kind of significance to the fact the dates of the closing of Hudson River State Hospital correspond so exactly to defining moments of my life as a young adult. The only significance really, is this: had I been born in 1878, instead of 1978, Hudson River State Hospital would likely have been the place I lived out my life. I likely would have died and been buried in the cemetery that is there. I am writing a piece of historical fiction which is based precisely on this premise.
Anyway, I wrote my thesis about the development of “Moral Treatment” during the 19th century, and about the state hospital system. I did so, honestly, as a way to come to terms with my own psychiatric history as well as to satisfy the requirement for my degree. The journey, as I researched the lives and struggles of people like me –many of whom lived their whole adult lives, and then died in the state hospitals– was a profound awakening for me. From September of 2008, to that January, that journey consumed my life. There but for the grace of God go I.
I was lucky enough to have been born, then diagnosed and treated in an era after what philosopher Michel Foucault referred to as “the era of confinement.”
The story which these New York Times articles are telling, is really, a story that is being told for the first time. People like Milt Greek, people like me, have a voice for the first time in history. For centuries before I was born, people with severe mental illnesses were ostracized and chased out of their communities, sent on “ships of fools,” chained in prisons and alms-houses, and finally, society offered the comparatively humane response of locking us in hospitals for the duration of our lives. In less enlightened times, a person who attempted to kill them self was a moral failure and a pariah, not viewed with sympathy as a person who was suffering and ill.
I talk about my illness all the time, and pretty much to anyone who will listen. I know that I sometimes frighten and alienate people by doing so. But I talk about it, because I can and I need to. I talk about it for all the people like me that weren’t allowed to talk about it, or were shunned for doing so. Depression, schizo-affective disorder, bi-polar disorder, border-line personality, PTSD, dissociative disorder, are all various diagnosis that have been discussed by the series of doctors that have treated me over the years. A diagnosis is just a tool for a doctor, it’s not anything that’s really useful as a way for me to describe my experience.
I have the chance to speak for people like me. I will do so, and however imperfectly. I have looked at images of empty day-rooms of the state hospitals, I have imagined myself having pissed my life away in one of those day-rooms. In some ways, when the state hospitals closed, the mentally ill were “thrown to the wolves” to a degree. We now had to make our way through a society that only half cared for us, treated us ineffectively, or jailed or hospitalized us when we acted up. When we ask for help, they locked us up and drugged us, and then sent us back out into the world, doped and dazed, a few weeks later. However, as this article shows, we are making it. De-institutionalization worked. The mentally ill have found ways to stand on our own two feet. Psychiatry has a long way to go, and it’s hardly a national priority now. However, I am glad that there are options available to me, other than spending my days staring out the window of a hospital.