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In all my years of receiving care for my paranoid schizophrenia the best therapy I've had is the work I have done. I've done and continue to receive individual cognitive-behavioral therapy with a good therapist. I've done the group therapy thing at an IPRT (Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Therapy) which gave me the perspective that I'm not the only one out there that is suffering with this horrible disease. The idea that I'm one of a group really helped. Also, I continue to take a combination of typical and atypical antipsychotics that keep me in the land of the sane.

There is something self-validating about a job, and it gives me a sense of dignity that I don't have when I'm out of a job. I worked my way through college. It was kind of the "Good Will Hunting" thing. I was an honors student, and I was also a janitor. Thoughts of working on differential equations and calculating non-linear regression models would be in my head while I would be wet mopping bathrooms.

That was my job situation then. Many years lapsed before I could work again. Currently, I am working part-time as a computer instructor over at the Post Graduate Center West. Everyone over there is great, and they make it a pleasure to go to work each day. I teach MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, MS Access, the Windows 95 and 98 operating systems and general computer knowledge. We just went for a field trip to Comp USA last week. That was fun. I'd love to teach the Internet and all its subtle complexities to my students, but currently we do not have the funds to wire our classroom. Hopefully, in the future we will be able to do that because I think the greatest single computer skill today is how to use a Web browser to harness the World Wide Web.

Thanks to the experimental New York Works program, which is a joint program between the New York State Department of Labor (DOL) and the Social Security Administration (SSA), I can now work! New York Works is what has enabled me to work part-time and keep my all-important benefits. Before I joined New York Works I was deathly afraid of going to work because I didn't want to lose my benefits that allow me to see a psychiatrist and get my medicine. I couldn't afford the risk. The people in New York Works have been very supportive of my career goals. If anybody in the upper echelons of the DOL or SSA is reading this article, I'd like for you to know that your efforts are really appreciated and make a difference!

The Ticket to Work Incentives Act that was passed by Clinton on December 17, 1999 has spawned the realization of a Medicaid buy-in that was approved in Albany this year. This Medicaid buy-in will give many more people with psychiatric disabilities the ability to reap the benefits of work: monetary and otherwise. My winter holiday wish for all of my fellow mental health care recipients is the following: may 2003 be a year of health, and may it be a year of new beginnings with regards to your long, put-off career ambitions!