Email | Print

Good medicine, good treatment and my experience at Riker’s stopped the shouting
In my late twenties, I was leading a very normal life. I was in graduate school working towards a master’s degree in psychology, and holding a couple of jobs to pay my tuition and rent. I handed in my final papers at the end of what I was sure was my final semester at City College. And then nothing. I waited a couple of months, but my final grades never came in the mail; neither did a master’s degree.
I started getting super-frustrated. Then I started getting angry, and I went up there with the idea of getting my money back for the last semester.
When I got to the graduate office, I sat down and asked for my money back. The administrator called in a couple of professors, and I started to shout that I wanted my money back and that they should write a note for the bursar’s office to refund my tuition for that semester.
The guards came, led me to an empty room, and handcuffed me. When the police came, I was still shouting. (Later, in therapy, I realized that before all this happened, I had shut myself off from all my friends and isolated myself to work on my graduate thesis.)
The police took me to St. Luke’s. Still shouting, I was admitted, locked in a quiet room, and put on a lot of medication. The psychiatrist there gave me the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. After that month, I was released and went home with my father.
I had applied for a job at New York Hospital a few months before, and I started going there, shouting that I wanted a job as a psychologist.
I was hospitalized that whole year. They tried every medication on me, and a social worker finally referred me to St. Vincent’s day hospital. There, I was assigned to several groups, one of which was writing and editing for the day-hospital gazette. I finally felt someone was helping me toward a vocation, and I stopped going to the personnel office and yelling for a job. I started making real friends at the day hospital and my doctor finally found a medication that seemed to put a lid on my anger. In the meantime, my diagnosis was downgraded to brief reactive psychosis. After three years full-time there, and two more years part-time, as I volunteered part-time, I was on my way to recovery, or so I thought.
During a community meeting at the day hospital my blood began to boil and I started shouting. The doctors called this “escalation,” when you start shouting and can’t stop.
I was rehospitalized. After another try at the day hospital and another bout of shouting, I was discharged from the program. At this point I was volunteering full-time and was fairly happy. But something in me said I could do better, and so I started showing up at the psychology offices of City College, New York University and Columbia University and shouting, thinking they’d give me a job.
This was going on every Monday, and every Monday the police would pick me up at one of the universities and drop me off at an emergency room. Finally, City College pressed charges for criminal trespassing and had me put away at Riker’s Island jail. I was there for three weeks, and was finally released to the state hospital, because I was yelling in jail every day and getting beaten up for it. The social worker at Riker’s Island deemed me a threat to myself. I then spent two months at Manhattan State Hospital, which was like heaven compared to the brutal hell of my stay at Riker’s.
After my release from the state hospital, I went home and started my life again. Gradually, the shouting stopped. It was a combination of good medication, good treatment and my experience at Riker’s, which made me never want to go back there. My diagnosis for the past few years has been obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. It’s the fact that I feel I have to keep shouting to get my thoughts across. Though the head of psychiatry at Manhattan State said that to him, it just seemed like I was really angry. That was his diagnosis.
I am now leading a very normal life, volunteering, hoping to get a paying job soon. I’m really happy, reading a lot, hanging out with my friends, and listening to music.