Summer 1986, New York, New York

By Art Segal

Although I had a full-time job, paid rent on my Manhattan apartment, and seemed normal to my friends, a hidden illness was derailing me.

It was 1986, and I was 34 years old. I was losing control and depressed all the time. I no longer experienced any pleasure – and I couldn’t sleep. I’d suffered the blues since my early 20s, but they’d always disappeared in a day or two. Not this time.

I hated my new full-time job, which was at a spice brokerage firm. My boss, the owner’s son, screamed obscenities all day, and I feared that I’d be his next victim. I couldn’t learn the company’s system fast enough, and my anxiety increased. I went to the men’s room to smoke 10 times a day.

A secretary asked me “Are you OK?” and I managed to say, “Yeah,” but she kept staring. I went downstairs, smoked an entire pack of Merits, and threw up on the sidewalk. My tongue was burned, and I was out of control and scared.

I wandered aimlessly for weeks, unable to sleep or eat. Holes had worn through the soles of my shoes. I wore the same red shirt 24 hours a day. I was shocked to learn that I’d lost 25 pounds.

My friends didn’t know what was wrong. They said, “You look exhausted. You’d better get some rest.” Seeing my roommate get dressed and bounce down the stairs on his way to work each morning made me sick with envy.

I hadn’t seen my parents in months. On the phone, Dad said, “Buck up and take care of yourself, son.” His gout was so bad that he couldn’t visit me, and I didn’t want him to.

About 8 p.m. one night, having wandered the streets of Manhattan all day, I stopped at a pay phone outside the Beth Israel Medical Center and called my best friend, Burt. He demanded that I go to the emergency room. But since I said my problem was insomnia and nothing worse, the doctors kept me waiting for hours.

Finally, a junior psychiatrist named Dave talked to me. “Let’s go upstairs for a few days so we can see what’s going on with you,” he said.

“I just want to go home,” I said.

“OK, go home,” he replied. I didn’t move.

At 2 a.m., I was still sitting in the ER. “So what do you want?” Dave asked. “Write on this pad,” he said. “I could have you admitted, you know.”

I wrote: “I want relief from terrible anxiety. I can’t stand feeling bad all the time.”

Finally, I said OK to a physical, and the attendants smiled as I lay on the stretcher. “We gotcha,” one said.

On the day I entered Beth Israel, I didn’t know how sick I was; in the morning, I read the Patient’s Bill of Rights and immediately signed myself out. Dave came to my room, sat down on my bed, and said, “Art, you can do that, but please don’t. I didn’t stay up with you half of last night for that. My boss thinks you need medication, and I agree. It’s going to take a few weeks, but you’ll feel much better. Give us a chance to help you.”

I glared at him, unsure what to do, then I picked up the pen and crossed out my signature.

Reading the transcript of my treatment years later, I found that Dave had written every day, “Patient is still very closed. Won’t talk about his feelings. Patient keeps asking, ‘What do you mean?’ I’m trying to pry him open.”

A young male patient constantly phoned U.S. senators, saying he was being treated with experimental drugs against his will. Sitting at a small wooden desk covered with handwritten notes, he demanded to see an attorney. Another patient offered me a bite from his apple, which I accepted. Then he cackled, “I have AIDS! Hahahaha!”

My fear felt like ice water. A nude young woman ran up and down the hallway, screaming for help. Orderlies dragged her into the Isolation Room, where she pounded on the window, yelling, until I couldn’t bear to watch. Finally, they subdued her with a shot. Two nurses raced down the hall to a room where two teenage girls had overdosed on their meds – again. I heard that they were suicidal.

One morning, the stillness in the common room was shattered by a young Japanese patient who followed closely behind me, stopping when I did, moving when I moved. He suddenly leapt to the ceiling and punched his fist through the plasterboard with a bloodcurdling scream. Later that week, I watched him being rolled out on his way to Bellevue, the state hospital. His electroconvulsive shock therapy had failed to produce any results.

The young man with the Senate connections switched on the light in my room late one night and demanded a cigarette. He was covered from head to toe in black paint. I froze in terror as the nurse led him out, cackling, but my shock lasted for hours. I was really in the nut house, and it was no fun. How could I escape?

I still couldn’t sleep, and I became more delusional every day. I thought the staff was listening to my conversations with a device in the wall. I mentioned this to all my visitors. I heard Dave, the young shrink, talking to my father on the phone: “Your son isn’t crazy; he just needs a good rest.”

Rest indeed. My mother had Alzheimer’s disease and no longer traveled alone, so neither of my parents could see my despair. That was fine with me.

My books and clothes – everything, in fact – were checked for sharp items. In the bathroom, which had no locks, I couldn’t bring myself to even a slight erection but wore myself out trying. In Group Therapy – more like Group Torture for me – a doctor said, “If you don’t take your meds, we’ll have to give you shock treatments. Is that understood?”

I asked one of the nurses if she had ever taken antidepressants like mine. “No, but I learned about them in nursing school,” she said.

The bitch had no idea what I was suffering from 24 hours a day. The medication I was on, Norpramin, made my chest and arms burn for hours. I lay on my bed one afternoon, rocking from side to side and moaning, when the young lady across the hall slammed her door and shouted, “That bastard is jerking off again!”

“Are you attracted to any of the females on the floor?” Dave asked. Why this question? I wondered. I fretted about what Dave wanted to find out about me.

“No,” I lied.

“Really? Are you having trouble getting an erection?” he asked. Watching me stammering and sweating, he said that was a side effect of the meds, and I needn’t worry, I’d have erections after I got home.

That explained why I didn’t have any on my daily group walks when a sexy woman crossed the street. Still, I didn’t trust Dave. He was trying to find out something about me, and that made me nervous.

I pretended to be sleeping when the nurse shined her flashlight on my face every half hour through the night. They’d keep me locked up until I could sleep, so I’d fool them.

One morning, I staggered to the front desk and asked for Ativan – a sleeping pill. “But you were asleep,” said the nurse.

“Not really,” I mumbled.

“So you made us look like fools and falsified your official record?” she asked. “We’ll have to talk to your doctor about this.”

All day, my blood pressure bobbed like a yo-yo, and my pulse was off the charts. I felt like a heart attack ready to happen. “Are you agitated?” asked the nurse.

“No!” I said, my hands shaking, my palms sweating.

“I saw you reading a book in the common room this morning,” she said. “What stories were you reading?”

Unable to concentrate, I hadn’t read a single word but was pretending to. She was calling my bluff. “Uh, I don’t know,” I said.

“Must not have been very interesting,” she said with a faint smile.

The day after I was admitted to Beth Israel, my bipolar girlfriend, Jenny, overdosed on lithium and was taken to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at New York Hospital (now New York Presbyterian Hospital). This was a “nicer” ward, for folks with means. Jenny had called me on the pay phone in the hallway to give me the news. I blamed myself for her attempted suicide and was desperate to see her.

Dave said, “Don’t worry, she’s in good hands.” I wondered if Dave had ever been in love, but I was too afraid to ask him.

On my first solo day pass, I stumbled the 50 blocks to New York Hospital and tottered into Jenny’s room. I had lied to my nurse at Beth Israel about where I was going, and I feared being caught.

Jenny was staring at the ceiling, smoking. She looked terrible. “How the hell did you get here?” she asked.

“I don’t feel well,” I said.

“You don’t look good, either,” she replied. Jenny’s fellow inmates were just as disturbed as mine, and smoked no less, but their environment was nicer, its colors softer. I wished I could stay.

Late one morning, Dave shocked me by saying, “You can go home now.” “What?!?” I exclaimed. The Norpramin had kicked in, finally. He could tell by my voice.

“Yeah, I called Outpatient Services to arrange your follow-ups,” he said. “Get your things ready. Who should we call to pick you up?”

Shortly after returning home, I jumped on my bicycle and ran into a parked car, falling over the trunk. My ribs hurt for a month, but I was eager to make up for the time in a locked ward. That fall, my hiking and bike rides seemed far more pleasurable than ever before. I had a new lease on life.

At a Juilliard concert several years later, Dave spotted me in the lobby. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I slowly recognized him.

“How ya doin’?” he asked.

“Pretty good, thanks,” I said.

After a pause, he said, “Well, nice to see you.”

“Yeah,” I replied, shifting nervously, and walked away. I had nothing to say to the man who, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, had saved my life.

Art Segal has been a freelance writer since 1994. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington CEO, and other publications.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, May 25th, 2007 | Email This Post

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