This is half of her story; the rest won’t be available for some time
This tale goes to show that women
can suffer from schizophrenia and “be loose cannons on the street,” too—but not
necessarily ready to shoot people; and it helps illustrate how psychotic women
tend to be more approachable (as to allow possible help) than psychotic men
[If you find a formatting problem, see my note in the Profile feature of this blog.]
An incurably
psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a
human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it
worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged
brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely
more, euthanasia would be justified.
—Viktor E. Frankl, existentialist psychiatrist
and survivor
of a Nazi concentration camp, in
Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to
Logotherapy (New York: Touchstone, 1984),
p. 135
Prefatory note 1: Entries like the
present one, and like this one about my helping some homeless on a
cold night, are not presented in line with a middle class notion of
“do-gooding” for which someone may or may not want credit. The actions
recounted were done in line with one daily-life
ethos, related to concern for suffering others (for which recognition typically was not
sought or received), and later written about from a certain artistic mode: examining, dignifying, and conveying
(for whosever edification) the fact of stark ruptures, discontinuity, and
mystery in life, and the corresponding challenge of moral response by
individuals to the same, and/or of maintaining or acting on faith in the face
of same. People can either accept this “religious” or “mystic” side to my
literary efforts or not (while they may value the literary works for their
other sides); but to see the “helping of others” as fairly ordinary middle
class actions presented banally “for recognition” is wrong. This is no more appropriate
than to say that short story writer Flannery O’Connor’s incorporating symbols
and issues of her Roman Catholic faith into her work is somehow a “plastic
Jesus” element that detracts from, or is otherwise incompatible with, her
black-humorous and Southern gothic approaches.
Prefatory note 2: Nowadays, use of the
words delusion and delusional is very common, often seeming
to preempt use of other words that would be more appropriate. Delusion, in the classic psychological
sense, refers to a belief that either on its face cannot be verified or proven
false by readily available evidence or is still held to even when such avenues
of proof are opened to the deluded person. Important aspects of a delusion are its being held to over
considerable time, with little change based on experience, and its source being
unclear. When someone says another person is “easily deluded,” this misuses the
term; delusion by its nature wouldn’t come about easily. The term many people
should use when they speak of someone who holds a belief that clearly runs
contrary to common sense or scientifically verifiable reality (but which may be
relinquished if evidence to the contrary is presented) is illusion. Meanwhile, the rough portrait of Fern K. that follows
gives a pretty clear example of someone suffering from delusions.
Prefatory note 3. Ideas that men are
the only ones prone to gun violence of the mass-shooting type are wrong: women
can do this, too. For one example among several, see my subsection on Sylvia Seegrist below.
A novel story counters a commonplace notion about the uniformity of the
mentally ill (and measures “needed” for them)
When people talk, as they do a
little noisily lately, about severely mentally ill people as they may “feature”
in public settings—or even in semi-public contexts like school campuses—as if some major new measures need to be enacted
to deal with an unambiguously identifiable danger, these laypeople forget
that so many matters of mentally ill people impinging on others don’t follow a
formula.
They vary quite widely (some
situations can be very full of unstructured contexts, frayed relations, and
sheer chance…), and social morés and expectations about what can be done can
vary quite widely. Further, the nature of one given person’s illness may define
what kind of “danger” he or she poses very
differently from that of another patient.
This entry will boil down a
story I have about a woman who was suffering (as she could well still be) from schizophrenia who got
tangled up in brushes with the Security department and in odd encounters with
students at GWU in the early-to-mid 1980s. In my position at the MC, I actually
had some “grounds” from which to do something with her that would seem very
novel by today’s standards, but which I think had some (limited) role in her
getting a little more help later.
Subsections below:
1. One schizophrenic woman was a “quiet” example of that illness; times
were different
2. The Andy Cohen story was a resonating lesson due to moral depth;
Fern’s is more a “clinical” sketch
3. One part of Fern’s story almost coincided with notorious news of the
1985 Seegrist shootings
4. My first coming across signs of Fern in 1983
5. 1984: Fern makes the school news
6. Fern is back at GW in 1985, and this time I encounter her
7. During November 9-21, 1985
Fern on the street, with bullhorn in hand
Fern in to use the
Marvin Center typing room
8. What’s ahead
1. One schizophrenic woman was a “quiet” example of that illness; times
were different
To paint every person who might
be given the designation mental patient—which
designation usually requires seeing a doctor and being methodically assessed—as
an imminent danger, or maybe even not quite so bad but still needing quick intervention—“treatment”—is
simply naïve and, even within the relevant professional setting, unprofessional.
(See my March 12 entry on related topics.)
This woman, Fern K., was
severely sick, but if you dealt with her directly, you got the intimation that
she wasn’t terribly much of a danger.
Also, times were different in
1984 or so, when many of us who are now in positions of some responsibility (or
at least able to speak from helpful experience) came of age. But at that time, people
still had sense (even if without the more detail-oriented guidelines you seem
often to hear about today) about how to deal with the most psychologically-suffering
ones among us. And other people (especially who are not able or disposed to
intervene in social trouble posed by such a person) could be frightened by a
very mentally ill woman.
So the story about how Fern
figured in various odd situations at GWU may seem a little chaotic—but that
would only be from the standpoint of the questionable opinion that every sick
person has a ready safety net out there, or that (today) one more legal
enactment (as with government moves supporting today’s “outpatient commitment”
courts, as are in the process of funding and expansion in New Jersey) will
shore up the system of “nets” even further.
But this is ludicrous to me; to
me, there is no all-comprehensive set of social-welfare nets for the mentally
ill, nor does there necessarily need to be if people are educated about some of
the nature of the mentally ill and what can be done, and they have some
facility for offering some help in this area. (Even the federal program of
databases meant to support a “full” background check for those buying guns
seems to have significant holes. See the New
Jersey newspaper The
Star-Ledger, March 16, 2013, p. 2 [in a wire service report].)
2. The Andy Cohen story was a resonating lesson due to moral depth;
Fern’s is more a “clinical” sketch
My story about Andy Cohen (see
the first installment here) is, in a way, the “heart” of my series
of MC-related posts. For one thing, it shows why, when it comes to remembering
something from 30 years ago, when your involvement with a person included some
strong emotional investment and an ethical conundrum, that helps you remember
the person and the problem ensnaring you both for many years, and also may lead
to your learning something about life and people, over the years, as a result.
In the case of Fern, there were
a lot of details to attend to, which my copious notes on her reflect, and there
was a lot of footwork: with her, my dealings resembled average-type “case work”
(of a social worker)—which in 1985 and some later years I did for free—more
than did something like my rich dealings with Andy Cohen (which, of course,
amounted mainly to a friendship). And partly for this reason, my emotions and
sense of moral complication are not as rich regarding Fern as regarding Andy.
As well, the details of my Fern
story require me to consult notes, and for this sketchy blog entry, I will
present a select scattered set of observations, from 1983-85; a later entry (not
to appear in this Marvin Center series) would cover 1985 and 1987, and there, I
would skip over stuff from my dealings with her family in 1988-90, and a letter
to her parents written much later, in 2000.
Fern was born in about 1951—I
would find her age reported in 1984 as 33. By 1984, she was suffering from
paranoid schizophrenia, and was basically homeless. She was
treatment-resistant, in the sense that, as was said by one person (her father) with
whom I spoke about her, she was such an adept escape artist that she could repeatedly
get out of mental hospitals despite the efforts of people to keep her there.
She spent time in numerous hospitals or psychiatric departments of larger
hospitals over several years (we’ll see a list of some of them). At one
hospital (at least), she had a number of applications of ECT (electroconvulsive
therapy); we’ll see details on this. She had been put on one or more
antipsychotic medications. She would be on the meds for a while, and as is not
atypical among such patients, she didn’t like the effects, and found a way to escape
the situation in which she was treated (including the meds).
3. One part of Fern’s story almost coincided with notorious news of the
1985 Seegrist shootings
By the way, the 1985 phase of my
story started just within a few weeks after the October 1985 shootings (and
killings) at a mall by Sylvia Seegrist, a woman suffering from schizophrenia,
near Philadelphia
made the news. I remember hearing about this at the time.
For information related to this woman
and her attacks (for which she is still in prison), here is a blog
entry from December 2012 from a Philadelphia magazine, prompted by
the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting; here is a version of a 1986 news
article on Seegrist; and here [I had a link for this, but it's not working; you may be able to find it if you Google Seegrist] is something from a New York Times article published in 2000, on “rampage killers,”
that includes mention of Seegrist. Further, if you Google “Sylvia Seegrist,”
you can find pictures/links to several other notorious mass-killing women. It
is foolish to say such a phenomenon—female “rampage killers”—doesn’t exist; in
fact, it would be sexist. There is no reason why women can’t do this; and
understanding the illness (in highly unusual form) behind this—not that it
entirely excuses egregious crimes—allows as much proper sympathy, compassion,
and so on as there might be applied (limitedly) to male “rampage killers.”
I probably had the notion in
mind, with my dealings with Fern in November 1985, that a schizophrenic woman
causing some consternation at a semi-public facility within my area of business
could have associations in others’ minds with the jangling newsy quality of the
Seegrist story. But it became obvious that Fern, as a schizophrenic, was not a
danger as Seegrist was. But Fern was difficult to deal with at first, in her
own way.
4. My first coming across signs of Fern in 1983
I first got wind of Fern K. in
1983 when I was working at the MC, in the spring (probably in April, when the
spring semester was still in session); this preluded my working at the MC for a
summer for the first time. I found a copy of some fliers Fern had distributed
in the first floor cafeteria, and it made references to her father being among
a group that was trying to apply some dread treatment to her (we’ll come to
details below; the delusional quality to her writing was clear enough in 1983).
It also named her parents, and noted an apartment that had supposedly been
arranged for her in North Bergen,
N.J.
By spring 1983, I had already been
well “indoctrinated”—in a firsthand-experience sense—in the colorful ways of the
mentally ill by what I had witnessed from a distance (since 1980) of passing-through
street people (and maybe it was in 1984 that I found a paper manifesto posted—obviously
by a mentally ill person—on the ground floor of the MC, talking about some conspiratorial
problem with a local supermarket chain). Also, one psych class I took (Abnormal
Psychology) had a group of us (in spring 1981, I think) visit patients at St. Elizabeths in D.C. The fact that Fern seemed a schizophrenic was
obvious from her own flier.
I saved the flier for my files. At
the time I figured that I might not ever see evidence of her again, but maybe I
could use the flier as inspiration for a writing project, or just against the
day she might return to GW, for informing whatever practical benefit I might be
able to bring to the situation. (This was less quixotic or vapidly “idealistic”
than you might think, as we’ll see in some pragmatic developments ahead.)
Certainly the flier interested me as the connoisseur of psychology I’d long
been becoming.
The flier includes the
following, typed (by Fern) with an IBM Selectric typewriter (all in capitals):
I am writing
this newsletter in a desperate attempt to get assistance as well as inform the
public of the news that the New York Post doesn’t as yet print about [sic; and in those days, the status of
the Post as a credible news vehicle
was different than today].
I would care to
relate to you about a horrible experience that I have been going through due to
the miserable workings of my parents.
In 1979 they began
having me committed to psychiatric hospitals to help me get over my delusions.
In Sept. of
1981 I found out that I was not having delusions at all[, but] that in fact
something was being done to me and [that] the hospital personnel were partic[i]pating
for [sic] lying for the group that my
parents are involved in.
I would care to
state publicly that my parents have ordered the group that they are associated
with to kill me and make the death appear to be [from] as natural [a] cause as
possible.
The group is
carrying out their plan for me with the use of a portable instrument that
participants carry and when they are within a certain proximity with [sic] the victim (myself)[, it] can be
directed to internal organs and through the use of some kind of wave can
over-stress the body.
I’ve been
running or trying to stay away from the group and now they are profusely using
it on me in Washington[,] D.C. where I plan to go to finish school in May. [I
don’t know in which year this May was; I found the flier in about April 1983.]
There are some references to
details of the alleged plot against her, and she makes an almost blackly
comical reference to her finding it hard to type because “some students at G.
Washington U. [sic] have possession
of this instrument in this typing room” (which had to be in the Marvin Center).
She lists hospitals she had been
in (the names and spellings follow what she had typed; I edit a bit): Fair Oaks
Hospital, Summit, N.J.; Roosevelt Hospital, in New York; Payne Whitney
Pavilion, in New York (where, she noted, she had been given a “drug that I had
totally adverse side [e]ffects from”); the St. Francis Medical Center,
regarding which she mentions a Dr. “Nicolas [sic] M____ [surname redacted],” with whom I (GL) was briefly in
touch in November 1985, and who (she remarks) had given her electroconvulsive
therapy; Sibley Hospital, in Washington, D.C. (where she says she was a
voluntary admission); Georgetown Hospital, D.C. (voluntary admission);
Meadville City Hospital, in Meadville, Pa.; and Pocono Hospital (here she
remarks she was strapped to a bed, possibly in four-point restraints).
At some point—the source will be
seen below—Fern claimed she had lived in the dorm Mitchell Hall in 1983, but
the GW student newspaper the GW Hatchet
in 1984 said the student housing office stated there was no record of Fern
having been there. In fact, as was widely known among students in the dorm
system, Mitchell Hall, which was the only one (or one of only about two) that
had single-student rooms, was a tough dorm to get into—with a longer waiting
list, you could say, than any other dorm. It was highly unlikely that Fern, who
at best, at any point, would be a part-time
student (as we’ll see), could get one of the coveted rooms there (because I
think only full-time students could
or would want to get into the dorms, with cost one significant issue).
Also without the source
immediately at hand, I see a note of mine saying Fern was admitted to the GW
hospital in 1983. The Hatchet would
say that Fern made nine visits to the GW hospital from July 1982 to May 1983.
(Funny—I never heard anything about Fern being on campus in 1982, but GW was a
very big facility, and the hospital was on the fringe of the total grounds.
There wasn’t always news coverage of her—as we’ll see below when there was—whenever she appeared on campus.)
5. 1984: Fern makes the school news
In spring 1984, Fern made news
on the campus in the most vivid way. The GW
Hatchet had a few articles covering how, among other things, Fern did a
minor assault on one student. Also, it was apparently at this point that she
was given the designation of persona non grata (even while she was taking a
class at GW and, accordingly, was allowed only in the building where she had
her class). The conferring of the persona non grata status came from a number
of different departments, including (as we’ll see) Security, the office of the
Vice President for Student Affairs, and the Dean of Students.
In the Monday, April 2, 1984, Hatchet (I omit bylines with these
quoted articles):
Woman
disrupts Academic
Center
The GW Office of Safety and Security
will apparently take no action against a woman who dropped a can of cola from
the third floor of the Academic
Center onto another
woman’s head Friday morning.
[The Academic
Center, at the time,
housed a dean’s office, some academic department faculty offices, some class
facilities I believe for specific unusual departments (such as
radio-and-television [?]), and other amenities (I’m trying to recall). It was
not a typical classroom building, but was a large, impressive facility, with
balconies-of-sorts in a high-ceilinged atrium-like area, with much sunlight
coming in; this was apparently where Fern dropped the can of soda from two
stories up.]
Campus Security would not comment on
the incident Friday in which, according to one witness, as many as a dozen
people at the Academic
Center were verbally
assaulted by the woman.
Robert B____ [surname redacted], a
GW student who works at the GW Television Studio, said he heard the woman who dropped
the full soda can tell the woman who had been hit, “You don’t even deserve to
be living,” as the latter woman tried to file a report with a security guard
moments after the incident.
B____ said the security guard
refused to write up a report, and when B____ went to the Safety and Security
office to complain[,] he was told that the woman had been involved in “two to
three” other incidents involving Campus Security in the last year. “Their
attitude was totally out of call,” B____ said.
B____ also said that a co-worker of
his, who wished to remain anonymous, said she saw the woman threaten “about 11”
other people at the Academic
Center Friday.
The woman responsible for the
incident is believed to be the same woman who visited the GW Hatchet Wednesday night claiming that people at the University
were trying to kill her with a radio device.
The woman, who identified herself at
the time as Fern K____ [surname redacted], told the Hatchet she was kicked out of Mitchell Hall last summer after
attacking another woman there who she believed had one of the radio devices in
her purse. The housing office said Friday it has no record of the incident or
of a Fern K____.
The newspaper was published
every Monday and Thursday during the fall and spring semesters. The next issue (on
April 5) had bigger news:
D.C.
cops arrest GW student
A woman with a history of run-ins with GW officials was arrested last
night at the Academic
Center and charged with
unlawful entry by Metropolitan Police (MPD).
Fern K____, 33, who has been involved in numerous incidents involving the
GW Office of Safety and Security and the Medical Center,
was arrested by GW Security officers and later taken to the MPD’s second
district office and charged with unlawful entry. K____ was detained at the second
district office last night and will appear in D.C. Superior Court this morning
to face charges.
Last Friday, K____ dropped a can of soda from a balcony at the Marvin
Center [sic; this should read “the
Academic Center”; for one thing, the MC had no structure that allowed her to do
what was alleged, from two floors above] on the head of a woman she claimed was
trying to kill her with radio waves. According to one witness, she also
verbally threatened a dozen other people. No action was taken against K____
after the incident.
A source at the Med
Center said yesterday
that “We have had repeated dealings with Miss K____,” and that she was
considered a “regular” in the emergency room. K____ made nine visits there from
July of 1982 through May of 1983, the source said, and is considered a “persona
non grata” and forced to leave whenever she appears there.
K____ has attracted crowds in front of the emergency room using a
megaphone and passing out leaflets which claim the hospital is trying to kill
her by bombarding her with radio waves.
She visited the GW Hatchet last
week and said “I really need help.” K____ said then that she was forced to lead
a “ridiculous life” on the run from people who were trying to kill her with
radio devices which send waves through the body.
K____ was arrested by GW Security officers last night at about 8:30
p.m. GW Security would not comment on
the matter last night, but MPD said that K____ was picked up at GW by Officer
Ryland Franklin and taken to the district office.
K____ is a registered GW student this semester with a University
identification. She is enrolled in a dance class.
If you wonder how she had money
to pay tuition for a class, that is a very good question, and I’ve never had
the answer to that (and I never felt the need to inquire anyone about it,
either).
Another article appeared the
following week, on Monday, April 9:
K____
released again
The woman arrested by D.C.
Metropolitan Police (MPD) at the Academic
Center last Wednesday for
illegal entry and disorderly conduct, was back on campus again Thursday and
allegedly caused another disturbance.
Fern K____, a part-time GW student
who has had numerous run-ins with University officials, was arrested by
officers from the GW Office of Safety and Security last Wednesday for
disrupting a class. She was held at GW, then taken by an MPD officer to the
second district station and held over night [sic]. K____ appeared in D.C. Superior Court Thursday morning and
was released.
Director of Security Byron Matthai
said Friday that his office received a complaint from a GW professor on
Thursday that K____ was disrupting a class.
Matthai said that K____ was declared
a “persona non grata” by the University last week, apparently in response to
the incident March 30 in which she dropped a can of soda on the head of a woman
from a balcony at the Marvin Center [sic;
should be Academic Center].
As a persona non grata, K____ is not
allowed in any University buildings except Building K, where she has a dance
class. The decision to take this action against K____ was made by Matthai, Vice
President for Student Affairs William P. Smith [who, incidentally, also had
some jurisdiction/responsibility over the Marvin Center,
but not really day-to-day input] and Dean of Students Gail Short Hanson, Matthai
said.
K____ is enrolled in a Broadway jazz
dance class at GW taught by Jasmine Leopold.
Leopold said Friday that K____
joined the class in the middle of the semester with the agreement that K____
make up for the classes she missed by taking another class taught by Leopold at
D.C. Danceworks. Leopold said that K____ is usually “very cooperative in
class.”
“I have a feeling that she’s
harmless,” Leopold said. She said, however, that K____ has accused other
students of taking money from her at D.C. Danceworks, and that some of
Leopold’s GW students have complained that Klausner has threatened them in the
locker room after class.
“The atmosphere is different when
she’s there,” Leopold said, as most of the 12 students in the class are
“nervous” when K____ attends class.
“She has a habit of walking in and
out of class,” Leopold said. “I more or less let her do as she pleases in
class.”
K____ is already a persona non grata
at the GW Medical Center, where an emergency room worker described her as a
“regular.” GW Security is called whenever K____ visits the emergency room, the
worker said last week.
I have notes written on a “While
you were out” memo sheet, from either 1984 or 1985. I believe I made these as
recording what some people told me with whom I talked about Fern. “Sec[urity]
g[uar]d impression of her as harmless,” I noted, and he “said she [was] scared
when Security deal[s with] her.” Another note says, “FK rolled around on floor
in classroom—acted like dog?” I don’t know whom I heard this from.
I never saw Fern in 1984. And
apparently she did not make the school newspaper for a year-plus after April
1984. Maybe the run-in with the city police led her to stay away for a while.
But the picture forming is one
where Fern would drift to places including GW, like a lost soul, and in her
untreated state sometimes accost people with accusations that they were part of
the conspiracy against her (involving a radio-wave device). Why her family had
little control of her would become evident.
6. Fern is back at GW in 1985, and this time I encounter her
The next time my notes and
recollections tell me she had anything to do with GW was in November 1985, just
a few weeks before my job at the MC was going to be over.
And at this time, I got directly
involved with her, and how this developed led to a few interesting distinctions
(which are appreciable in retrospect):
(1) I found out how to get in touch with her parents, who lived in
a Bergen County
town in New Jersey;
(2) I did enough—though I didn’t think it was worthy of honor—that
one guard in the GW Security department who knew me (to chat with) said he
wanted to recommend me to be cited by the Security department for recognition
of what I did with Fern;
(3) I would be in touch with Fern and her family again in 1987 and
1989 (maybe 1988 also), with the last time I was in touch with Fern (by mail)
maybe late 1990 or sometime in 1991 (I would send a letter to her parents in
2000); and, lastly,
(4) there was enough of my detailed involvement with Fern in 1985
that I incorporated these dealings into a book manuscript I wrote mostly within
1985, a novel between The Folder Hunt
and A Transient (this in-between one was
never fully completed, and I never sought to get it published, though parts of
it—not related to Fern—turned up in later work). (For thoughts on the issue of
confidentiality with an associate like Fern related to my fictional work, see
Part 13 of this Marvin Center series, on Andy Cohen.)
Why, over several years (apart
from taking a class in 1984), Fern went to GW is a little unclear. At times it
could seem she was taking some kind of stab at getting a degree (?), and in
1985 the purpose was unclear. The fact that—while Fern was Jewish—GW had a
large Jewish segment to its student population seems suggestive as one reason
(and certainly other—and mentally healthy—Jewish students enrolled there more
or less for its being the, or one of the, “de facto Jewish colleges in D.C.,”
roughly put). But for one thing, I don’t think Fern knew anyone on campus (as
from her home region of New Jersey).
And certainly the academic efforts she made didn’t seem especially efficient
and promising (and her story is much more decrepit than Andy Cohen’s). And, of
course, she alienated people with her behavior as in 1984, so she was not there
to make friends with anyone (or at least this did not happen; and I didn’t
really become a friend, either).
To get ahead of my story a bit:
Her father told me (in 1987, I think) she had been a performing artist, or an
aspiring one, when young. He spoke with pride as if she had performed in
Carnegie Hall when young and healthy, and she sang like Barbra Streisand. Fern
had lived in New York City
for a time, and was raped by someone in an elevator, or such. This was the
prelude (a trigger, you might say, or “precipitating stressor”) for her
developing mental illness shortly afterward (which, my notes suggest, happened in
1977).
This was according to her
father; I never saw Fern before she was psychotic and living on the street in
1985. Her parents, it would turn out, would seem pretty reliable on (at least
some) aspects of Fern’s life that could be seen in phases I could never have
witnessed. I will discuss her parents in some detail if/when I get to Part 2 of
her story. For now, it seems a safe hypothesis to say that Fern’s having been
raped in 1977 precipitated her breakdown, while she also could well have been fairly
heavily biologically predisposed to such a breakdown anyway; this sort of
pattern of how a serious mental illness sometimes starts manifesting itself is
common enough.
(The DSM-IV says that the onset of schizophrenia “may be abrupt or
insidious, but the majority of individuals display some type of prodromal phase
[prodrome = a set of symptoms
foreshadowing a psychotic breakdown, just as, etymologically similar, a syndrome is a set of symptoms occurring
together whose unitary cause isn’t clear] manifested by the slow and gradual
development of a variety of signs and symptoms…” [p. 282]. The fact that some
instances of schizophrenia can develop suddenly and in response to a stressor
is reflected in the old category, which I learned in college in 1981, of
“reactive schizophrenia.” See also End
note 1.)
7. During November 9-21, 1985
Let’s take a look, being sketchy
(because this is a blog entry), at
the details of how I came to get more information on her, and get more involved
in “helping her,” in fall 1985. This wasn’t exactly within the normal lines of
duty and discretionary activity defined in my MC job, but that job certainly
put me in a good position to do some of what I did.
Fern on the street, with bullhorn in hand
I think the first time I
encountered her was when she was addressing passersby at the Foggy Bottom Metro
stop, which at the time was across the street from the GW hospital. She had a
bullhorn. She talked about her father (and others?) coming after her with a ray
gun. The story conformed basically with what you read above.
The general picture of this
should strike you as if she was a street crazy, and that indeed was the initial
(surface) impression she gave, but she didn’t look especially filthy or rag-covered
in clothes. I was on my way home from work at the MC, I think, and other people
were descending on the Metro escalators to the station belowground. I think it
was this point that I started the mini-drama that I would record in some
detail, incorporating it into the book manuscript I mentioned earlier.
I tried to strike up some kind
of conversation with Fern. I wanted to engage her in some general way as if I
could help her with some problem, but not directly alluding to her evident
psychiatric problem. I think I suggested that we could go somewhere to talk
(i.e., away from the people-cluttered Metro stop).
She was oddly shy about doing
so. She seemed to have a weird, somewhat stubborn way of not focusing on me
with her eyes (which lack of focus I think, theoretically, she would also have
exhibited with anyone else who was directly addressing her as I was), which is
fairly typical of a schizophrenic person who is untreated. (See End note 2.) This whole exchange may
seem unlikely and naively recounted here, but as I foreshadowed, I’m skimping
on details.
She became a bit hostile about
not wanting my help before too long, and I tried to be careful with her. One or
two passersby gave me a look as if I was a little quaint or goofy to deal with
this evident oddball with her bullhorn. The mixed signals given by a person in
such a state can be striking: though she seemed, in some sense, “paranoid”
about me, I think she also understood that I was offering some form of help,
and one would suppose that I didn’t seem to her like a mere crazy (after all,
you should understand, I was a working man in charge of a central facility at
GWU on weekend nights). She said something cryptic like I should check with
___, whom she seemed to refer to as a relative, who, Fern said, went “Wee wee
wee” all over the place, or some such thing.
I am going on memory, and I
deliberately don’t seek out the elaborate book-manuscript passage I wrote about
this exchange in 1985.
I don’t recall if there was
something in the student newspaper (to be seen later) about Fern in 1985; I
don’t think there was. I do seem vaguely to recall there was some word about
her that was going around, and (how I heard about this, I don’t remember) that
she ended up at the GW hospital emergency room.
I went there, which as it
happened was a day or two (or three) after her and my exchange at the Metro
stop. I asked a worker there about Fern as she had behaved at the ER. (Today,
probably, HIPAA or some such set of laws would prevent the worker from
answering me on what I asked.) The worker said Fern had come, seeming to seek
help, and the worker had asked her if she wanted to be admitted for
treatment—this was said with jargon specific to the issue of the possibility
Fern could be admitted to the psychiatric ward. But Fern declined, heading off
uncertainly, or such.
It is pretty suggestive to me
after these years that Fern’s way of initially gravitating to the ER indicated
that somehow she felt she could use help from a hospital, but what this then
negatively/vaguely meant to her—i.e., reflected in her strong hesitation
arguably based on bad past experiences—meant ultimately that she didn’t go
through with it.
Sidebar
on the nature of “commitment” to a psych inpatient facility: not all admissions
to an inpatient psych unit are matters of “commitment.” The women I
helped in 2002-03 who spent some time in an inpatient unit in Sussex County,
N.J.—two women I had first met days before in a support group—were a lot saner
than Fern was in 1985, and they knew what they were doing in going to be admitted
to the inpatient unit. (One had had it previously suggested to her by her
talking counselor, and the other had been led to be admitted right after her
appointment at the hospital’s outpatient-psych department with her
psychiatrist, which was within a morning I was actually supposed to meet up
with her to help her as a layperson extending a hand outside the support group
in which I met her.) These facts are not covered by HIPAA or any other
confidentiality rule, and I offer them—with the vividness of personal
experience—to show that when it comes to
entering a psychiatric inpatient unit, the matter is straightforward in some
ways and tricky in others. And the situation might have been
programmatically different in 2002 than in 1985 (and might have varied with hospitals),
and it may be different today.
But as a
general matter, when a person elects
to go into such a hospital arrangement, this is not strictly speaking being committed. Sometimes you read in
mainstream media (even The New York
Times, as I’ve seen over the years) that anyone who goes into psych
“inpatient” is “committed,” but this is not true. These facilities are for (along
with whomever else) people who choose
to be admitted, too. But there is certain protocol for the hospital to follow
in admitting them, such as making sure the patient knows what he or she is
seeking, and there are probably forms to fill out concerning insurance and
various rights and responsibilities.
It’s likely
that in 1985, at the GW hospital, the staffer was walking a line that was meant
in part to protect a patient’s rights when she asked Fern if she wanted to be admitted for treatment. Beyond that, there may
have been further questions, forms, protocol to square with. Fern couldn’t
simply be yanked in.
As I found in
2002 with the two women I helped, once you are in inpatient, especially if part
of your health issue has been suicidal ideation and an initial perception by a
professional that you may be a danger to yourself in this regard, there then
comes into play, after you’ve been there a while, an occasional application of
vaguely Catch-22-ish questions asked of you, as if you can’t leave unless you
can prove, or confidently aver, that you are no longer a danger to yourself. In
this regard, if you are kept on in light of your answers, you are (I would
interpret) in some pseudo-capacity of being “committed,” but it’s more being subject a decision based on
passing professional questions as to your state of health rather than your
being committed in the usual “involuntary” sense.
In November 1985, Fern, with her
bullhorn on the street, may seem to have been a prime candidate for being
“committed,” but she only entered the hospital ER as a patient coming of her
own accord, and after getting questioned methodically by a worker there, she
(however not-fully-rationally) declined treatment. The hospital itself couldn’t commit her on the spot.
The paradoxical quality of this
situation as it was told to me, probably with a poignant component, struck me
at the time, but I think it is consistent with some broader experience had, and
morés encountered, by such patients over many years. For further reading on a
really messy case of a schizophrenic woman who drifted through a long spell of
inadequate help about 40 years ago, you could check out a book I happened to read
in early 1986, in the aftermath of helping Fern in 1985: Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? (New
York: Vintage Books 1982). This Pulitzer Prize–winning book is about a Jewish
young woman in the New York
metropolitan area who had her first breakdown in the 1960s.
Fern in to use the Marvin Center
typing room
The next time I encountered Fern
was some days later (in November 1985), when she turned up at the MC, of all
places, and wanted to use the typing room, which of course was for students.
Obviously, a typing room attendant was the one to wait on her. This room
happened to be across the hall from the administration offices. I think I was
just ambling by on my usual rounds, and happened to find her there (I believe
in the hall outside the typing room). It was coincidence that she showed up;
she didn’t come there because I was
there, because she shouldn’t have known where I worked. I don’t think I’d told
her where I worked when I was with her at the Metro stop.
But in a sense, I couldn’t help
but run into Fern if she turned up so close to the administrative offices. This
story is to be continued, including the intricate way I found out what was on
her latest flier (which she worked on at the MC typing room, over a couple visits),
revealing the latest “news” and a sort of cry for help she was willing to put
together.
8. What’s ahead
When I get to it, Part 2 of this
story will recount how things rounded out with my business regarding Fern in
1985, including my getting in touch with her mother; in July 1987, my getting
in touch with her parents, and at the same time with Fern herself (who was back
home with them); and whatever relevant additional stuff I’ll recount (I had
occasional dealings with her and her family through at least 1990). Basically I
had no practical way to have any dealings with her during 1986, once I returned
to New Jersey.
And that year, I probably didn’t expect to deal with her ever again, once I was
mired in my own personal challenges.
In 1987, the only bit of information
with which I could locate her parents was what she had written on her 1983
flier. (Also, when I spoke with her mother on the phone in November 1985, I
implicitly confirmed the parents’ location, so I had more grounds to later be
in touch with them via that connection.)
Fern is not a person I developed
a strong emotional attachment to, like other people over the years who could be
considered “sad waifs.” Fern was more of a “case” in the sense of a troubled
person on whom you developed, catch-as-catch-can, a set of informal personal records,
and dealt with in some sense as “a professional,” not usually so much as a
friend. She was really in such decrepit shape, especially in 1985, that all I
could be was, in a sense, a “social worker” regarding her. As to whether my
dealings with her in 1985 somehow clued her off to going back home to her
parents, where I found her in July 1987, I have no idea. I’ll visit all this
set of topics again in Part 2.
##
End note 1.
The way we can understand how
something discrete and short-term can trigger development of schizophrenia can
be pursued this way. There are (or there have been conceptualizations of) both
an acute and a chronic form of schizophrenia—this was a relevant categorization within
the health-care environment in which I dealt with Fern in the mid-1980s; also,
the two types I was taught in college in 1981 were process and reactive, the
latter being defined by including, among other things, a “precipitating”
factor. This fact of two types is reflected in, for just one source (among
many), a 1983 book by Jerrold G. Bernstein, M.D. In it, he talks about forms of
therapy as suited to different forms of schizophrenia-related disorders. He
says that use of a short-term neuroleptic (antipsychotic drug), as an option or
as a general practice, should be made in cases of “acute psychosis” and
schizophreniform disorder (a category not quite schizophrenia). Getting the
picture a little more complicated, he says that a low dose of a neuroleptic is “useful”
for schizoaffective disorder, among other illnesses, while the problems of
schizophreniform disorder and acute (or brief reactive) psychosis “by
definition do not generally entail long[-]term maintenance medication” (Handbook of Drug Therapy in Psychiatry [Boston:
John Wright-PSG Inc., 1983], pp. 49, 41).
Of course, Fern’s history, with
multiple hospitalizations, alleged at least by her 1983 flier, strongly
suggested she had long-term, chronic schizophrenia. But a rape could still have
set it going.
End note 2.
The theory of problems in selective attention as a key dysfunction
in schizophrenia was established enough by that time. If you Google “selective
attention schizophrenia,” you will see several relevant search results,
including a link related to a 1976 article by Sid J. Schneider that possibly
was one of the research-related items of literature that helped establish this
inroad on understanding schizophrenia at the time.
