The "100 Individuals with Schizophrenia" interview series continues with William, an all-around good guy I met years ago when I lived on Staten Island. He's a natural-born speaker, and though he professes not to be, I let the voice recorder roll . . . and sure enough, he was down-to-earth and spontaneous.
CB: Let's talk free-form for a bit. Tell me as much as you're comfortable with about your story. I usually start off by asking how old you were when you were diagnosed.
W: Well, I'm pushing 48, and I was diagnosed at 15 years old.
CB: That was an early onset. Could you tell me what your symptoms were and how it came about?
W: My parents were getting divorced, and my sister went away to college. I was alone in a new neighborhood with the family, and I didn't have any friends, was very depressed and getting anorexic. I did that all through summer, stopped eating, from freshman year on. When I was back in school as a sophomore, things turned around. I was eating and getting along. Then boom (snaps his fingers) my mother tells me, "You're going into the hospital."
CB: That must have been devastating.
W: It broke my will, and I was diagnosed with anorexia. I don't think it was smart to be diagnosed and labeled at that point when I could've gotten out of it. I was young and home alone with my mother, and I wasn't in good physical health. Also my mental health was shaky, and I couldn't understand why my mother would do that. I got lost in my head, as the expression goes. I'd go down in the basement, lock myself in and listen to music. She'd bang on the door and scream at me. I slid into a deep depression, and graduated high school-but barely.
CB: You were hospitalized in 1978. What prompted that?
W: By the time I was 18, I stayed in my room, I didn't shower, and I walked around in my pajamas all day. My mother called the cops. I was sleeping, and they dragged me out of bed, handcuffed me, and drove me off to South Beach [a psychiatric hospital].
CB: How long were you in the hospital?
W: For a month. I still remember the date: it was November 6, 1978. I got out by Christmas, and joined a pretty good day hospital for six months. It was around April or May, I started making friends and feeling good again. One day my mother showed up at the hospital all angry, holding her pocketbook and going like this (shakes his shoulders back and forth dramatically). She goes into the office, and the therapist comes out and says, "Your mother doesn't want you home any more, she wants you in the hospital." So I said, "I'm not really sick," but they said to go in. At that point it was June, and I knew, "I can't let this happen again. She's already messed up my life for four or five years."
CB: How did you get out of that one?
I told the staff, "Okay, I want to live with my father," and so I went to Pennsylvania. He's a big fan of work and thought that if you didn't work, you were a bum. He told me, "You're going to work." I found a job that lasted only two weeks. My father said I'm no good, he told me he was going to take me down to the river and drown me.
