An Interview with Marvin Spieler

The "100 Individuals with Schizophrenia" interview campaign continues.  I talk now with Marvin Spieler, director of the Consumer Speakers' Bureau of the Mental Health Association of New York City (MHA-NYC).

CB: Give us an introduction for our community members.

MS: I've been living for the last 14 years in Brooklyn in a supported apartment that is OMH-subsidized.  I pay 30 percent of my income in rent.  It's similar to Section 8 and is sponsored by the Office of Mental Health.

CB: Okay, let's talk about your history.   You were diagnosed with schizoaffective in 1960?

MS: In 1960, it wasn't called schizoaffective, it was paranoid schizophrenia.  Schizoaffective came 10 or 20 years later.  I was 16 years old, in high school, and I got what I call "hypomanic." I knew what I was doing, but I was acting differently.  I was more outward-going, more social, more controlling.

CB: What was going on at the time?

MS:  How it started was that I was going to bed at one o'clock in the morning from September until April when I left school.  I was getting asleep at one, getting up at six and getting my mother out to work, making her breakfast and a bag lunch.  Then I made my breakfast and was at school at eight o'clock to pick up a bundle of the New York Times for the teachers who subscribed to a daily copy.  So that by 8:15 a.m. when they came in their paper would be in their mailboxes.  After that I would go to my classroom for check-in and then go to the office where I was running the traffic squad.  I was the lieutenant, managing the floor, checking that people were in the middle of the hallway, on one side of the wall so they wouldn't collide.  In the morning I'd come in and assign the floors.  There was one guy who got to his spot late-I regret it now but I fired him because he wasn't playing by the rules, he wanted me to break the rules.  It didn't matter if he was a minute early or a minute late, but the way I was acting when I was getting sick, it was either black or white, yes or no, you did it the right way or you were off the traffic squad. 

CB: Tell us what happened when you got sick.

MS: That wasn't the end of it. I came home after school and cooked dinner, on Thursdays I shopped, and occasionally swept and washed the floors, and I did the laundry.  Some of the chores I resented doing-I got no thanks from my mother.  It was only the two of us-my father died when I was seven.  She gave me a penny, or two cents.  I wasn't getting enough sleep; I had too many chores to do.  I already was in therapy when I was 13 years old and I was getting sick, hypomanic as I said previously.  The teacher I was working under for the traffic squad pulled me out of the squad and stopped having me deliver the New York Times, and I was no longer the editor of the Whitney Scholar, the honor society newspaper.  I came up with that name, it was a good name.  This broke me, and I went into a depression.  I went from being happy and high, to low.  Eventually I dropped out of school and told my mother I was suicidal.  We went over to Bellevue [famous New York City psychiatric hospital] and I signed myself in.