Working Their Way Back

  • (2 of 2)

    Awakenings, with 12 chapters in the New York City area, is a program aimed at "robust responders"--medical jargon for high-functioning individuals. Founder Ken Steele, who for 32 years wandered across America homeless and schizophrenic, feels that the most formidable task for the mentally ill is overcoming the social stigma. "The public's synonym for us is still psycho," he says. "We are feared and misunderstood." Partly to counter this, individuals with mental illness call themselves "consumers"--an emotionally neutral word meant to suggest people who consume medications and services associated with psychiatric disability. A voting effort, for example, is called a consumer-registration drive; psychosocial rehabilitation is considered consumer-driven.

    Programs like Manhattan's Fast Track to Employment work with employers to help the recovering mentally ill find jobs. At least 50 firms have signed on, and most seem satisfied. "We had anxieties at first," admits RDS Delivery Service co-owner David Zogby, "but customers called to salute us." Says George Castaldo of American Postcard Co. of his new hires: "They come 20 minutes early in rain, snow or cold, and they give 150%."

    Miriam Kravitz was in a locked psychiatric ward lying naked in a puddle of her own urine when she got a career idea that would benefit herself as well as people like her. She enrolled first in college and then in law school while homeless. In 1985, she started INCube (short for incubation), a New York City agency run by the recovering mentally ill that helps others start businesses. "We do business as well as or better than the mainstream," says Kravitz. "It's a big secret." INCube has helped start 300 businesses over a decade and counts 176 still going, from Courage Communications, whose crews install pay telephones in Manhattan, to DJ Unexpected, which provides music for parties and public events on Long Island.

    There are still hurdles. Traditional mental-health professionals are more focused today on drug therapies than on social rehabilitation. Ruth Hughes argues that the profession's "belief system" still contains "the idea that people with schizophrenia never get better." Insurance companies have been slow to be convinced that these programs work and will ultimately save money. And many employers still resist hiring the mentally ill. American Postcard's Castaldo recalls telling a fellow businessman "how well I'm doing with handicapped people." The man was interested, Castaldo relates, "but when I mentioned mental health, a wall came down."

    Brenda Lee Riley, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, hitchhiked with her husband, who had bouts of serious depression, from Ohio to California, where he beat her and sometimes pretended to hang himself. One day he ripped out the gas wall heater and flicked his lighter. Brenda survived by diving out a second-floor window. "Fire is a weird color when you're inside it," she recalls. Years later, though burn scars cover her body, medication has controlled her mental illness and she has become a part-time "life coach" at the Village. She rents her own apartment and hopes to become a writer. "I've found that it's not necessary to have a crappy life," she says. Bobby Frazier and a lot of other consumers would agree.

    1. 1
    2. 2
    3. Next Page