Stay tuned for future posts.

Illness can take control!

                There are times when everyone who is involved in mental health treatment tries their best to resolve problems.  The patients work as hard as they can to feel better and to do better.  The helpers, both family and professionals, use every resource available to make things work.  The illness, however, can conquer all.


The Story 

“There’s nothing up here. It’s really dusty and from what I can see nothing is disturbed.” The young cop was on a step ladder, his hat off, his upper body squeezed through a small square hole in the celing of the closet of my client’s bedroom. “The attic is really well insulated.” he said as he carefully made his way down the ladder, adding his flashlight to the gear on his belt. His partner gave him back his hat and they both stepped into the small bedroom. “I suppose there could have been squirrels, but I don’t think so. I didn’t see any light from outside and they have to have some way to get in.”

Gwen looked at me and softly said, “They were here.  I’m not lying to you. They really were here.”

I walked the cops to the door. “Thanks guys, I really appreciate you coming. You’ve been a big help.” The older cop rolled his eyes at me and said, “Give me a call when you’re done.” I closed the door and returned to the living room. Gwen was sitting on her sofa. Her tall thin body was swallowed by the soft cushions. Her graying brown hair was matted. The sweat pants and tee shirt that served as pajamas were wrinkled. She stared at her hands folded in her lap. I’d only seen her neat and prim in nice clothes and makeup. She looked up at me, eyes pleading.

“They were here. They really were here. I don’t know how they do it and I don’t know how they get in, but they were here.”

She was referring to the aliens that had been visiting her on a regular basis for a month or more. Her therapist had brought it up in one of our regular clinic staff meetings a few weeks earlier.

Alicia, her therapist, told us, “This is new. She’s had delusional materiel before, but nothing like this. It came up almost as an aside in a discussion about other problems that she’s had with neighbors in the building, loud noise and stuff like that. She said that aliens have been in her room at night. The first time was in the last few weeks. Two or three of them just stood at the end of her bed. When she first told me about them, they were unformed, a presence. As time has gone on they have become more substantive. They look like TV or movie aliens, a child’s height with light bulb shaped heads, their bodies a greenish color.”

The room gave a collective sigh. Gwen was a favorite. She was a woman in her forties who had returned to Ithaca last year after many years in and out of mental hospitals throughout the country. She’d grown up here and had a strong and supportive family who were willing to assist in any way possible without being intrusive. They’d helped her find an apartment and scoured garage sales and second hand stores to furnish it. More than twenty years earlier Gwen had left Ithaca to go to college in the Midwest. She’d earned an undergraduate degree in English literature and had started a doctorate program. Then she became symptomatic with signs of schizophrenia. After a few hospitalizations she hit the road trying to escape the various demons that made up her illness. She’d tried cities: Denver, Austin, and Portland Oregon. She’d tried rural: southern Ohio, eastern New Mexico, even Lancaster Pennsylvania in hopes that the Amish lifestyle would somehow rub off on her. Illness combined with poverty always led her to hospitalizations. I’d looked at her record a number of times and saw the all too familiar patterns.

“Have her make an appointment to see me,” her psychiatrist said. “Maybe we can find a way to resolve this before it becomes too bad. Squeeze her in after lunch tomorrow.”

Gwen would only agree to a minor medication adjustment when she met with the doctor. She’d been given a variety of medications over the years, but we all knew that many of our clients did not take medication as prescribed and at times the medications did not work. When Gwen came to our clinic, accompanied by a cousin, we’d been impressed by her knowledge of her illness and her level of commitment.

“I am sick of that life!” she told us when she arrived a year earlier. “A young person can wander the country and do all sorts of crazy things. I’m not a young person anymore.”

She was the kind of individual who continued to be very well read, often showing up at appointments with arms filled with books from the library. She went to the library every day, spending hours reading papers and magazines. She often engaged other clients in the clinic waiting room with discussions of current events or politics. Her employment history was the counterpoint to her hospitalizations. She presented very well, and according to her and family members, she’d been able to support herself waiting tables, stocking shelves, answering phones and with every other entry level job imaginable. When she moved home, she needed public assistance to survive and the Department of Social Services looked at her record and insisted she apply for disability. Even with more than twenty hospitalizations, Gwen did not view herself as disabled. Soon after she was settled, she began to volunteer at the soup kitchen.

Gwen had lived in a variety of rooms, apartments, motels and shelters over the years.  She had nothing of value. At different times over the years she’d return to her residence to find her few belongings stolen. Her current apartment was in a building on the edge of college town, where at least ten thousand students and hangers on lived. Most people felt physically safe, but break-ins were common, with practiced local thieves looking for laptops, jewelry and other easily fenced items.

The first few times she’d called the police, it was to report strange noises or possible intruders. The officers had responded quickly and professionally, making sure that doors and windows were secure, writing detailed reports. A crime prevention officer had even come during the day and helped her make an assessment of risk. I was made aware of the calls by the Records Sargent and stopped by Gwen’s on a regular follow up visit. We had only met once before at the clinic and she was polite, but not forthcoming.

Later in the day, after the inspection of the attic, I went to the police department to follow up on the older officer’s request.

It was near the end of the day shift and the officer had that careworn look that cops get when retirement is near but not close. He had a couple of years left.

“Terry, she is clearly a code 88,” he said, referring to the designation police give to mental health calls. Since I couldn’t talk with him about her case, I went to a general discussion.

“When these sorts of things happen, we try to add medication and keep close track of what’s going on.”

The officer knew the limits of our discussion, but added, “When we first got there, she said the aliens “probed” her. I asked what that meant and she got sort of angry and said that they looked inside her. I didn’t bring it up at her house because she had calmed down and I didn’t want her to get upset again and I knew I’d talk to you today.”

I called Alicia and let her know about the “probing”. Working with clients that are often the victims of crime, we felt the need to rule out sexual assault as a possibility.

Alicia called me into her office later that week. Gwen was sitting across from her. As I sat Gwen looked at me, silent for a moment as she tried to gather herself and control her anger before she spoke. “Look, I was probed, not raped. I’ve been raped before, once in Denver and once when I was hitch-hiking. What happened in my apartment was not rape. There was nothing violent or sexual about it. Somehow they controlled my mind. They made it so I couldn’t move. Then they poked and prodded and looked inside. And not just my private parts. They looked in my ears and mouth and even my nose. See what they did?”  She leaned towards me and touched a sore on the bottom of her nose. “They did that! They pulled too hard on the nostril and it tore a little.”

“That sounds really unpleasant,” I said

“You don’t believe me! You people act like you’re trying to help and when I really need help, you don’t help.”

“I was there with the cops when they looked in the attic. When you call, we respond. It doesn’t make any difference whether I believe the specifics or not. I believe that you are upset and I’m trying to help.”

She shook her head and mumbled, “No one believes me, and they think I’m crazy. It’s getting bad, really bad.”

“Would you like to go to the hospital for a few days? You’ll be safe there. No one will bother you. You can catch up on sleep then decide what you want to do. Alicia can meet with you there to sort things out,” I suggested.

Gwen gathered her coat and purse and slowly stood up. “I know you think I’m crazy, or I’m lying, but I’m not. This is really happening. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’ve got to meet somebody for coffee.”

After she left, Alicia and I reviewed our very limited options. Fortunately, she didn’t leave while she was angry. We felt there were still opportunities for help.

It was two nights later, about one in the morning when I was called to Gwen’s apartment. I could see the flashing lights as I came down the hill to her street. The fire trucks filled the space in front of the house, ladder lifts on either side of the house. Hoses were directed at the roof where a few flames were still licking at the sides of a large hole. A small crowd of residents and neighbors gathered across the street. Beyond the firefighters was a police car. Gwen was in the back seat.

“I’ll sign the papers for the hospital,” I told the cop sitting in the front seat.

He lowered the driver’s side back window a few inches so Gwen and I could talk.

She was wrapped in a soft white blanket, quietly crying. “They came to take me with them. I heard them in the attic talking and I didn’t know what to do. So I rolled up a newspaper and set it on fire and pushed it through the attic hole to drive them out.”

“I’m glad you’re safe,” I said as the officer rolled up the window and put the car in gear.

Break Almost Over

As many of you know, I have been promoting and giving readings of my new book, When Truth Lies, A Journey with Schizophrenia http://whentruthlies.com/  I will continue promotions and tours throughout the spring and summer. I will resume posting  this week, continuing to share true stories from the world of mental health.

Communities need characters!

Neighborhoods and small towns all have their characters.  We often view them in a one dimensional way and assign our judgments to them.  In my neighborhood, growing up, it was “Moose”, a big guy in his mid-thirties with intellectual limitations, a Yankees cap and a beat up baseball glove. Our responsibility as a society is not only to ensure the safety of our characters, but to try to make them a part of our community. They are a part of, not apart from our world.


The Story

He came out of the post office with a handful of flyers, ads and junk mail. He’d probably been attractive as a young man but time, mental illness and psychiatric medications had taken a toll on him. He was at least forty, just under six feet tall and had long dirty blonde hair. He was clean shaven and you could tell his face wanted to be long and narrow, but ended up puffy and jowly from weight gain. He had on a Motley Crue t-shirt that barely covered his protruding belly. The spandex pants and lace up boots had never really been in style, and no one had worn anything like them for twenty years. I knew it would take him about ten minutes to walk home so I went to a convenience store for a cup of coffee and sat in my car listening to talk radio. The little town Jim lived in was a strange mix of run down Victorian homes, empty storefronts and a new “super” drugstore that sold everything.  This community had been Jim’s home his entire life and he’d become a local character. “The Rock Star” was what the locals called him.

I went to the door of his basement apartment and gave the secret knock:  Tap- tap,tap,tap, - tap,tap. I could hear him behind the door looking through the peephole. He cautiously opened it and I quickly entered. The smell of cigarettes was overpowering. The white walls and ceiling were a light tan from twelve years of exhaled nicotine. The long, narrow living room was built just below ground level with windows at shoulder height. When other residents of the building entered or left you could only see their legs and feet. However, most of the day, the curtains were drawn, as they were this day. The bare bulbs of the fixtures made it brighter than it was outdoors. The sparse furnishings consisted of two lounge chairs facing a small TV and a kitchen table. Dolly sat at the table, she wore a floral print dress that went just below her plastic knees. “It’s only Terry,” Jim said to her. Dolly’s surprised open mouth  expression never changed. Jim had purchased her at the dirty book store in Ithaca almost ten years earlier and she’d been his companion ever since. Jim softly smiled at her.

The radio was playing hits from the past. “Classic 99” the voice from the radio said and Jim echoed “Classic 99.” He sang along with his favorites as they came on.

“I saw you walking back from the post office. It’s great to see you getting out,” I said.

“I never get anything anymore, just junk mail. I keep writing and nobody sends me anything. I think the interweb makes it so people don’t write except with that e-mail stuff. The last thing I got was a picture of Bon Jovi and that was almost a year ago.”

He lit a cigarette and waved his arm towards a wall of photographs, each sent and signed by his favorites: Kiss, White Snake, Alice Cooper, Def Leppard and many more of the genre know as Glam or Hair Bands. “Classic 99,” the radio said “Classic 99,” Jim repeated, laughing.

“The zombies pooped on my front step again first thing this morning. I went up to the door and cursed them. It smelled real bad. But they cleaned it up by the time I went out. They’re going to get in trouble. They can’t do that can they, Terry?” He asked.

“I’m sorry your day started out so badly,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow will be better. Have you seen your folks?”

“My mom came over yesterday and brought me groceries. I got Fruit Loops. Me and Dolly love Fruit Loops. Mom took the garbage with her too. I told her about the zombies and also I’ve been having a problem with ghosts. They keep flying around when I’m watching TV. They don’t really bother me, but they get in the way of the TV and sometimes they get together and make this buzzing sound, like there’s bees in the room. If I yell they’ll usually stop.”

“That sounds terrible, but you usually can deal with bad stuff,” I said.

“Where’s your med box?” I asked. Jim went into the bedroom and came out with a plastic box that was divided into seven long slots for each day of the week and further divided into four for morning, mid-day, dinner and evening doses. A nurse came every Friday to fill his medication box and he also had a two day emergency supply in case of bad weather. “Things look good here,” I said, handing the box back. “Any problems with the medications?”

“Just a little dry mouth, nothing too bad,” he answered.

“Mr. Cooper upstairs keeps cursing me. Dolly heard it too. I’ve never done anything to him. I can hear him curse at me. But I haven’t been banging on the ceiling.”

I looked up, seeing the marks where Jim had banged the broom handle earlier in the month. Jim’s caseworker had spent time with both the neighbor and the landlord reassuring them that Jim was not a danger to them. “Remember what I said? If anyone is bothering you while you are in the apartment you can take another pill to make you relax. Make sure you let me or your mom know. And if anybody is bothering you in town remember what I told you?”

“Yep, I can go to my mom’s or I can go to the police station.” Jim had been bothered a number of times in the street by local teens. The police chief had gone to high school with Jim and felt very protective of his former football teammate. “Chief Billy always watches out for me.” “Classic 99”, the radio said. “Classic 99”, Jim repeated.

“When I was at the post office yesterday, I heard people say I had AIDS. The people in line and the people behind the counter all said I have AIDS. I don’t have AIDS, do I, Terry?”

“When you hear people stay stupid things what can you do, Jim?” I asked.

“Just ignore them. That’s the best way to do it, right Terry?”

“I’ve got to get going. It’s really good to see you, and Dolly too. Tell your mom hello when you see her.” I got up and Jim unlocked the door and I slipped out. Behind the door I could hear, “Classic 99”.

The Stories

The stories are my remembrances. Each of them is based on a true event in my work for Tompkins County Mental Health. I have changed the names and identifying information of every client, patient and co-worker except for Beau Saul, of the Ithaca Police Department, who I was fortunate enough to have as a partner. When confidentiality demanded it, I have changed details. The dialogue is my reconstruction of what was said at the time.   I have felt honored to be let into the lives of so many individuals over the years. Their stories are a gift I have been given.  Please enjoy them in the spirit with which they were written; to educate and inform.

Difficult lives can create challenging problems.

There are some people who live such difficult lives it is hard for us to imagine.  Pain and suffering are joined with fear in ways that produce unusual patterns of behavior as a way of coping. We can pathologize those behaviors if we are willing to help. But we must be careful about judging them.

The Story

            Her face had been sliced and cut at least fifty times. She looked like she’d been in a horror movie. The razor blade was still in her hand. “Would you please put that down?” I asked. “What? What?” she whispered back at me. “The razor is in your hand. Could you please put it on the table behind you? Can I come in?” “Yeah, sure. Come in.” As she backed into the house, I picked up a book from the same table and placed it on top of the razor, hiding it. “What do you want?” she asked, irritated that I had entered her world. “I need to make a call, give me a minute.” I said as I dialed the house phone to central dispatch asking for an ambulance and a deputy. “Shit”, she said, “Not the cops, there’s really no need for the cops. I’m not going to do anything stupid.” I remembered some time earlier that year when she had threatened suicide and made the same promise. While she and I were walking to the car, she pulled a piece of broken glass from her pocket and slit her wrist. I wasn’t taking any chances this time.

            I went to the kitchen and got some paper towels. ”You’re bleeding!” Many of the cuts were superficial, but some looked deep. There was blood in her hair and down the front of her shirt, on her jeans and splattered throughout the house. Her hands looked like they were covered in rust. I doubted she had even looked at herself since she’d started cutting. When she cut, it was usually slow, a process that could take hours, something she could savor like a fine meal.

            “What are you doing here?” she asked. I replied, “Dave called me and told me that you’ve been having a rough time. When he left to go to work, you promised that you would answer the phone. But you didn’t. I see the answering machine has eight messages on it. Two are from me. I had to come out this way for a home visit and I thought I’d stop by.” “You have no right to be here,” she said. “When I knocked on the door, you opened it and invited me in,” I replied.

            She had bunched the paper towels into a ball. She sat and stared at them. “I need my glasses. They’re in the kitchen, can you get them?” I went to the kitchen and found the glasses on the table next to a box of Cheerios. The dishes were done, the counters were clean. I was sure that after Dave went to work she’d fed Maggie, then fixed her lunch and sent her off to school. I went back to the living room and gave LeeAnn her glasses. “What time is it?” she asked. “Almost two. What time does Maggie get home?” I asked. “The bus comes at two thirty.” she answered. “Is there anyone who can stay with her until Dave comes home?” I said. LeeAnn picked up the phone and called a neighbor who agreed to meet her daughter and have a play date with her own child until Dave got out of work. She then returned to her chair and the ball of paper towels returned to her hand.

            “Do we really have to do this? I’m okay, I really am?” she said, pleading with her eyes for me to just disappear. I was tempted to have her look in the mirror. But her appearance was so shocking, I was afraid of her emotional response. Her history of dissociation had begun in childhood with daily physical and sexual abuse. She’d described to me how horrible her life had been. I was aware of her extended family, with generations of sexual abusers and victims, men and women, taking on both roles. The families poverty had been spread out over two rural roads with broken down trailers and roughhewn cabins, most of which had no running water and were heated with wood or kerosene heaters. The children who lived there were dirty and strange, almost feral. They existed on canned goods from food pantries and school lunch programs. The adult men seemed always to be working on rusted out trucks in the yard, small groups of them under the hood or searching for tools. The women were inside watching talk shows on small old televisions.

            LeeAnn had escaped. She’d graduated from high school and worked at Cornell in food service. She’d gotten her rotten teeth fixed and been presentable enough to become a supervisor. She met Dave when he made a delivery of paper goods for the restaurant supply company he worked for. They only dated a short time before they were living together and got married after she became pregnant. Somehow she was able to keep her cutting a secret for most of their early years together. She explained her dissociation as being “spaced out”. As a young mother she was able to juggle job and home as well as anyone. When her younger sister died she went off the rails. Her sister had tried to follow in LeeAnn’s footsteps and might have succeeded if she hadn’t gotten involved with a man who was like all the men in her family. He threatened and bullied and abused. LeeAnn’s sister found the only way out; she took her life.

            The death brought back all the feelings of fear and helplessness and guilt. “I go away! I just go away.” was what LeeAnn had told me when I asked her about what she described as “missing time” each day. “You know when you’re driving on the interstate, and you realize you’ve passed three exits you didn’t notice. It’s like that.” LeeAnn’s therapist had been working hard, using a variety of therapeutic approaches to help LeeAnn. I supervised treatment and we agreed that LeeAnn needed to retain a high level of functioning to be able to stay in her marriage and raise her child. It was difficult to tell how successful we were.

            I could hear the diesel engine of the ambulance as it pulled in front of the house. I went to the door and opened it. “You don’t need the gurney. I’ll walk her out.” LeeAnn continued to stare at the balled up paper towels. “LeeAnn, they’re here. Will you walk out with me?” She stood up and stared at me and I followed her out the door.

The Stories

The stories are my remembrances. Each of them is based on a true event in my work for Tompkins County Mental Health. I have changed the names and identifying information of every client, patient and co-worker except for Beau Saul, of the Ithaca Police Department, who I was fortunate enough to have as a partner. When confidentiality demanded it, I have changed details. The dialogue is my reconstruction of what was said at the time.   I have felt honored to be let into the lives of so many individuals over the years. Their stories are a gift I have been given.  Please enjoy them in the spirit with which they were written; to educate and inform.

When Truth Lies available as an eBook

When Truth Lies, the first real novel about schizophrenia, is available today as an ebook. Print copies will be available for purchase beginning October 24, 2011. To find out more, or read an excerpt, go to http://www.whentruthlies.com/.

Praise for When Truth Lies from Dr. E Fuller Torrey-
[Garahan] "writes clearly and well, and the subject is certainly appealing." -Dr. E Fuller Torrey, author of Surviving Schizophrenia and the Insanity Offense

Context can create understanding

            There are actions that people describe as “crazy” that really aren’t as crazy as they seem.  Rather than saying what someone is doing is crazy, I often start with, “I don’t understand what that person is doing or why they are doing it.”  The action, in and of itself, is most often neutral. When we call it crazy there is a judgment attached that may or may not be true.

The Story

The first calls started about eight thirty in the morning. The initial call was from a friend of a friend who was driving through a small town about seven miles from Ithaca. “There’s a guy walking down the road with a yak. He’s got it on a rope like a dog on a leash and he’s got a big dumb smile on his face. I thought you should know.” I often got calls like this; updates on unusual happenings where someone saw something and they just needed to call someone. The next call was from the lone officer on duty in the town. He was running radar on the edge of town when he noticed an unfamiliar sight in his rearview mirror. “This knucklehead is walking up behind me with the strangest animal I’ve ever seen. I got out of my car and waved him over to the sidewalk. It turns out that he was at the livestock auction at the other end of town and bought a cow or steer or something called a Scottish Highlander. Damn thing has horns that are about six feet wide, and hair like bigfoot. When I asked him what he was doing with it, he said he was going to go to Ithaca and set up a petting zoo. He didn’t have ID or anything except a receipt for the cow. I called the Sheriff’s department and they knew him. His name is Keith Taylor. He’s been picked up a few times, all petty stuff, mostly noise complaints, disturbing the peace and some weird motor vehicle charge. He seems pretty harmless. He was on his way out of town, so I told him to stay off the road and be careful. I was glad to see the back of him. Sheriff’s dispatch said that you had been called a couple of times on him. Good luck!”

A year earlier I’d been called to the Sheriff’s department to help them with a man they had in custody. He’d been pulled over for driving 45 miles an hour in a 20 mile an hour school zone. When the deputy approached his car, the man began with “Do you know who I am?” The deputy was expecting a tale of local fame or high level connections. Instead he got an incoherent monologue that he referred to as “arble-garble.” At the time there was a suspicion of substance abuse. The police report stated that, “Mr. Taylor declined to take a field sobriety test and became quite agitated. When I suggested that he come with me to the sheriff’s department, he began to kick my car and curse. I then took him into custody.”

The deputy was frustrated. He met me at the sheriff department’s front door saying, “The guy can’t calm down. Maybe you can do something. All he’s got is a traffic ticket. I could charge him with harassment, but that is a huge pain in the ass for me. See if you can calm him down and get him out of here. I go off shift in a while and I don’t want to leave him behind.”

Keith was being held in a small corner interview room with glass on two sides. There was a rectangular metal table attached to the floor with a pair of metal chairs facing each other on either side. Keith saw me coming and stood near the door. The deputy pointed at the chair, “Sit!” Keith sat. The deputy unlocked the door and let me in. “I’ll come get you when you’re done,” he said and left.

Keith was a tall, thin white man, with a narrow face and crooked teeth. Even though he was only in his mid-thirties, he had a haircut like a fifties rock and roller, swept back on the sides with a big curl on the top of his head that hung over his forehead almost to the bridge of his nose. He had on jeans and boots and a western shirt with decorated pockets. “I’m Terry Garahan from the county mental health department. The deputy said you were pretty upset and thought I might be able to help. What can I do for you?” Keith gripped the table top with both hands, gritting his teeth. “Now I’m crazy! I can see where this is going. I’m Keith Taylor. I’m the man who is going to decide whether you keep your job or you move on. Understand? I might not decide your fate, but your fate will be decided by me. There are things that I know and things that you know, but I don’t think we know the same things or things that are the same. Understand?” The monologue continued for about twenty minutes with my few interjections of: “That sounds pretty difficult” or “I’m sorry to hear that.” I occasionally nodded my head in response to, “Understand?” with recognition of the fact that in listening to him, there were many things I did understand. I tapped on the glass for the deputy, and said to Keith, “We need to figure a way to get you out of here.” “Good stuff!” he replied.

After an hour on the phone, I had a story and a resolution. Keith was a local guy who was born and raised on a nearby farm. He’d joined the army right out of high school and was given a medical discharge for bi-polar disorder during his first year of service. He’d stayed in Texas, where he’d been stationed, until recently when he decided to return home. His dad said the Veteran’s Administration had been slow to transfer his case and he’d stopped his medications. Within half an hour his dad showed up and the deputy was happy for Keith to leave with him.

During the following months I got several calls about Keith from his dad. He either refused to take his medication or he took it and spit it out or took it and threw it up. Keith’s mom and dad had a small dairy farm a few miles from town and had their hands full. Keith was their only son and while they wanted to help him, they hadn’t really spent much time with him as a mentally ill adult. He’d been in Texas for fourteen years.

One early spring morning I drove out to the farm after an exasperated call from Mr. Taylor. I found Keith in a shop under the hood of an old, beat up Porsche with Texas plates. There was the number 11 formed by two long strips of duct tape on each of the doors of the car. The car was as loud as a jet plane with him revving it by pulling on the throttle. He looked over his shoulder at me. “This car, after I finish, will be the fastest car in the world.” “Your dad is worried about you!” I shouted. He replied, “The 11 is for the number of letters in my name.” He reached in and turned off the ignition, then leaned against the car, looking at me, saying, “A lot of people don’t believe in numerology. But if you think about it, it really makes sense.” I asked him, “Your dad doesn’t think you’re taking your meds. Are you?” He replied, “There is a lot of misinformation going around. Excuse me.” With that he got in his car and drove away.

About midnight that night, I got a call from the state police. Keith Taylor had been arrested and taken to the county jail. A trooper had been having a coffee break in a diner just outside the city limits when he heard the sound of a very loud car. He turned on his stool in time to see a flash of metal go by at high speed. He raced to his car and got on the radio looking for other available troopers or deputies in the area. Another trooper pulled over “number 11” about ten miles away after clocking it at one hundred and three miles an hour. “What is your problem?” Keith had asked the trooper when he tossed his license and registration at his feet.  Unfortunately, the problem was Keith’s; losing his license, car and spending nearly a week in jail.

Now, months later, I was preparing to see what new plan Keith had concocted.  I stopped to see one of the psychiatrists I consulted with. “Petting zoo! Really! He wants to open a petting zoo? Danger to self or others might be able to be met with the cow,” he said, “but I doubt it. Maybe you could trade the cow for three magic beans.”

I saw Keith about five miles outside of town. He was sitting in the grass on the side of the road. The cow was tied to a mailbox, grazing on the thick grass surrounding the wooden post. It was a beautiful animal, a movie star of cows. I drove past and turned the car around in order to be on the same side of the street. “Keith, how are you doing? What’s going on?” I asked. Keith lay back on the grass and closed his eyes. “The world is in turmoil. All I want to do is bring a little joy into the world. I grew up with cows. Kids should be able to see cows. But I’m so tired.” I stood over him blocking the sun. “Keith, you don’t look well. You are really pale and you’re sweating. Are you faint?” “I don’t feel so good,” he responded. “I think you need a doctor to take a look at you. I’m going to call someone to come get you.” The ambulance and the deputy showed up together. The emergency medical technician, after looking at Keith, conducted a simple test, pulling on the skin on his wrist. “He’s really dehydrated. No wonder he feels so lousy.”

The Scottish Highlander was tied to the rear bumper of my car when the deputy pulled away. “I’m glad I’m not you,” he called out the window. It was almost six in the evening when the livestock truck came to get the cow. They came shortly after I received a call that Keith had voluntarily admitted himself to the mental health unit at the hospital.

The Stories

The stories are my remembrances. Each of them is based on a true event in my work for Tompkins County Mental Health. I have changed the names and identifying information of every client, patient and co-worker except for Beau Saul, of the Ithaca Police Department, who I was fortunate enough to have as a partner. When confidentiality demanded it, I have changed details. The dialogue is my reconstruction of what was said at the time. I have felt honored to be let into the lives of so many individuals over the years. Their stories are a gift I have been given.  Please enjoy them in the spirit with which they were written; to educate and inform.