Fixing New York's Mental Health System

The story of Gregory Seifert represents everything wrong with New York’s mental health system. Last year, while touring the Erie County Holding Center—better known as the Buffalo Jail—I observed him quietly hallucinating in his cell, probably communicating with his superiors at the CIA, where he claimed to work. Police had arrested him 14 months earlier for cutting down three wooden power poles with a chainsaw, terminating power to 6,800 homes in suburban Buffalo in the dead of winter. Like most individuals with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, he doubtless had a logical (in his mind) reason for his actions: perhaps his voices told him that cutting off power would prevent a tsunami from Lake Erie from sweeping over Buffalo. When the police questioned him, though, Seifert denied everything. “I know this sounds weird,” he said, “but my cloned twin did it.”

Seifert hadn’t always heard voices. He had graduated from college with a degree in finance, got married, had four children, and held down a good job. But during his thirties, he suffered the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, and, worse, he had no awareness of his illness—a condition called anosognosia, which results from the disease’s effects on the parts of the brain we use to think about ourselves. From there, it was all downhill. As described vividly by Matthew Spina in the Buffalo News, Seifert lost his job and family, became homeless, set fire to his car (he thought it contained devices to spy on him), and was psychiatrically hospitalized for brief periods in community hospitals seven times, including just two weeks before chainsawing the poles. He mostly refused medication. After all, he thought he was fine.

Read Full Article »
Comment
Show commentsHide Comments

Related Articles