זך פלד

זך פלד

Finishing College and Seeking a Career: Zach Feld

My schizophrenia story starts in fall 2008. I started school at Kenyon College right after high school. My high school was a small, gifted program, and I had done well enough to get in the year Newsweek called Kenyon a “New Ivy,” so my future seemed bright. At first, things seemed normal for my freshman year. I was going to class, doing my homework, etcetera. After a while, however, things took a turn for the worse. My grades slipped dramatically; I struggled socially; and I began having thoughts of paranoia regarding my friends and roommates. At one point I believed they were conspiring to drive me to suicide or at least have some kind of angry outburst.

By spring of my freshman year, I withdrew from school and went home. Kenyon followed me in a sense. I began hallucinating my friends and other ghosts of Kenyon in my childhood home. During that time, I tried to continue my education by taking courses at a community college, but the paranoia and hallucinations were large roadblocks. Around the same time, my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, and I hallucinated her for a while. I remember being so sick that I giggled at her funeral because of intrusive thoughts.

Eventually, I had an outburst due to a major psychotic break. The outburst was a culmination of distress from changes in the way my mind had been operating, including increasing visions and other imaginary phenomena. When I saw my mother one evening, I felt as if she was invading my mind. In frustration, I smashed a plate on the floor which was filled with blintzes Mom had made for dinner. I yelled, “Get out of my head!” at her, and she called the police.

I wound up at the Lindner Center of Hope (a psychiatric facility in Mason, Ohio) for about a month. I wasted away at the Lindner Center, watching the charge nurse write the date every day on a large display pad. This helped me regain a sense of time I had lost from spending days at home not knowing the time or date. They put me on medication, but when I got home I had anosognosia (lack of insight) so I was non-compliant with my meds.

I lasted a short period of time off meds. Before things worsened, I took some woodworking classes, played a lot of Call of Duty, and worked a summer gardening job my high school friend got for me. By the end of summer 2011, after my job ended, I was at the Lindner Center again. While I was getting help, I missed my brother’s wedding, and I had few visitors because everyone was preoccupied with the wedding. When I was discharged, I had my head shaved to a two-inch haircut from the shoulder length curly hair I had and was sent off to a work therapy farm in Massachusetts called Gould Farm. It is not too far from the site of the wedding I missed.

At Gould Farm I participated in farm work as therapy. I started on the forestry and groundskeeping team and eventually moved on to work in the kitchens and with livestock. The age-old medicine of chopping wood and carrying water to build one’s self up was a very literal part of my treatment. There’s nothing else like hard outdoor physical labor to ground you and force you out of your head and into the environment. I did physical labor not only thanks to work therapy but by my own volition. I had started out randomly doing pushups at the command of hallucinations and by the end of my stay at Gould Farm, I was a regular user of the farm weight room, and I was hallucination-free thanks to being stabilized on meds. A self-motivated exercise routine that was my own idea was an important step in my recovery because it gave me a sense of control over my own self-improvement that wasn’t being handed to me from an outside source. Others self-medicate with cigarettes and drugs. I was lucky those had never appealed to me. Whatever sparks of self-starting in the recovery process one has are important to keep and nurture because, otherwise, you’re left with other people’s motivations and no motivation of your own, which leads to non-compliance.

The prescribed meds were a problem for me, however. The psychiatrist noticed some tardive dyskinesia and it upset me so much I started “cheeking” my meds (storing my meds in my mouth rather than swallowing them) in the medication line. I regularly butted heads with the resident psychiatrist and was also getting fed up with the work program. Something had to change so I took drastic measures. I made an attempt on my own life by drinking Simple Green—the cleaning solution—which as luck would have it is non-toxic. I was rushed to the hospital after immediately alerting the night staff of my impulsive behavior. I spent a week at the Pittsfield Mental Hospital until I ended up back at the farm. Later that year, I eventually ended up back in my hometown.

Back at home, I was treated by the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team at Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health (GCBH) around the time of my fourth and final hospitalization. The ACT team helped me get resituated in my hometown. They reminded me of psychiatric appointments and assisted me as I searched for my first apartment. Another thing they did was get me involved with GCBH job coaching. They were a series of friendly, caring, and understanding faces that kept me from isolating at home by visiting me regularly or having me drive to them at the GCBH office. I was hospitalized this one last time and during my hospitalization, the ACT team had a hand in continuity of care between the hospital and GCBH. I stabilized on a four-week injection of paliperidone (Invega Sustenna) so that I didn’t have to think about taking oral medication. I ultimately ended up taking daily divalproex sodium pills as well, but the Invega does the majority of the work, so if I miss a day of the oral medication it’s not a tragedy. I also have a PRN (as needed dose) of oral risperidone today, in case of occasional flare-ups in symptoms.

Things were neither here nor there for a while. I reunited with my biological father who sought me out (I was adopted at birth), and I learned that schizophrenia was inherited from that side. It is a part of the mosaic of contributing factors to my illness. I gave cognitive enhancement therapy a shot and worked a little bit of retail. Eventually, I went back to college, Xavier University, when I felt recovered enough in fall of 2015. The university provided accommodations to work around my illness and learning disability from high school, and I finally graduated in summer of 2022 with a degree in economics and sustainability. For my capstone project, I chose to write a 20-page paper about Gould Farm and present it over Zoom. I looked at the recovery program from an economic, environmental, and social perspective. A big part of my capstone was highlighting the need to return to work after going on disability for a mental illness and showing how meaningful work is important to recovery, finances, managing mental illness, and becoming less of a burden. There is an economic story to be told about disability, work, and upkeep of standards of living that can, sadly, include stories of joblessness and poverty when personal and community failures happen. There is also a beacon of light when successful treatment is administered.

Towards the end of my educational career at Xavier I returned to Gould Farm for an alumni weekend and spoke on a panel about some of the triumphs in my recovery. Revisiting places of recovery can be hard because they are so charged with memories of traumatic times, but it can also help the healing process towards later stages of recovery as a reminder of how far you’ve come.

These days I spend my time volunteering at a food pantry where I’ve been working for a year now. I bring my mom’s dog to the dog park, paint, chauffeur an elderly lady, job hunt, and look for ways to further my career after my recent graduation. I don’t know what the future holds, but I have learned how to manage my illness and feel it is largely behind me now. There are so many institutions that have helped me find hope, including the Gould Farm, the Lindner Center, and Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health. I particularly like the Gould Farm slogan, “We harvest hope.”

I still go to doctors’ appointments and work with a case manager, but I no longer am involved with Assertive Community Treatment because I have graduated from that. I still have occasional residual symptoms, but for the most part, I am more comfortable and compliant than when I started. Some of my breakthrough symptoms lately include animation of paintings I have up on my walls when it’s getting close to my injection time and other hallucinations like the occasional voice. Schizophrenia is a thief of sanity, but with the right treatment, care, and management it can be caught. The mental soundness lost from schizophrenia can be recovered and returned; damage can be mitigated.

www.gcbhs.com

www.gouldfarm.org