Chelsea Kowal 

Back to School: Chelsea Kowal

View the condensed story in Newsletter Issue 23

Chelsea Kowal has lived with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type since beginning college. Despite several hospitalizations and refractory symptoms, she is now recovered on clozapine. She graduated with her master’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2013.

Chelsea was born in 1989 in Newark, New Jersey, and is the youngest of three siblings. Her mom was a teacher’s aid and craftswoman. She had two older brothers.

Chelsea experienced a difficult childhood filled with abuse and neglect. At age 15, Chelsea was suicidal. This led to her first hospitalization, and what would be only one of many. While hospitalized, she met a person around her age who was hearing voices. At the time, she had no idea that many years later, she would experience the same symptoms.

Chelsea’s oldest brother committed suicide at the age of 25, when Chelsea was only 17. A few months after his suicide, she spoke at her high school, encouraging students to not do drugs or drink and to seek help if experiencing thoughts of suicide.

In high school, Chelsea and her mother were evicted and became homeless. Chelsea “couch surfed” at night during the summer before her senior year and into the fall, staying off and on with about eight different families. During the summer, she helped build and fix homes through an organization with her church called Appalachian Service Project. She also volunteered as a Junior Camp Counselor at a camp for children and adults with special needs. The camp provided her with food and somewhere to sleep.

She was eventually notified that a permanent residence was required within the school district boundaries if she wanted to continue studying at her high school, which was one of the best in her area. To meet the requirement, she decided to move into a friend’s family home and stay in their basement until she and her mother moved into an apartment together. She and her mother were homeless for about six months.

Chelsea dealt with her homelessness and abusive upbringing by directing all her effort toward her studies, and remained drug and alcohol free, after seeing how abusing these substances took a toll on her family. In her first year of high school, she had taken remedial courses including biology and social studies. But during her senior year, she would take five advanced placement courses and two honors courses, graduating tenth in a class of 300 students.

However, about that time—at age 17—Chelsea attempted to take her own life, overdosing on her prescribed antidepression medication, only a month after losing her oldest brother to suicide. Fortunately, she recovered quickly after a hospital stay. After this, she was diagnosed as “probable bipolar.” She was also diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (on the Autism spectrum) at age 22 and again at age 32. Due to her challenging upbringing, she was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In spite of her diagnoses, she looked forward to making a new start in college, living independently as a young adult, apart from her family. Despite her unstable family situation and unpredictable mental health, Chelsea was ambitious for her future. After applying to universities, she was waitlisted at MIT, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, receiving correspondence from these universities while homeless. Nine different colleges across the nation granted her admission. She finally settled on starting at Syracuse University in 2007 to major in bioengineering.

Throughout her life, Chelsea always had a photographic memory. Starting college, she managed to memorize tens of pages of class notes in less than an hour. She would finish an exam scheduled to last over an hour in 10 to 15 minutes. She managed a course load of over 20 credit hours, over the normal limit of 18, and maintained close to straight A’s. After her sophomore year, her GPA was 3.986.

In addition to studying full-time during college, Chelsea worked a variety of jobs for up to 60 hours per week. This included tutoring calculus classes. She remembers tutoring as a happy time when she enjoyed going the extra mile and taking any possible opportunity to help her students.

Along with working during school, Chelsea also performed research at two other universities as part of summer research internships. In the summer of 2008, she engaged in cancer research at University of Virginia. In the summer of 2009, she engaged in spinal cord injury research at Case Western Reserve University.

Looking back, Chelsea recognizes that during college, she was experiencing a “manic energy,” always working or studying. At that time, her efforts were successful, and she was unaware that she was on the brink of developing a full-blown mood disorder and eventually psychosis.

Despite great success in school and work, during the beginning of her junior year, Chelsea’s abusive upbringing came back to haunt her. She eventually attempted to take her own life again by jumping off a 40-foot building. Fortunately, a large tree braced her fall, and though she had broken her back, she survived. After two days of hospitalization, she was able to walk again, which friends and family considered to be a miracle. She would wear a body brace for the next three months to allow her broken vertebrae to heal.

Following her recovery from the jump, she was transferred to a psychiatric ward and mandated to take a 10-month leave from college. At that time, Chelsea heard from some of the calculus students whom she was teaching. They were encouraging, missing her, and wanting her back. She hoped to soon return to normal life.

Unfortunately, Chelsea’s first antipsychotic medications negatively affected her exceptional photographic memory. Her clinicians tried risperidone, among others. These medications had bad side effects including weight gain and akathisia (restlessness). Following the suicide attempt, her diagnosis was changed to schizophrenia.

Following her hospital discharge, Chelsea spent the next 10 months in an intensive outpatient program (IOP). She tried various medications. While there, she enjoyed crocheting scarves, which she later distributed to the homeless in New York City. With her history of being homeless herself, helping the homeless has always been incredibly important to her. She also made friends in the program.

In fall of 2009 and spring of 2010, she unsuccessfully reapplied to return to Syracuse University. Finally, in fall of 2010, she was readmitted.

Back in school, Chelsea went from straight A’s to A’s and B’s, as her memory was not as sharp as it had been prior to antipsychotic medication. She took fewer courses but enjoyed doing research in the Department of Orthopedics at the Upstate Medical University, where she worked on a project studying the anatomy of the human shoulder. Chelsea realized that she still had a bright future and promising career.

Chelsea also resumed working other jobs while in school, including washing dishes in a cafeteria, which she enjoyed for the fast pace. She tutored calculus and differential equations and worked as a math grader. She also volunteered at her local community center, helping students learn math and science.

In addition to studying for her undergraduate bioengineering degree, she added two minors: mathematics and general management studies (including marketing and accounting). Chelsea graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University with a GPA of 3.736 and in the Honors Program. She also received several awards.

Upon Chelsea’s college graduation in May 2012, she had worked in research for nearly three years. She decided her next step was to study for a PhD degree in biomedical engineering, and applied to the University of Florida, where she received a full tuition scholarship to attend in the fall of 2012.

However, during the beginning of her graduate studies, she began to experience her first delusions. She expected to win a Nobel Peace prize. Friends told her that she was one of the smartest people alive, and when voices in her mind confirmed that it was true, she believed it.

At the University of Florida, she developed an idea to cure cancer by using quantum physics. Chelsea soon expected to help cure cancer herself and wondered if there was anything in life she could not do.

Her closer friends and family quickly noticed that something was wrong. She was in and out of the hospital in Florida throughout her degree program, and her diagnosis was changed to schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. At one point, a physician told her it was impossible for her to finish graduate school, and she should not even try. Despite the voices and delusions, Chelsea successfully graduated with her master’s degree in biomedical engineering in December of 2013 with A’s and B’s.

Following her graduation, her psychosis returned, worse than it had ever been. She would not work again for 10 years.

She returned to New Jersey and entered another partial care program through the local psychiatric hospital while living at home with her mother. She remembers art therapy classes where she was encouraged to do simple art projects. Though she appreciated art, it was devastating to realize how far she had fallen from her success in biomedical engineering. Still, she held onto her goal and dream of returning to engineering.

Her doctors tried yet another medication, aripiprazole (Abilify) but she developed a rare side effect, becoming unable to swallow. Eventually, she was moved to a group home in Sussex in 2015 after another hospitalization. While living there, she would be closely monitored in a partial care program.

In 2017, Chelsea was finally admitted for a long-term stay at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital until August 2019. At Greystone, doctors tried lurasidone, among many other medications, which initially helped with her memory, but seemed to aggravate her psychosis. Haloperidol was unsuccessful. Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) made her more suicidal. The list goes on…

Chelsea remembers hearing voices all day, from the time she woke up until the second she fell asleep, and she recalled that she would often sleep only an hour per night for months. She even had two periods during which she recalled that she did not sleep at all for about nine days each time.

Chelsea was afraid of the staff, believing they were trying to kill her because she was too smart. At times, she refused to eat. She also believed she was working for the FBI, police, CIA, FDA, and Department of Justice. Everything she learned in college and graduate school was speeding through her mind. She wrote letters to various organizations with ideas for inventions.

Upon her discharge, she was still acutely symptomatic and delusional, believing she was the President of the United States. She also believed she was Jesus making a return back to earth. She remembers visiting a pier at the waterfront, believing rescue workers there were resuscitating people who had drowned many years prior. She thought she had invented a vaccine that would save all humans and animals from COVID. Chelsea also struggled intensely with “cybertelepathokinesis,” a term she created for hearing other people’s voices in her mind.

Chelsea finally accepted and made peace with her psychiatric diagnoses. It was about a year after being discharged from Greystone when a doctor prescribed a new medication, clozapine, when things really began to improve.

Chelsea began clozapine in the fall of 2020. After one month, she saw a significant reduction in her voices and delusions, which she had never imagined possible. She recalls that her voices were reduced from constantly to about 5% of the time. Within a few months, Chelsea had gained a high enough level of recovery to grasp a firm hold of her dream of working again, and she began a new life.

She began a volunteer internship in January 2021 for the National STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Honor Society to help students increase their awareness of STEM fields. She worked in seven departments, serving as Director of Market Research/Email Marketing, Director of Member Care, Department Manager of Sponsorships and Partnerships, and an intern in e-commerce, public relations, business management, and social media.

In January 2022 Chelsea resigned from her internship, focusing instead on the training she needed to become a peer support specialist.

Throughout her life, Chelsea always abstained from drugs and alcohol, having seen the negative effects the substances had on the lives of some of her family members. She committed herself to live differently. Fortunately, drug and alcohol use did not complicate her recovery.

Today, Chelsea has been in nearly full recovery for three years. In recovery, she finds herself busy again. She volunteers as a peer support specialist and a recovery coach in training. She also volunteers at her local library and YMCA, as well as a few other organizations. She currently suffers no side effects and experiences very limited symptoms.

Clozapine was different than any other medication she tried because every other medication either was ineffective, intolerable, or stopped working after a few months. Chelsea reflects that “Clozapine totally changed my life and enabled me to move forward in ways I never thought I could again…Now, I want my life to matter, especially because I nearly died a few times in my life. I am just grateful to be alive. Every day is a blessing.”

She recalls choosing biomedical engineering because there are so many projects in the field that would allow her to make a difference in the world. Her dream is to continue to make a difference in the lives of as many people as she can.

Chelsea recently became engaged to be married and is excited to see what life has to offer her next.