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Overcoming Schizophrenia: David Wilson

David Wilson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1968. His father was a pharmacist, and his mother was the executive director of NAMI (National Alliance on mental illness) Staten Island for 30 years, retiring just 2 years ago.

David has a younger sister whom he remains close with today. He remembers his childhood as a happy time.

As a child, David attended a college prep school in Brooklyn. Though he did well in high school, he remembers partying at exclusive night clubs. When his friends found out I was not following many of the rules, they lost interest in his friendship. Looking back, he sees that the changes in his personality at the time were a serious red flag but remained unnoticed by his parents.

David received early admittance to Vassar College in 1986, where he would study biology. At first, he did well and enjoyed the college atmosphere. However, he remembers using marijuana to excess. During the end of his first semester, he had a full-blown psychiatric emergency, running from a classroom into a library, paranoid, afraid that other students would hurt him and were “out to get him.” A faculty member called 911.

David had been staying up all night studying and drinking coffee, and assumed that the pressure involved in college led to his break from reality. He was 18 at the time. Despite this first psychotic episode, David does not recall experiencing any auditory or visual hallucinations.

Following the 911 call, David was taken to the emergency room for a few hours, and then his parents took him home. A week after this first psychiatric break, a psychiatrist diagnosed David with schizophrenia.

Unfortunately, when David returned to college after the winter break, everyone knew what had happened. David was embarrassed and felt it was impossible to explain. The university consented to allow David to stay in school if he would return home to his parents’ house on weekends.

While studying for his biology degree, David was prescribed the older, typical medications (the newer generation of medications was not yet available) including haloperidol, prolixin and loxapine. Nothing helped. He managed to stay in school until his junior year, when he was no longer “thinking straight.” He left college on medical leave, in 1988.

For three years, David lived at home and worked part-time for his dad in the pharmacy. The auditory hallucinations began. David believed he had a “telepathic connection” where he heard other people’s thoughts, and they heard his. After leaving Vassar College, he began to suffer from delusions of grandeur, auditory hallucinations and heard voices inside his mind. He was hospitalized three times, about three months each.

In 1992, when it felt that all hope was lost, David was prescribed a second-generation medication for treatment-resistant patients, clozapine. Within days, David experienced a reduction of symptoms that he had never imagined possible. After three weeks, his doctors decided he was ready to spend weekends at home. Another three weeks later, he was discharged on clozapine. Daivd remembers that time of life as a “U turn.” His uncle told him it was “the biggest change anybody has ever seen.” After a month, his symptoms were gone.

Unfortunately, despite the encouraging progress on clozapine, there were setbacks. For ten months, David was sleeping 13-14 hours a day, but these side effects eventually resolved on their own.

David was 26 years old, and his goal was still to graduate from college. With the support of his doctors and parents, while living at home, he enrolled in Wagner College in Staten Island. After he took a microbiology class and scored an A-, he then began taking difficult courses such as physics, calculus and organic chemistry. In 1997, he graduated with a biology degree and an A- average.

During David’s descent into schizophrenia, his mom began volunteering for NAMI Staten Island, and continued contributing to their programs for thirty years.

Shortly after graduation, David was admitted to the New England College of Optometry, but after a semester and a half, he found the coursework too difficult and decided to not complete the degree program. Unfortunately, he never considered asking for help, a tutor, extra time for tests, and other accommodations that are readily available to disabled college students today.

David decided to look for a high-paying job, ideally in pharma sales. In 2000, he joined the Ricoh company in Manhattan selling copiers. His goal was to get sales experience, and he worked there for a year before landing an outside pharmaceutical sales job.

Succeeding in his work and financially stable, David bought a condo and lived there alone. He had great friends and was in pharmaceutical sales for seven years. He felt he was in full recovery with no positive or negative symptoms.

Finally, David decided to follow a new dream and become a peer support specialist on an ACT team (Assertive Community Treatment). Despite the fact that there would be a huge pay decrease, he took the job. For three years, he did outreach work with the mentally ill and enjoyed it.

In 2007, He decided to return to school for a three-year master of social work program at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work, studying at night school while working full-time. He loved the material, and helping others holistically, graduating with a 3.8 in 2010.

Following graduation with his master’s degree, David worked as a lead social worker at a psychiatric emergency room in the inner city at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn for a year. He did intakes, therapy and discharges. He recalls it was a difficult job, where he was seeing the “worst of the worst,” but feels the experience helped him become a mental health expert.

David met the love of his life in 2014 and married. In 2016, they had a daughter.

In 2018, he took his boards to become an LCSW, passed, and began his own practice.

Today, David runs a thriving and busy private practice as a Serious Mental Illness (SMI) specialist in New York city. He sees patients with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, and he jokingly comments that other therapists “would not touch this area of work with a ten-foot pole.” He sees about thirty patients a week.

He shares that it “takes a village” to make a success of a life touched by schizophrenia or other serious mental illnesses. He also notes that the newer medications (called “atypicals”) which came out during his twenties, are a game changer.

He feels that treatment with clozapine is what saved his life.

www.statenislandcounselingpro.com

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