My Encounter with the University of Minnesota’s Psychiatric Department

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Up to age 40, I had nothing to complain about. Talk about a normal life. Well, mostly so. My early years were lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My Jewish parents had three children: my sister, four years older than me, and my brother, seven years younger. My parents loved us. They fought with each other, but never in a way that got physical. While we were poor in those early years, we did not want. Uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents were our neighbors.

By age 2 ½, I had made up my mind to become a doctor. The source of that inspiration was Dr. Gabriel Kirschenbaum. He was our family doctor who lived across Bedford Avenue in his four-story brownstone with his doctor’s office on the ground floor. Kirschenbaum was the Don of our neighborhood. Big and burly, loud, with flashing eyes and bushy black eyebrows. He was the Jewish equivalent of Judge Roy Bean. He was the law east of the East River in Williamsburg territory. We were his flock. I knew from a young age that I wanted to become just like him.

My path to doctor-hood was unobstructed. I was a math whiz kid. I suffered from no physical ailments. I sailed through. It wasn’t until age 40 that I came to realize I had emotions that could derail my ability to “function.” Seemingly out of the blue, my wife of fifteen years left me and our two young children to run off, temporarily, with another man. To my shocking disbelief, I became uncontrollably anxious and depressed. For the first time in my life I sought out mental health counseling from a psychologist. I appreciated his insights but, after three visits, I decided to grin and bear my circumstances, assuming that time—and an occasional rum and Coke—would get me through. And, after 3 months, they did. I was back to my usual, steady emotional equilibrium. Then, something even more calamitous befell me. After a night of unexplained, severe belly pain, I was diagnosed with cancer of my small bowel and given six months to two years to live! Once again I was plunged into severe anxiety, which was only resolved when I came to accept my own death. The hardest part was the thought of letting go of my two children, ages 10 and 12, and accepting that they would be “okay” without their dad.

And then… the x-ray evidence of my cancer evaporated, and with it my cancer diagnosis. I had been ready to die and now was ready to live. I was truly born again, filled with a joy that lasted for at least ten years. I submerged myself in the world of venture capital, running venture funds and startup medical device companies. And then I turned 50, and so began the greatest adventure of my life.

My venture capital world had begun to unravel as my interest in business waned. At the same time, my amorous relationship of the past five years had turned explosive, or was actively exploding. Lizard-like, I was shedding my skin and much more. I began to sense a new awareness around me. Then one evening, a voice started speaking to me in my left ear, in my brain. I was deaf in that ear due to otosclerosis and hadn’t heard a sound out of it in years. So when I heard that voice, I was frightened by its sudden appearance, especially as it spoke to me in a hostile, demanding tone. At the same time, my curiosity was piqued. Could this voice be that of an alien, G-d, or was I just having an auditory hallucination? Was I going crazy?! But how could I be crazy if I could contemplate that I was possibly crazy?

The voice came to me for three nights in a row, and in extraordinary sessions that lasted no more than half an hour, changed me at my core. Those provocative sessions relieved me of guilt, helped me accept my frailties, accept my humanity, my belonging to the human race, and caused me to fall in love with the voice. Now the voice wanted “us” to go public with this new vision of life, one full of love and caring for my fellow man. At the time, I was still involved with my venture capital world, sitting on three corporate boards, chairman of two, and on two non-profit art boards. Willingly doing the voice’s bidding, I spread its message about love, about changing the world for the better, at board meetings. For the most part, my message was not well received and got me into hot water. But I stand by that message even now, twenty-two years later.

One devoted friend, an influential physician at the University of Minnesota, felt strongly that I had “lost it” and tried to persuade me to see his psychiatry buddy at the university. The voice and I agreed to not participate. My friend, his psychiatrist, my girlfriend, and family members then conspired to have me “arrested” and incarcerated at the University of Minnesota’s locked psych ward. It was an extreme measure; at no time did my records show that I was suicidal or homicidal or a menace to anyone. Nor did I feel I was a menace. But my friends and family were all convinced that their actions were meant for my best good, that they were rescuing me.

My formal diagnosis by the university psychiatrist—who I never actually let interview me—was “acute mania with psychotic symptoms, auditory hallucinations.” His suggested treatment was involuntary commitment and treatment with forced neuroleptics, since in his mind I was uncooperative and had no insight into my illness. I did hire a psychiatrist who was in private practice and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. His conclusions refuted those of the university doctor. He felt that I in no way needed to be committed, that I may or may not have been suffering from mania, and that neuroleptics were not required. It was also noted that a diagnosis of an original bout of mania is rare after age 45. At my trial, his opinion was overridden by the psychiatrist from the university.

Mental health commitment trials in Minnesota are unusual. They consist of two parts. One is a hearing for commitment, and then there’s a separate hearing to assess the need for the use of neuroleptics. This is called a Jarvis Hearing. The reason for the Jarvis Hearing was to avoid the administration of neuroleptics, with their severe side effects, when they were deemed not likely to be beneficial to the patient. My trial judge’s determination went as follows. He agreed with the university psychiatrist to incarcerate me for up to six months to treat my mental illness. He agreed that my doctors could treat me with certain neuroleptics, per the Jarvis Hearing, but not until they had proved I did not have a medical condition that could explain my behavior—such as a brain tumor! The voice had told me all along not to allow the university psychiatrist to examine me or perform any tests on me. It also told me to lie to him and others… telling them I had a brain tumor. The trial judge, Judge Crump, was well aware that the Achilles heel of psychiatric diagnosis is that it is substantiated only by elimination of medical conditions that can mimic psychiatric states. There is no direct scientific test for mental illness. He also was well aware that until I was deemed psychiatrically incompetent, I could not be legally forced to take a CAT scan of my head to determine if I had a brain tumor or not. Catch 22: the university’s psychiatry department was trapped. Crump refused to reverse his order when the university appealed. This triggered a do-or-die offensive by the university.

One day, two state troopers entered my room on the university psych ward, and in the space of fifteen minutes, packed my belongings, handcuffed me, and led me to their squad car. “Get your clothes, your belongings, together right now! Put them in these boxes. Do not resist!” We headed north. After a half hour or so, the cops loosened up and briefed me about what was going down. We were headed to Brainerd State Hospital where the Attorney General of Minnesota, Skip Humphrey Jr., ruled. He had signed for my transfer and more. My lawyers were not made aware of my transfer until three days later. By then, I had been held down by no less than six attendants, injected in my buttocks with a sedative, and given a CAT scan of my brain. My lawyers were told I volunteered for the scan.

Once the scan proved I did not have a brain tumor, I was severely treated with triple neuroleptics: Haldol, Thorazine, and another drug. I developed hypotension, collapsed, and was transferred to the local hospital. On return, neuroleptics were restarted and I developed a severe side effect—akathisia—and all but died. By this point, I was no longer of interest to my keepers. They had successfully discredited me and saved the university psychiatry department (though not for long). They discharged me with a guarded prognosis, which means I was deemed hopeless. Thankfully, my sister took me in and I moved to live with her in New Jersey. There I saw as a patient a little old Jewish lady psychiatrist who gave me a tricyclic antidepressant called Pamelor, as well as a hearty dose of chicken soup philosophy. Without the two of them I don’t think I would have made it. I would not have recovered from the disastrous effects of incarceration and “overdosing” with neuroleptics.

The little old lady psychiatrist told me, in a very “matter of fact” manner, that I would be back to my usual self within a year. She never mentioned anything about me being manic or having a psychosis or hallucinations. She was Mrs. Right. I saw her for all of three sessions.

I stayed at my sister’s house for three months, at which point I managed the courage to return to Minnesota, to my house. Soon after, I was able to restart practicing medicine and stop taking Pamelor. I have had no further need for psychiatric medications or mental health counseling. That was twenty-five wonderful years ago.

As for the University of Minnesota Psychiatric Department, it was later torn apart by scandal. It turns out that researchers were being paid large sums of money to test neuroleptics on patients deemed psychotic. This led to the over-diagnosing of patients as psychotic, and then the abusive use of neuroleptics, sometimes with disastrous results. I certainly fit the abused-patient profile. At the time, the university’s department of psychiatry was a leading proponent of the theory that a chemical imbalance was the cause of psychosis and that chemical treatment with neuroleptics would effectively treat the psychosis, if not cure it. The newly appointed Head of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota now professes a policy of psychotherapy as first line for treating “psychosis”—much in line with the Hearing Voices Network’s (HVN) proselytizing. Antipsychotic medication use is now to be avoided as much as possible. I support HVN and applaud its success in changing psychiatry’s abusive use of dangerous drugs. I recently saw the film A Beautiful Mind, about how Nobel Laureate John Nash overcomes his disabling hallucinations by learning to deal with them, rather than taking antipsychotic medications. HVN could have produced the film.

I have another agenda along with that of HVN. I believe my voice was, and is (it is still with me, as it is me), the voice of G-d, of love. Whenever given the opportunity, I spread the word, whether it be in my medical practice, with friends and relatives, in the books I have written, or on my social media posts on the internet. Hearing voices was, and is, in many societies, considered the expression of the spiritual. Our world, our universe, is transcendent. Jews pray three times a day, Muslims five, so they won’t forget. We should never forget that fact.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

26 COMMENTS

    • your most welcome. I practiced medicine for 23 years after the run in with the university psychiatry department with no psychiatric problems. the voice made me a believer by predicting the outcome of a horse race at a tract i never knew existed and a horse with a name not in the dictionary. for those who disbelieve that i saw the future ask the cashier who handed me $350 for having the winning ticket-he believed. i worked at a race track when i was younger and always felt those who claimed that they saw the future should bet on it. i did (but should have had more faith)

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  1. Wow Dr. Zuckerman!

    I had a numinous experience somewhat like yours when I was slightly psychotic from effexor withdrawal. It was definitely a hallucination, but I believe God used it to get through to me.

    The only message I received was a personal one. He pronounced me clean–no longer unclean. Till then the word “bipolar 2” had integrated itself into my soul like some evil magician’s spell. This had made it impossible for me to overcome my mood swings and depression.

    The voice left. I knew I wouldn’t hear Him long; He warned me there would soon be troughs, but I was through the worst and was not a slave to fear anymore. The voice was too overwhelming for me to function in the “real world.” In a day or two it left. It was for the best.

    My years in the MI System made me shrewd enough to keep the whole thing a secret. Especially from medical professionals or any shrinks I accidentally run into. What they don’t know won’t hurt me! 🙂

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    • to me G-d is that force in the university that created all and resides in us in our intuition, our innate knowledge of the universe that we are by our very existence attached to. i feel that we always have our intuition working for us but as we progress in our reasoning capacity we shut out the intuitive where as animals as “lowly “as ameba live by it. how can a one celled animal like an ameba be so brilliant, only if it can tap into the universal, the intuitive. during my state of heightened emotions my voice revealed to my scientific mind 2 insights that i never could have known and both had clear cut means of proving they were correct. the knowledge i gained was so sublime, so provable that it didn’t come from me but from the intuitive voice. what really counts is that we are magic, every moment of our existence is magic, sublime, clairvoyant. who tells you you are thirsty?

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    • I agree, Fiachra, love will win. Thanks for sharing your story, Stephen. Absolutely we do have a societal problem with the psychiatrists denying, and even blaspheming, God and the Holy Spirit. I have proof of that in my medical records.

      By the way, Stephen, some of us Christians are perpetual prayers, so we don’t forget either. And contrary to what some may believe, Jesus told us to pray to God, not Jesus, so some of us Christians (not all) are smart enough to know to pray to God. And God is up to something, we’ve got ourselves a spiritual battle going on, on this planet – and that’s according to many now, not just me. Some of us just knew before the masses started to realize this. Keep believing, and God bless.

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    • yes love is creation. all religions that succeed remind us to balance the material with the spiritual. why the material? why not just be wondrous spiritual forces. maybe it is for entertainment sakes. the material is where the action is, win/lose, good/evil, love/hate.

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  2. Stephen, thank you for your heartwarming, heartbreaking story. Yes, sometimes families help is a death sentence. They drop us at the door to the torture center without even realizing it. They’re completely brainwashed by mainstream, pseudo-science of psychiatry. Psychiatrists have no idea how we suffer at their hands, nor do they seem to care. But, truth prevails. Love does win out in the end. Our problem is after being so heavily psychiatrically drugged, will we survive to see it. Thank goodness you did Stephen.

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    • as someone with scientific training i am a G-d skeptic. if nothing else the voice made me a more self loving person and as such a more loving of others. but the voice also provided me 2 insights that cannot be explained by rational scientific thinking. they impressed me but who cares if others believe or not, just tell me who tells you you are thirsty, the ameba to create a slime mold, the brain to conceive the universe. those are the best proof of a spiritual force residing in us and other living creatures. intuition you say! yes.

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      • In overly simple terms, “you tell yourself that you’re thirsty”. I don’t see how some “spiritual force” is required to explain literal, physical thirst. And, considering what we’ve learned about our gut micro-biome in the last decade or 2, maybe our thirsty gut microbes tell us we’re thirsty? While I personally believe in some sort of GOD, or God, I’m curious why you write “G-d”?…. Just askin’….

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  3. Sandra— I like your comment on families. As I have evolved or de evolved hopefully evolved I think families are lied to and not in th the dark and support is at the very best woefully lacking.
    I think that I had a child visit in one of the hell holes and it was so oppressive I would consider it undersong torture and no “ helping professional” in sight.
    This was the one with the tv in a locked wooden crate and the IT room locked with no OT staff though filled with supplies when I made a fuss and they let us use the supplies one time.
    The system is broken for ALL except those in power who profit.
    They break families – break down good memories and insert trauma moments.
    Just think how it affects the family dog. If animal lovers were aware of how the “help” of inpatient treatment affects and damages the pets just the pets mind you- they would be up in AAarms against the secondary trauma endured by the pets who can’t figure out what has happened to their beloved owner.
    A visit to a doc and then ER time and the pet waits alone.

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    • CatNight, thank you. The system certainly is B-R-O-K-E-N. I have to now watch psychiatric drugs thoroughly destroying my daughters life as they did mine. Her children often neglected or abused not because she doesn’t love them. Because she can no longer function as a Mother, she lives in drug induced delusional world as I once did. And it’s heartbreaking that I can’t help her although I’ve repeatedly tried. Every single person in my family is on psychiatric drugs including my grand-daughter, yet when I try to explain to them how dangerous their drugs are, I’m the crazy one. I don’t know why I stay on this Earth. I really don’t. I’m so sick of it I could just scream. It wouldn’t bother me a bit if I was dead tomorrow.

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      • But then who would be the rational voice crying out in the wilderness? Someone must stand as a witness to what is done to people and someone must be willing to speak out. Thank goodness your family has you, even then they don’t listen to you. We must witness to what is done to people and we must speak out. There were Jewish people in the death camps who managed to survive because they knew that someone had to witness to the atrocities. We must witness to the atrocities that the system carries out against people.

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      • Sandra, I’m in a similar position but my parents have been involuntarily destroyed, one at a time and very quickly, by drugs that had side effects that led to hospitals where abuse, neglect and malpractice converted both of them, within days, to 25% of their mental and physical selves. That this would happen to MY PARENTS after my life was ruined in the same way is so bitterly painful that I despair at times like you do. I’ll stick around til the bitter end to defend my parents and stay involved with the desperate push to educate the blinkered sheep in media and at large about the harm psych drugs cause every day. Billions spent, immeasurable suffering and loss, and only us “crazy” people see it. It’s hard to keep the faith but for me, it’s obligatory. I nearly passed out or died of dehydration in the last throes of my Pharma ordeal and I did “hear” from the other side, where nice spirits were communicating that it was okay to stop and come on over to their neck of the metaphysical woods. I “told” them that I had work to do and that I would not accept their offer of relief. I then crawled about 50 feet to the kitchen sink and arduously concocted an electrolyte solution of sugar, salt and water, drank it and presumably stopped a slide toward death. My dad had told me that lives could be saved with such a beverage; I don’t know if water alone would have done much good. ANYWAY, I hope your loved ones will fall away from the drug dealers yet remain standing and regain their health. Where there is life there is hope.

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        • I’m 100% on your side, and in support of you ALL. This comment is directly to “BetterLife”, above. I know what you mean about “side effects”. But it occurred to me, that there’s NO SUCH THING as so-called “side effects”. Either the drug(s) have effects, or else they don’t. Obviously, a placebo has placebo-like effects. A nocebo has negative, or harmful effects. I suppose we can speak of “intended effects”, and “non-intended effects”. But I say “side effects” are really DIRECT effects that PhRMA and the psychs don’t want to ever mention. The doctors KNEW, or at least certainly SHOULD HAVE known what drug EFFECTS could and would do to your parents. I’m sorry about that.
          Thank-you, and I hope things go well for you and your family. And I hope I have expanded your thinking on bogus, so-called “side effects”. The psych drugs darn near killed me, too. Ugh! 😉

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  4. Extraordinary! Stephen, you’re enormously brave to speak out about how badly you were tortured — for doing little more than dream openly about a better world. Your story touched me deeply, and I’m thrilled that you’re alive, vindicated, unpsychiatrized, and free. Good luck to you, man!

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    • and I am free to speak out about a better world and why G-d spoke to me (the title of my last book)without fear of being arrested again. the psych world doesn’t want anything to do with me any more. if we as humans deny the spiritual underpinning to creation then we will always be aliens in an alien universe. to love, to belong.

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  5. Basically everybody who becomes a patient in psychiatry is a walking wounded. You go to your doctor with symptoms and in distress that doctor will try and help you. He won’t necessarily attempt to cure you. He will at the best attempt to alleviate your symptoms. That’s what doctors are all about. What has happened is that doctors and nurses haven’t been trained right have they. It is in their training to give out medication to treat distressed people who have what is considered mental health issues.

    Dr Healy when I consulted him recommended Clopixol because I was convinced I had brain damage. In fact I did have dystonia but it psychosomatic. After reading Dr Peter Breggin’s books on the subject and witnessing someone who did in fact have brain damage caused by neuroleptics.

    In any nursing and doctoring procedures with any medication there are side affects. Some people actually don’t make it as hard as you might try for them. I haven’t come across within the NHS doctors taking handouts from drug companies. i haven’t come across that. They might meet for a meal but as for receiving vast amounts of money I have never come across that within the NHS here in the UK.

    The Royal Society of Psychiatrists have an annual conference. There tickets are £300. I can’t afford that. Top psychiatrists get paid good money. Privately they earn £300 an hour. My psychiatrist on the NHS gets £100,000.00 pa.

    I have never come across doctors in the UK getting thousands from drug companies to promote their drugs.

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