motherless child

I just wanted to finish up telling you about my mother since the experiences I had and the experiences she had and the experiences I had with her were the motivation for me getting involved in the anti psychiatry movement.

What I have yet to tell you is that when I was adopted the social worker told my adoptive parents to watch for signs of mental illness when I was around 20 since my mother was mentally ill. When I was 20 I came home from college that year in 1967 with an ounce of marijuana.

As many people did that year I wanted to go to San Francisco with flowers in my hair for the summer of love but my parents found the pot and construed it as the sign of mental illness and sent me to a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist that they to send me to happened to be the deputy director of Rochester State Hospital so he knew my mother and had my records. He was an old school bastard and son of a bitch and tortured my young brain with thorazine and stelazine and put me through hell for 15 months.

I eventually got away from him and went back to Syracuse and graduated in 1969. I went to Woodstock and the Friday night of Woodstock my adoptive parents had a terrible car accident. When I returned home my mother gave me the combination to the safe in case they died and the one thing I got from the safe was my adoption records.

Using these I found my mother in Rochester State Hospital but here is where the fun begins. Because I had been to that shrink and because my mother was an in patient, the staff determined that we were both too unstable to meet but I was told that if she were ever sick or died they would notify me.

The next year I came to Vermont and eventually got myself into my own kind of trouble and in 1972 ended up in the state hospital here. My parents came to visit me and brought me my mother's obituary. The staff had contacted them and not me to say my mother was sick and dying.

The rest is, as they say, history. I never got to meet my mother. I determined that the state hospital here was the closest I would ever get to her and I was committed here. I got out in three months, went to Florida and was a substitute teacher and came back and went to the Newhouse School at Syracuse for a Master's degree in television radio and film in 1977.

I immediately came back here and set up a television studio in the state hospital in 1978 where I had the patients produce their own television shows and then joined the movement in 1980. Still the biggest thing in my life is being a motherless child.