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Mental health expert to share experiences, insights
Tuesday, September 28, 1999 By Sally Kalson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
When Frederick J. Frese III argues in favor of new state laws that override a mentally ill person's right to refuse treatment under certain conditions, he has a different kind of credibility than some other advocates.
Frese, retired director of psychology at Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital near Cleveland, has lived for 33 years with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
He has been picked up by police, hospitalized 11 times in 10 years, declared legally insane and committed to a psychiatric ward.
Despite this history, Frese has succeeded both professionally and personally.
Considered a national expert on mental health issues and an inspiration to others living with mental illness, he is married, with four grown children, and serves as first vice president of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, whose local chapter he will address tonight at a Station Square hotel.
Frese knows first hand that a person in the midst of a delusional episode does not recognize it as such. He also knows that debilitating side-effects -- from uncontrolled movements to sleep disorders -- lead many patients to stop taking the drugs that help keep their demons at bay.
"I elected to stop taking my own medication several times because of the side-effects," Frese said, although the newer drugs have reduced that problem dramatically. "The disorder is such that once the symptoms go away, it's easy to tell yourself you don't have it anymore."
Sometimes, the demons come back with a vengeance and wind up on the front pages. In January, a man with schizophrenia who had stopped taking his medication pushed a young woman named Kendra Webdale to her death under the wheels of a New York City subway train. Two other subway-related crimes followed, each involving mentally ill patients who had refused to take their medication. In all three cases, the state of New York had been powerless to force them to do so.
Due in part to Frese's efforts, New York now has Kendra's Law, which makes it easier for family members and caregivers to compel seriously mentally ill patients with histories of hospitalization or violent behavior to receive medication and treatment, as long as the treatment has been shown to help them and they are judged unable to make informed decisions themselves.
This approach has its critics, who see it as an invitation to violate patients' civil rights instead of increasing services. But Frese sees it another way.
"There are degrees of disability that come with schizophrenia," he said. "For persons who are very, very disabled with a disorder that tells them they don't have a disorder, we really need to take care of them."
Frese and eight colleagues founded the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia to help fashion legislation similar to Kendra's Law for other states.
Frese's first psychotic break came when he was 25 years old and about to become a captain in the Marine Corps. He had 144 men under his command and responsibility for guarding a nuclear arsenal.
"I had a 'discovery' that certain high-ranking officials were brain-washed by the enemies, that the enemies were threatening the arsenal through their agents," he said.
When he shared this with the base psychiatrist, he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital, hospitalized for six months and discharged with a psychiatric disability.
He went back to school and landed a job as a management trainee at a Fortune 500 company. In the summer of 1967, at company headquarters, he had another episode in which he imagined himself as an atom about to be split at the center of a thermonuclear weapon, ushering in Armageddon.
"I woke up in the psychiatric ward of Milwaukee County Hospital," he said.
There followed a year of wandering and repeated hospitalizations, until he was committed as insane under Ohio state law. He spent three months at a psychiatric hospital.
"Everyone tried to help me," he said. "They must have succeeded because I'm doing pretty good right now."
Between hospitalizations, Frese worked in a state hospital, and earned his master's degree and doctorate in psychology at Ohio University.
His last hospitalization was in 1974, but Frese still considers himself in recovery.
The southwestern Pennsylvania chapter of NAMI will meet tonight from 6:30 to 9 at the Sheraton Hotel Station Square, South Side. The public is invited. For more information, call 412-366-3788.
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