Standing Tall In Queens Creedmoors Unending Fight Against Mental Illness

The facility is operated under the jurisdiction of the New York State Office of Mental Health in Albany. Creedmoors annual budget is $60 million.
Creedmoor stands on land once owned by the Creed family. In the 1800s, the Creeds built a rifle range and the Creedmoor Range Hotel. The psychiatric center was founded in 1912 and moved to Queens Village after new buildings were erected in the 1920s and 1930s.
Physicians like Dr. William A. Fisher, a psychiatrist who serves as clinical director of Creedmoor, worry too about the misconceptions that still haunt the mental health movement.
"Some still think that the mentally ill are violent," he said, "when, in fact, effective treatment has changed that picture completely."
Fisher points to the case of Andrew Goldstein who pushed a former Queens reporter off a subway platform to her death. He said that when Goldstein was a patient at Creedmoor he was perfectly under control. It was only when he moved into an apartment years later and failed to take his medication that the tragedy occurred.
He said that in certain cases electroshock treatments, a controversial therapeutic tool, proves successful.
"Case management is the key to success," Fisher said. "It helps to assure that patients take their medicine."
Fisher explained that community hospitals like Jamaica Hospital Medical Center now have psychiatric facilities.
"Developments like that have helped change the face of mental health in Queens," he said. "Referrals come to us from such general hospitals.
Fisher said Creedmoor has an advantage over the Citys voluntary hospitals.
"Were not involved with HMOs (health maintenance organizations) or with Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.
Freedom to move about the huge institution is based on patients health status. Twelve patients are kept in "secure care" wards, with 19 in locked wards.
"We have had no escapes this year," said Charlotte Seltzer, Creedmoors executive director.
On a recent visit to Creedmoor, dozens of classes and group therapy meetings were going on. Much of this intensive activity conducted by therapists and trained instructors was centered around preparing mentally ill patients for return to the outside world.
For many, long-term treatment is required before they can make the big step to the outside world. Once they are ready, patients are moved into a modern set of apartments on the Creedmoor campus to get a feeling for living in their own dwellings.
In one gleaming kitchen Creedmoor patients were getting instruction on how to cook. One enthusiastic patient described in glowing terms a cake she had just baked a dessert she was sharing with fellow patients.
In other classes, patients, referred to as "clients" by Creedmoor staff, learn budgeting skills, how to keep their emotions in check and how to perform in job interviews.
Dozens of agencies including a police unit are located on the institution grounds. They provide significant support for patients. On a recent hot summer day, one group was preparing a barbeque for hundreds of patients.
"We have ceaseless activity here," Seltzer said, "and its all directed at preparing clients for a return to the outside world."
One of the popular spots on the vast campus is the Creedmoor barnyard stocked with 35 geese, rabbits, chickens and other barnyard denizens. Mark Stebbins who supervises the facility explained that the clients find comfort in visiting with the creatures there.
Staff and clients alike enjoyed a good laugh recently. It seemed a stray rooster caused a barnyard fuss. It escaped from its coop when the barnyard animals were being moved to another location on the campus. The fowl apparently met up with a hen he took a liking to and the resulting noise caused a neighbor to complain to Sen. Frank Padavans office. The barnyard dispute was amicably settled when the rooster and the hen were temporarily moved to the Queens Farm Museum. Then both creatures were permanently transplanted to a farm upstate where they are reportedly enjoying each others company.
Creedmoors absorbing story is told in the book, "Is There No Place On Earth For Me," by Susan Sheehan. Her book, originally a New Yorker article, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction works in the 1980s.
It focuses on the tortured life of a Creedmoor patient, Sylvia Frumkin (not her real name). It tells how she wound up in 1978 in Long Island Jewish Hospitals emergency room after she fell in her bathroom and cut her head. Upon examination, the emergency room doctor ordered a psychiatric consultation because of her behavior and Frumkin agreed to be admitted to Creedmoor.
Frumkin had been a highly intelligent young girl who became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next 17 years in and out of mental institutions. Sheehan followed "Sylvia" for almost a year, talking with and observing her, listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors, even for a period sleeping in the bed next to her at Creedmoor.
Todays schizophrenic patients are much like Sylvia Frumkin. They progress a step at a time, suffer setbacks, are a constant worry to their friends and families, and ceaselessly struggle before they can be restored whole to the community.