Summary of History of Mental Illness
In my late 20's and early 30's I created a document called History of Mental Illness that is basically an autobiography of my life and struggles with mental illness. Most of it is too private and personal to share here. Ultimately what I can do, however, is give bits and pieces of it here and offer personal stories of my life without revealing too much personal information.
History of Mental Illness has two parts. The first part is just one long story that I went into detail about my relation to other people. The second part was attempting to do the reverse — to give details as to how other people related to me. That part was divided into ten separate chapters. The first two chapters, regarding my two moves after moving out from my parents place, is perhaps the most important and the part I’m willing to share with my Medium audience the most. It’s the most important parts of my life.
This will not be a simple copy and paste. In fact, I intend on giving an even deeper story and go much more in-depth with this than I had in the original chapters. But I will also omit things like last names or specific addresses in my attempt to keep myself and other people I will mention safe.
Due to my mental illness I had to move out of my parents place. There was a period around October 2012 which a psychologist recommended that I be put on escitalopram, the same medication that caused my first psychotic manic episode, due to what he said was obsessive-compulsive disorder. All it did in the end was make me manic, and in that time span I also went off of my medication. However, I definitely was becoming manic before that happened, and the primary reason why I went off of my meds was due to delusions that escitalopram was giving me.
I burned the bridge I had with that psychologist, scared several people, including people I had went to college with, and my parents, and sent to the psych ward multiple times and to be honest I was mostly unaware of why I was sent to the psych ward. After an altercation with my former psychiatrist which he told me that I might be moving into a group home, I showed him my stretching scars on my body after he denied that I gained weight on a medication called olanzapine, and my hyper behavior freaked him out so much they called the police on me and I was sent to a public psych ward since insurance would not pay for a private psych ward at that point.
I was there for two months. For the first time in my life I grew a beard and mustache, and they actually put me on less medication, which is what I needed at that time. One anti-psychotic, risperidone, one mood stabilizer, lithium, and one benzodiazepine, clonazepam. My parents, including my mom’s husband, visit me, and firmly tell me that I will not be allowed to live at their place anymore. After that I went into a deep depression and I was there at the psych ward for so long because they didn’t know where to put me after that. I still held on to a misspoken delusion after that so they did a CAT scan of my brain to make sure there was no brain damage.
Then, after some time passed, they have me transfer over to a transitional living situation on the south side called Crisis Resource Center, which I stayed for four weeks, even though the usual limit is supposed to be just two. I met a lot of interesting people there. A guy obsessed with Yu-Gi-Oh, a woman who I took the bus to see a movie with her at the theater at Mayfair Mall. One of the Hobbit movies. And I spent my Christmas there, as I was required to stay there during the night. I still had contact with my parents, and that Christmas they bought all kinds of stuff for my move out. A lot of small knick-knacks anyone needs, like utensils, but the big purchase was a tan futon that cost $300 and an extra $100 just to hull to my apartment.
So the first place I moved into after leaving my parents was a place called Farwell. They were studios, not very large and at the beginning were really outdated. Like, in the beginning they used gas heaters, and the gas heaters didn’t even work half of the time. I moved into Farwell in January of 2013 and it was often cold in my apartment due to this. There was a bathroom, a small space that had a built-in dresser for clothes, and much of the floor had carpeting. For a month I was sleeping on a cot as the futon wasn’t delivered until February. For the first time of my life I had a case worker, because Farwell required it, and I saw him for a few months.
Farwell was undergoing a transformation. Everyone was moving out because they were changing the apartment to subsidized assisted living for those with chronic mental illness. There used to be students from MSOE and other non-disabled people that lived there. After I moved in, to apartment twenty on the second floor, I saw remnants of things that were left by the previous person that lived there. Although I do not remember exactly what they were, it seemed to me that it was a Latino woman that lived there before me.
After the high of getting my first place subsided, I went into a deep depression because I felt like nothing was going to change after exploring the east side of Milwaukee for a few months. I wasn’t handling my medication well at the time, and during a mixed episode I took three months worth of lithium and went to the hospital, drank charcoal, was put on dialysis twice and then sent to the psych ward which they put me off my clonazepam. I went through a benzo withdrawal so they put me on a temporary dose of diazepam to calm me down. I switched psych doctors there to a female nurse practitioner who was my provider until she retired several years later.
But that year I made the biggest mistake of my life by going off medication. My therapist approved of it but my nurse practitioner yelled at him for it. I became hypersexual, developed deviant behavior and I stopped eating for a while. I had a manic episode so severe I was put in jail and court ordered to take medication. After I still refused to do so, they said they were considering keeping me long term so I don’t harm anyone if and when I get released from the same public psych ward institution I was in before. One day I acted extremely erratic, went to sleep during the day and was given a one-month paliperidone injection in my sleep. When I woke up, I realized how bad I had gotten and vowed to them and myself that I would never go off medication again. And I haven’t. I did miss a few injection dates since then but not on purpose. They realized I got better from the meds they gave me, including a medication called lurasidone that didn’t seem to be doing much, and of course, everybody’s favorite, lithium.
But I was not able to go back to Farwell just yet. They still wanted to monitor my behavior in a group home for a week just to make sure I was better. After affects of my mania still persisted. Even though I was taking meds I was still hypersexual, very high energy and almost completely unaware that I was in the ghetto. A few times I went to the McDonalds even though food was prepared there. There were three other tenants there. Someone that used to be from Farwell, a black woman who wanted to have sex with me but I refused, and a domestic abuse survivor who at one point I kissed on the cheek.
I came back to Farwell in about August of 2013 and it underwent a transformation. The carpeting became tiled flooring, the shower bath became a shower, they removed the built-in closet, they added a microwave that doubled as an oven and they got rid of the Stay in Balance part of the building and made it an elevator, a fitness room and they developed a community room and a building supervisor office. They kept the same person from Stay in Balance and she became the OurSpace supervisor part of the building. What didn’t change was the store that a section of the building had, a shoe store called Mr Shoe, that eventually moved out and became a wig store instead.
After this happened a lot of things started to change. There were a lot of new arrivals, all of them dealing with some sort of chronic mental illness, and I got to know a lot of people between the summer of 2013 to the end of 2014. Many people there who had chronic mental illness, like me, were also drug addicts at the same time. However, they never encouraged me to do drugs and the only thing I did was take one hit of cigarette and drank a bottle of cheap strawberry wine that I bought at a local liquor store when I spent New Years 2015 in some one else’s apartment.
There is a rule when you sign up for Section 8 that you must live in your current residence for at least a year, then you can move out again as often as you want. So in 2014, as I was making a lot of neighbor friends from the building and going on all kinds of adventures around Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs, I had the overwhelming feeling that there were places better than Farwell. Although the renovations made it much nicer, there were two things I wanted more than anything else. A one bedroom, and a building that didn’t have drug addicts in it.
The first place I looked into was owned by the same company as Farwell, Cardinal Capitol, but had one-bedrooms in a suburb called West Allis. A newly built place called Highland Commons. Highland was permanent supporting housing and unlike Farwell all of the apartments there were subsidized. However, it was designed specifically for people with mental illness like Farwell and I didn’t even get to tour the location. Because I needed my case workers to handle the application and because I kept switching agencies at that time, for months I thought I was on the waiting list but wasn’t and I felt like I wasted three months of my life for nothing. I knew at that point that if I were to move out of Farwell, I would have to do the work to do so.
Several times I tried doing so with my Farwell neighbors, most notably an older gentleman named Gary, who was recently diagnosed with mental illness after a work accident and it left him divorced and homeless. I knew about half of the people who lived in that building, but spent the most time with Gary and Spencer while inside the building. Spencer was a drug addict but not mentally ill. There was also Robby and Joe, two people who were both drug addicts and mentally ill and both of them were kicked out for the drugs they had in their apartments. Robby found places on the south side to move into and Joe moved into a place in West Allis. Both of their places were trashed the entire time they were there, and neither of them seemed able to live on their own.
There was a stocky bald man in his forties named Paul who was so medicated that I did not know what his problems truly were. He lived in apartment 22, right next to mine and there would be many days I would make coffee for both of us and spend time in his apartment. As he was smoking his Pyramid cigarettes. He traveled all across the country and had a daughter in Tennessee. He was also dishonorably discharged from the military as an engineer. His apartment was cluttered like mine. On occasion we’d take walks around the area too. One day he saw furniture some people were throwing out and hauled their sofa to my apartment and a large one-seater that matched it to his own. Paul applied at another Cardinal Capital building, St Mary’s in Dubuque, Iowa, and mistakenly thought he was offered a place there. So one morning out of the blue he loaded what he could to a U-Haul and disappeared on July 3, 2014. The only reason why I know this is because Gary told me after I woke up.
Around this time I planned several months with Gary to move out of Farwell. I had all kinds of ideas, like moving into an RV, a mobile home or into a two-bedroom apartment. But he was never honest with me and tell me that he had no intention of doing any of that with me. Still, Gary and I spent a lot of time together, watching TV at my apartment, ordering Chinese or pizza and becoming best friends at that point. Since my mom’s husband didn’t adopt me after marrying my mom, I even thought at one point that Gary could adult adopt me. But after months of me putting in the work to try to move out with him and plan other projects with him and him not putting in the work to achieve those goals, I decided to stop talking to him about it.
One of my Farwell neighbors had a friend named Maegan that I had a chance encounter with outside the building. We exchanged socials. After that we begin to talk on Facebook. In October 2014 our friendship became serious, even though she met her significant other through a website called My Yearbook, we were starting to become best friends. She moved to Dubuque, Iowa and we talked about me moving in with her and her now husband. They had a flat in a building there and the rent was cheap. Talking to my mom about the ordeal, she made me realize I would lose Section 8 and everything I had in Farwell just to live with Maegan. So eventually the excitement subsided and I became nervous and anxious about it. So I tell her I won’t be moving in with her and to avoid making the same misguided mistake twice, I burn the bridge I had with her. But to this day, I believe Maegan was the only person who was serious about me moving in with someone else. At this time I was desperate to move in with another person, so I would feel less lonely.
But by 2015 I thought enough was enough and I was going to move into a one-bedroom subsidized apartment by myself. I contacted a worker at Independence First, a disability company in Milwaukee, and a worker there named Philip gave me a list of disabled subsidized apartments in Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties on February 23, 2015. I spent weeks alone examining it. The problem was, the vast majority of these apartments were in Milwaukee’s ghetto. The ones that weren’t either only took the elderly or mobility impaired, had waiting lists that were too long to consider or was too close to Farwell.
There was a company called Metropolitan Associates who have several subsidized apartments around Milwaukee but never gave me a straight answer as to if I could live in their properties or not. The website said elderly or disabled, but when it came to disability they seemed to only accept those with mobile or visual impairments. I decided not to waste my time applying when my gut feeling is I would be rejected anyways.
However, Metropolitan Associates owned two properties in Oak Creek called Lake Forest and Lake Forest 2. They sold off Lake Forest 2 to another company, one with a bad reputation, called Meridian Group Inc. When Meridian Group Inc took control of Lake Forest 2, I found out this and looked through their website, the website specifically addressed this issue and claimed to be for those who are elderly or disabled. Which in my mind meant I could move in.
Lake Forest 2 at that time seemed to be my only option. It’s in a suburb called Oak Creek, which is a wealthier suburb in the county, in the southeast portion of it. Sort of a distance away from most places, but still near a bus line. Line 15, which coincidentally enough went near Farwell. So by the time March rolled on by, I put in my free application to Lake Forest 2 using Meridian Group Inc’s website to process it. And I was on the waiting list at that point.
Two months later, in May that year, I see Gary downstairs in the community room and begin to talk to him. I invite him back to my apartment on the second floor and we talk about moving. I mentioned to him how I felt like he wasn’t taking it seriously and that I applied to Lake Forest 2. I suggested he should do the same, since his childhood home in South Milwaukee was not far from that building. Assuming he knew the area, it seemed like a perfect fit. But he does not respond to that idea. Then I tell him that I still want to move in with him, and he nods his head, acting like he still wants to do that with me, even though even at that time it felt like a lie. However, I believed in it enough to withdraw my application to Lake Forest 2.
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A few months pass and the supervisor of Farwell lets me know that Gary moved out of Farwell, into his adult daughter’s place. Concerned as I was, I called Gary and asked him what was going on and how he could have moved out of Farwell without even telling me he did so. He apologized but ultimately said that he mended ties to his daughter again and that this was the best decision for himself.
It was at that point that I realized that enough was enough and there was only one way I could move out of Farwell. It would have to be alone, in a one-bedroom in a suburb around the area, and at the time I thought my only option was Lake Forest 2. So after I heard news of what happened with Gary, I reapplied there, around July that year. Taking it much more seriously than before, I take a tour of the place a month later.
I called the apartment’s supervisor and negotiate a time for me to take that tour. I write down a bunch of questions for her to answer before I get there. As previously mentioned, since line 15 is one bus south that goes near there, I take that line on a hot August day. From the south end of South Milwaukee I take the sidewalk going south and reach the building by myself to finally have a look inside of it. I call the supervisor once I get there and she lets me in.
The building’s entrance had many mailboxes and the supervisor lets me in and I begin to talk to her. She gives me an overview of the building. That there are around sixty-four apartments in it. That most people there was there due to old age, not disability, but made me aware at that point that disabilities was accepted and that my disability would be accepted. The building reeked of cigarettes as they allowed smoking indoors, like Farwell did. The building was two stories and there was a small elevator in the building. She answered all of my questions I had on my list, let me look at the large community room and an empty apartment.
The empty apartment was on the smaller end. It was being repainted and it appeared to me that the combined living room and bedroom area was the size of just my Farwell living room. There was a medium-sized fridge, some counter space, a small stove. The living room had a wood floor, but the bedroom had carpeting. The bathroom had a large shower bath, but the bathroom was connected to the bedroom, not the living room. There was an outlet for AC but no actual AC unit. No microwave.
The supervisor lets me know that there is onsite laundry and storage areas but do not show me them. I was only there for maybe fifteen minutes and all my questions was answered. I asked the supervisor about how people get around and she said that many of them have a car, since they have a parking lot, but others take the side walk to go into South Milwaukee. I told her that must be difficult since South Milwaukee is a mile north of the building, but she assures me that everybody gets their needs taken care of. During the tour I don’t see anyone else in the building and as I end the tour and head back I only saw one elderly person on an electric wheelchair going by.
Going back on Line 15 I didn’t feel like this was the ideal situation for me. But one thought that reoccurred to me at that point was that it had to be safer than Farwell. They did background checks and it seemed nobody there did drugs. They were one bedrooms even if they were on the smaller end. I knew I was going to lose my Farwell friends if I did this, but the community room of Lake Forest 2 is large enough that I thought I would make new, older friends there. I kept my application on the website but hesitantly did so, mostly because I thought that is what my mom would have wanted me to do. But I honestly didn’t think it was going to be much better.
A few months pass and I get no sign from Meridian Group Inc that I’ve been activated and accepted into Lake Forest 2, so I went on Meridian Group Inc’s website and looked at other properties they had up north, in central to northern Wisconsin. In nowhere towns with almost nobody in them. Many of them had immediate openings. I apply to a few of them and about a week later get acceptance letters in the mail saying I could move into them. One in particular was in Wisconsin Dells, a tourist location, and I really thought I would have a lot of fun living there. After a long discussion on the phone with my mom about this, we both decided that it would just be too much work to take my stuff there.
My case worker at the time, Christy, visits me and I talk to her about Lake Forest 2 and somehow the discussion gets around to her talking about the client she has next to see, that lived in an apartment complex called Greenbrook. Now, Greenbrook Apartments was on the list Philip at Independence First gave me, and my parents lived around that area, but I assumed it was only for the elderly. When I lived with my parents and walked around that area I only saw older people around the building. My case worker tells me that her client is not old and is mentally ill like me.
She doesn’t disclose any more information than that for privacy sakes, but that chance encounter led me to call Greenbrook in September that year and they told me over the phone that they accept elderly and disabled people but that I would need to actually apply to see if I would be accepted. So in October I took Line 15 to the 55, get an application at the office, go back to Farwell, submit the four background checks: land lord, criminal, credit score and sex offender parts, and submitted it back to them.
Greenbrook was completely different than Lake Forest 2 because it was a complex of twenty buildings, ten of them low income, with about in total 400 people living there. So, even if the turn over rate is slow, there was a more likelihood in my mind that I would be accepted sooner. As well, Greenbrook had a street in its name that extended from two different streets, with parking for both tenants and guests. I didn’t know much more about it, since when I grabbed the application I didn’t actually take a tour of it.
On January 2016, after three years living at Farwell, I get a phone call at about 10:30 AM from the staff at Greenbrook telling me that my name has been activated from the waiting list and that I could move in at the end of February. Despite not taking a tour of the location yet, knowing how close it was to my parents place, knowing that area already and just in general how excited I was to get a one-bedroom property, I accepted immediately. My intention after that was to call Meridian Group Inc and let them know that I chose to move into Greenbrook.
However, before that could even happen, on 2 PM the same day, I get a call from Lake Forest 2, and they let me know I have been activated from the waiting list, and like with Greenbrook, I could move in at the end of February. This felt like an extreme coincidence. After three years of living at Farwell and trying so hard to move out since 2014, unable to do so, I actually get two calls on the same day letting me know I can move into two different places. I mention the irony of the situation to the staff at Meridian Group Inc and ultimately declined their offer. Despite me not even knowing what the inside of a Greenbrook Apartment looks like yet.
I had to tell the staff at Farwell about this and I ultimately end up doing so. I tell the OurSpace supervisor about it, and when I told Spencer about it, he told me that the first thing I needed to do was write up a letter to Cardinal Capitol’s supervisor letting them know that I took Greenbrook’s offer and that it was my intention to move out at the end of February. So I took a blank piece of paper, wrote my heartfelt letter to Cardinal’s staff, and slid it under her door. Finally, after two years of trying something was done about this.
A week or two later the same case worker picks me up and we do an apartment tour together. This time, I didn’t have a list of things to mention since I knew I was going to be moving anyways. I take a look inside one of the apartments, after taking a look at the storage and laundry area, and I was impressed. It didn’t even seem like a Section 8 apartment to me! There was a full-sized large refrigerator, a large stove and microwave, a dishwasher and a lot of space in the kitchen. The living room by itself was the size of my living room in Farwell. It had a built-in AC and carpeting. The bathroom wasn’t connected to the bedroom and the bedroom felt full-sized. Overall it felt like an average non-subsidized apartment in a middle-income area.
It was such a risk to accept a place like that without a tour yet, but after all the times I looked at places that were impossible to move into, or were risky, or simply wasn’t as good as Greenbrook, I knew I made the right decision after that tour was over. I had about another month after that which I would have to pack everything I had into boxes my mom sent me, and clean my Farwell apartment, and then I would be settled into my new place at Greenbrook. My mom helps me out financially with the first costs, such as security deposit, first and last months’ rent.
However, moving day didn’t go accordingly to plan. My mom was actually very impressed on how well I organized and cleaned everything, but she hired a company called Two Men and a Truck and one of them, as they were hauling my stuff away, apparently saw a bed bug, and asked if there was a history of bed bugs in the apartment. I don’t lie and say there is. So they cancel the job and my mom gets furious and attempts to get her money back. I talk to Spencer and he tells me to throw away my furniture, and his first impression of my mom was so bad he decides not to help us after that. Then she calls her husband and he agrees to help us tomorrow, a Sunday, the final day I could be at Farwell. My mom drives me to Greenbrook and just like with Farwell I take their cot and sleep on it with nothing else in the apartment, yet.
Then the next day my mom takes me back to Farwell with her husband and we get a large U-Haul from West Allis, go back to Farwell and load everything in it ourselves. My father does most of the work as I am weak and my mom has a bad back. I slip my key and fob to Farwell underneath the manager’s office, see a peer specialist from the building outside and yell at her, “I told you this was going to happen!” During the drive we get back to my parents place and take a recliner and dresser, both were easy to haul, to my place, two blocks west of their place. Luckily the weather was nice that day, no rain or snow, and the temperature happened to be above freezing, so it was comfortable.
After unloading everything we talk for a bit and they head back to their home. Robby calls me the same time and on the same day visits my apartment, like a housewarming party, almost. I quickly take care of the boxes and put everything away in a matter of a few hours. This all happens on February 28th, 2016, my official move in date into the apartment. Robby was clearly impressed on how well everything was managed.
I still keep in contact with my Farwell neighbor friends for a short period of time. Robby and Spencer visits me for a few years, although Spencer decided to become a traveling homeless person, he would stop by Milwaukee once in a while to see me and other friends he had around the area. Gary happened to live next to Greenbrook so he visited me a few times too. But then Gary’s family moved away and he got cancer and died. Eventually I got fed up by Robby’s constant drinking and passing out in my apartment and stopped reaching out to him. Joe moved into a group home. By the time the coronavirus hit, I lost contact with all of my Farwell neighbors and only had one friend, a former peer specialist, that was a local friend, as well as a lot of online friends at that point to talk to.
But the area kept improving. The Target east of here became a Festival Foods, but then Festival Foods shut down. Sidewalks were built going east towards Milwaukee. A dining movie theater called Bistroplex was built, and a retirement center closed down and became a Meijer, which is like Walmart but nicer. I decided not to have case workers after that and got a local therapist around the area, that I had to change twice, but from the same agency. My apartment kept improving with new furniture and appliances that I would buy or my mom would gift me, and things overall are much better than they were when I first moved in. Line 55’s hours were cut so now I need to walk to therapy, but it’s only a 45 minute walk to get to. I have a new nurse practitioner that helps me whenever my brain chemistry is off, and visits with him and my therapist can be done virtually. I now get everything delivered from Walmart or Amazon, and I have a local pharmacy that delivers my medications for me. The only time I really have to go outside is to take the garbage out.
I was afraid that after moving out of Farwell I would have the same urge to move again after a few years, but that didn’t happen. In fact, my biggest fear now is for some reason getting kicked out of here. Greenbrook is asking the Housing and Urban Development more money than legally allowed, so there is a chance they may have to turn the subsidized apartments to unsubsidized. Which would mean I would have to move out. The building I’m in the complex has the community room in it, a patio area outside and a food truck comes once a month for discounted groceries.
As it turns out, Meridian Group Inc sent me a letter seven years into living here and said that I might be able to live in a highly sought out apartment named Fischer Terrace in Cedarburg. Which is close to where my parents moved three years after me living in Greenbrook, but after talking about it with my mom, who even agreed to help me move, I turned down the opportunity both from a gut and a rational, thinking decision.
It’s been over ten years since I moved in here, and this was the last large consequential decision I made for myself. Things would have been drastically different had I moved into Lake Forest 2, and I think about that decision all of the time. But I do have closure since I know for certain now that Greenbrook is both a better apartment and in a better location. Overall, I am really glad I moved in here and honestly I think this may become my forever home. My parents might move up north soon, but I’m fine staying here since all my needs are met without them.
This was the best decision I ever made for myself, and I hope I get to live here for the rest of my life. There is no better place than Greenbrook for me.
