I remember being in the hospital for 8 months in 1981 when I was 21-22. I was pretty symptomatic, very messed up. Actually, that 8 months is the worse off I’d ever been in regard to my disease. And I didn’t feel like I had improved at all during the whole stay even though I was heavily medicated. I think the medication didn’t make me better but it stopped me from getting worse.
Then my parents found a group home I could possibly move into; I had to go there for dinner and the clients and counselors would judge if I was allowed to move in. So my parents picked me up from the hospital one evening and dropped me off at this fancy group home . I sat at a big table with about 12 other people. I didn’t talk to anybody, I didn’t say a word. My parents told me to have dinner there so I sat there and ate the meal and sat in the living room for about a half hour (again with no talking) and then my parents picked me up. I left and went back to the hospital.
The next day my parents called me on the phone and they were astonished and bugged. They told me they had talked to the coordinator at the house and she told them I didn’t talk to any of the clients or the counselors. My parents admonished me, “Why didn’t you talk to anybody? You were supposed to impress them and get to know them so they could see if you were a “good fit” and could move in!” My parents somehow arranged for me to have a second dinner there again, something which I never saw the house do for any other potential client. I went there prepared to talk this time and forced myself to take and be friendly, and a couple of days later I was told the house had accepted me and I moved in. It was a few days after Christmas by the way.
Now this house was a unique house. It was run by a mental health agency and it was run on the principle that mentally ill people got better through having structure in their lives. It was a nice old house in a nice neighborhood in an affluent city near Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. They used to let people in with SSI and charge them about $450 for rent but I was the very last person they did this with then they changed the policy and all the other clients I lived with were paying full price for rent which was $2000 a month! They were all able to afford this because they were all the sons and daughters of rich doctors and lawyers or successful businessmen.
Anyways, since they wanted to give us structure they had us eat meals together. We all took turns cooking. We had two mandatory groups a week which were almost impossible to get out of going to. We had morning chores for everybody at 8:00 am and chores after dinner at 6:00 pm. We all took turns going grocery shopping with the counselors once a week. We had a mandatory outings once a month. And everybody had to have a daytime activity that they went to five days a week.
We had to leave the house at 8:30 am and they locked the doors and didn’t let us back in until 3:00 pm. Some people worked, some went to school and I chose to go to their vocational program 5 days a week where they held groups, classes and did mailing projects and yard work out in the community.
Now the thing was that I was crazy as hell when I was in the hospital. I spent my days pacing and sleeping and eating. I had no friends (or very few) there. I was barely hanging on, I was on the edge. But when I moved into the group home, called La Selva, I was suddenly living with 9 other clients in close quarters with two around the clock counselors. And like I said, it was heavily structured. But I remember I adjusted well, I got along with everybody and did what was asked of me.
But what was funny was even though I still suffered from symptoms just being in that nice environment I was a lot better. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain. One day I’m crazy as hell and can’t function and the next day I’m living like a human again. And I slowly got better and I got what they used to call “stable”, a big word back in the 1980’s when this all happened. The environment made a huge difference, I was suddenly living in nice surroundings with high functioning housemates and I fit right in. It still amazes me that I could do it. And I was successful at it and 9 months later I got a job and have been working pretty steadily ever since. I ended up staying at the house almost exactly a year, I moved out on New Years Day, 1984.