I am an old man. My profession of many years brought me into contact with some of the most interesting and troubled people of our of city.
For years I had an office in an old Presbyterian church on Archwood Avenue. It had been abandoned when the congregation moved to a new building on the edge of town. The church board donated the building to my practice. We turned it into a clinic- The Archwood Center of Hope. I worked there as a psychiatrist with a small staff of mental health workers for 30 years.
I listened and offered advice to my patients but mostly I listened as few mentally ill people ever take advice and even those who do don't for long.
The southeast section of Akron, over the last 30 years has been ravished by opioid addiction. I'll spare you the depressing observations and statistics. If you've read the news, you know how awful the overdose problem is in this part of the country. But during my practice the community also had an abnormally large number of cases of schizophrenia and, it's less sensory based cousin, delusional disorders.
We provided a variety of treatments, mostly anti-psychotic medications, benzodiazepines, some ECT at the hospital, and in the last few years this new EMDR or tapping treatment. But as I mentioned we did a lot of listening.
As the years went by it seemed to me that for the most part, my patient's outcomes were fixed. I grew cynical and expected tragedy or next to no progress. And mostly what I expected came about.
If I couldn't change my patient's fate, I could listen. So listened. Sometimes that's all I did. But I held no illusion that the listening I did was some kind of cure. No. In fact I sometimes thought everything we did in our clinic was, as I look back, probably as much a fiction as our patient's delusions and deliriums.
But the case that I'm about to describe in many ways undid my cynical outlook. Perhaps our destinies can be reconfigured. Perhaps odious, self destructive acts, as maligned as they seem, are the only path some have to redemption.
The story I relate involves a young man and woman both at that stage in life when our nature urges us to leave home and move out into the world- to launch our own lives. For the mentally ill, and their families, this is a particularly fragile time, one fraught with far more than the usual challenges with which they must contend.
Ariel and Edward had been friends throughout high school until just before their graduation when a tragic event would seemingly separate them forever.
It was said that Edward, who I never met, was mostly a loner, except for his friendship with Ariel, who, a year after the tragic event, would become my patient.
I learned that Edward was studious, had a quick though gentle wit and the ability to see through to the essence of a problem and resolve it. While shy he could be direct and funny. He made Ariel laugh. He was clever she told me. He finished first in his class at Edmonds High School.
He'd been raised by his father, though he'd really raised himself. His mother passed away a few months after she had given birth to Edward. Her death was never fully explained. She was found peacefully lying lifeless, on the sofa in their small apartment one Sunday afternoon. There was no evidence of foul play.
Edward's father, Joseph, a veteran of the first Iraq war, just 21, never recovered from the loss of his wife. Not long after her death he had his first psychotic break. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he worked odd jobs that he couldn't keep and eventually received small monthly disability payments. His sister drove him up to the VA hospital in Cleveland once a month. Throughout Edward's childhood his father was in and out of psychiatric facilities.
At one point Joseph received a moderate inheritance and bought a house on a busy intersection across from an empty industrial park at Archwood and Kelly. It was an oversized house for their needs. Edward had an upstairs bedroom, his father stayed downstairs.
As you might expect their relationship was troubled. Edward's father believed an evil spirit lived in the attic. He wrote letters to the spirit, made a bed of old sheets and pillows in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairway entry to the attic and slept there most nights. He slept there, he said, to protect his son from the evil spirit. Throughout Edward's childhood his father would leave for days and live on the street. Even as a young boy he would go out looking for his dad on the streets. Often he'd find him huddled in a corner in the abandoned truck depot across the street, mumbling incoherently. Edward would gently guide him home and feed and bathe him.
Edward's caretaking deepened as he got older but so did his resentment and desire to leave home. He planned to go to Ohio State in the fall with Ariel after they graduated from high school. But shortly before his graduation ceremony Edward's father had found a love letter his son had written to Ariel in which Edward had sweetly extolled the joy of their having shared a first kiss just the previous weekend. The note triggered a paranoid break. His father believed his son had been inhabited by the evil spirit he'd fought so hard to protect him from. His son was tainted.
Edward lost his patience with his father and for one of the few times in his life he raised his voice. "I'm leaving. You're crazy. Fucking crazy dad. I can't take it anymore. I going off to college soon and I'm never coming back."
Edward recounted this episode the last time he spoke to Ariel.
The night before his high school graduation ceremony his father murdered his son by hanging him from a rafter in their attic.
I met Ariel one year after Edward's murder.
