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Summer 2010 | Vol 13 No 4

Issues and trends

The “sometimes psychotic psychologist” fights stigma of schizophrenia

By Patricia Nicholson

Dr. Fred Frese is many things – a psychologist, a retired U.S. Marine and a person with schizophrenia.

His resume is impressive: He was director of psychology at a large psychiatric hospital. Last year, the American Psychological Association awarded him its highest honour – the Presidential Citation. He is a past president of the National Mental Health Consumers Association. And he’s been giving talks about schizophrenia and mental illness for more than two decades.

But Frese says he couldn’t have done any of those things if he had disclosed his illness early in his career. “It would have been impossible,” he says. “Nobody hires schizophrenics.”

As a speaker, he’s both funny and inspiring, telling his own story as someone in recovery from schizophrenia, as well as the broader story of how schizophrenia and other mental illnesses are perceived. There has been some progress in chipping away at the stigma of mental illness in recent decades, says Frese, but it’s a slow process.

“When I started, no one would acknowledge having mental illness of any kind,” he tells me when we meet the day after he gave a talk in Toronto, hosted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario. “Now it’s OK to have depression from time to time. It’s even OK to have bipolar disorder … more and more, that’s become something you can talk about. But schizophrenia isn’t quite there yet. Schizophrenia still scares people.”

Frese was diagnosed at age 25. While in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, he was assigned to guard nuclear weapons at a base in Florida. While musing on the reasons why the war was going poorly, he came to the conclusion that not only were Chinese communists brainwashing U.S. troops in Vietnam, but they had also mastered the ability to hypnotize people from a distance, and were now able to influence government leaders and high-ranking officers back at home. Realizing the base and its nuclear weapons could be at risk, Frese reported his conclusions to the person most likely to understand the risks of brainwashing – the base psychiatrist.

“He listened and smiled, and when I got up to leave, there was a man in a white coat on either side of me. They escorted me to a little room and slammed the door,” Frese told the audience at his talk in Toronto. “Just like that, I knew that psychiatrist had been hypnotized by the enemy.”

Frese’s initial reaction to the diagnosis was disbelief, and it took him a while to accept that he had a mental illness. “I was in shock that they were calling me a crazy person,” he says. “But when they kept locking me up, eventually I began thinking, something’s wrong here.”

After his initial diagnosis, Frese was committed 10 times over the next 10 years. But during that time, he also became a psychologist – almost by accident. “I just happened to fall into the field,” he says. “I had majored in psychology as an undergrad in college, but I wasn’t really interested in mental illness. I was put through by the U.S. navy, and they were very encouraging of students learning about leadership. They thought psychology had something to do with leadership, so I majored in psychology.”

Years later, after being released from hospital following a breakdown, Frese was living in a boarding house near Ohio State University in Akron. One of the graduate students living there told him that his degree qualified him to work as a psychologist for the state and encouraged him to apply.

“I very reluctantly took the test. I got extra points for being a veteran,” Frese says. He ended up working for the psychiatric hospital as a psychologist officially employed by the state of Ohio. He worked there for about three years and then arranged a leave of absence to go back to graduate school.

After finishing his PhD, Frese was assigned to work at the Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital in Ohio, where he was later promoted to director of psychology, staying until he retired in 1995. “Twelve years after I was committed as insane, I’m the director of psychology at the largest psychiatric hospital in the state,” Frese says. “Quite a change for me.”

But being a “sometimes psychotic psychologist,” as Frese calls himself, had its challenges. “I was under orders from my superiors not to tell anybody about my condition,” he says. When he wasn’t doing well, the cover story was that he had flu, “because you can’t have the insane running the asylum. Or if you do, you can’t tell anyone about it,” he says.

What started Frese on the long road from secrecy to speaking tours was a policy change that required oversight boards to include a mental health consumer. Frese was that representative for the Akron area, although he wasn’t openly identified as such. “They were very discreet about it initially,” he says. But it was a couple of years after that, during a talk at Kent State University, that Frese outed himself.

“I just got up and said, ‘Everybody who has actually been locked up and put away, please stand up and identify yourselves,’” he recalls. When no one stood, he said, “I guess I’m the only one standing here then.” “I didn’t plan to do that ahead of time; I just did it,” he says. “And since then, I’ve gotten a lot of attention.”

Once he began talking about his illness and even making appearances on local television, it was no longer a secret. “It was awkward for staff because this was new for them,” he says of reactions at work. “But most of the patients loved it. One of the staff was one of ‘them.’”

Frese’s parents, who had never mentioned his illness at home, saw one of his television appearances. When he arrived at their home later, his father met him at the door. “I didn’t know what he was going to say,” recalls Frese. “But he said, ‘Son, we’re proud of you.’” A week later, his mother called, saying that while she was very proud of him, could he please tell people that his condition was not from her side of the family.

“Twelve years after I was committed as insane, I’m the director of psychology at the largest psychiatric hospital in the state.

“That generation was one where nobody acknowledged that they had insanity in the family or in themselves,” says Frese. “This has been such a taboo topic. And that’s one of the things we need to change.”

Decades after his first disclosure, Frese still gets some negative reactions. But other times, his openness gives him the opportunity to meet people who might otherwise think they were alone in the world. “I was giving a talk to 150 judges in Ohio two years ago,” he says. “One of them came to me and said, ‘Dr. Frese, I’ve been on the bench 25 years and I’m going to tell you something that nobody knows, except my wife and my psychiatrist. I have the same condition you do. And I can’t tell anybody.’”

The stigma associated with schizophrenia can indeed be a bigger threat to a career than the illness. “The shame, the disgrace is so extreme that so many of us who have been able to recover think like I used to: Don’t tell anybody,” says Frese. When he disclosed, he says he felt he had “political cover” from a department head who was very pro-consumer. He also felt the timing was right.

“In my calculation of how open I was going to be, I figured I was close enough to retirement if they decided to get rid of me – and that’s eventually what happened,” he says. The pro-consumer department head moved to another position elsewhere. “When she left, it was a matter of time. And one day, they said, ‘You’re gone.’ But by that time I could retire, and that’s what I did.”

Frese recommends this approach to others who are considering disclosing a mental illness. “If you’re a young person, quite frankly, it is still very threatening to your career,” he says. “But once you’re retired or close to retirement, that’s what a lot of us are doing – revealing we have this condition, being open about it. It really helps fight the stigma.”

Advocacy can be the best medicine, says Frese. It was when he first became active with the National Alliance on Mental Illness that a colleague asked him how he had been able to recover from schizophrenia to the extent that he had. “I promised to try to figure out how I did that,” he says. The result was one of his best-known publications: Twelve Aspects of Coping for Persons with Schizophrenia.

Frese also supports simple, everyday acts that fight stigma. When he travels to give a speech, he takes advantage of opportunities to demystify mental illness for people he meets en route. “Whoever has the misfortune to sit next to me is not going to leave that flight without knowing they sat next to someone with schizophrenia.