On the Road to Recovery with Fred Frese

An article posted on March 19th by Miller-Mccune.com:

Mental health care "consumers" are taking a greater role in their own recovery, moving beyond merely being patients to being providers.

By Marcia Meier

Fred Frese was a young Marine Corps officer and graduate student when he started experiencing the psychotic delusions of paranoid schizophrenia. He was hospitalized, the first of what would be 11 such institutionalizations. But he also managed to complete graduate school and earn a doctorate in psychology from Ohio University. He married and had four children, and 12 years after his first hospitalization, he became a chief psychologist for the Ohio mental health system.

That was 30 years ago. Today, Frese is director of the Summit County Recovery Project in Akron, Ohio, and one of the most articulate and outspoken national advocates of mental health recovery programs.

A crucial part of that recovery is battling the stigma of mental illness, he said. About 6 percent of the population, or one in 17 Americans, suffers from a serious mental illness. One in five families are affected.

"It's important for us to get out on Front Street and talk about our experiences," Frese said. "Many of us have long experiences with hospitalization, institutionalization. In the '70s, many of us were simply put away."

Frese knows what he's talking about. When he had his first psychiatric breakdown, he was 25 and in the Marines. He started to experience classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia: delusions, hearing voices, inability to separate fact from fantasy, inability to think logically, an all-consuming paranoia. He came to believe that enemy nations had hypnotized American leaders in a plot to destroy the United States. He was sent to the naval hospital in Bethesda, Md., where he stayed for five months.

Since then, he has been hospitalized numerous times, but he's also been able to function with the help of medication. He earned graduate degrees in international business management and psychology, and served as director of psychology for the Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital in Sagamore Hills, Ohio, for 15 years until he retired in 1985. Since the early 1990s, he has directed the Summit County Recovery Project.

To read the entire article, please click here.

Also see:

Recovery From Schizophrenia: With Views of Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Others Diagnosed With This Disorder

Editorial: Understanding and Measuring Recovery (PDF)

Photograph by Simon des Forges.