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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497637139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2014 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The facts of my case have been well publicized. I dwell on them in this journal not to excuse my wrongful conduct but to explain how I wound up in prison and how the abuse of drugs, even those legally prescribed, and untreated mental disorder, can destroy.
The decomposition of my life began slowly, almost imperceptibly. It began with my weakness in pursuing an affair with Joy Silverman, a married woman who was the stepdaughter of my wife's uncle. When Joy's stepfather died in 1984, I was named trustee of a trust established for her benefit.
It did not take long for our friendship to become an intimate relationship, with all the excitement of clandestine meetings and travel to romantic hideaways. The attention and adoration of this attractive woman, seventeen years my junior, made this--my only affair after thirty-eight years of marital fidelity--an excursion of breathless exhilaration.
My relationship with Joy and my ability to function appropriately ended with the onset of a major depression in the summer of 1990.
William Styron, in his book Darkness Visible, describes his depression as a "brain storm," literally, a storm in the brain, one that affects every part of your life and being. He was struck by a major depression when he was sixty. I was the same age when I too felt the first manifestations of this illness.
Styron also wrote of the indelible link between depression and preoccupation with serious imaginary illness: "Unwilling to accept its own gathering deterioration, the mind announces to its indwelling consciousness that it is the body with its correctable defects--not the precious and irreplaceablemind--that is going haywire."
The part of my body that I thought was going haywire was the brain itself. Persistent headaches and a weakness on my left side convinced me that I had a brain tumor. This misbelief was fostered by answers given me by doctors to hypothetical questions and my claustrophobic fear and consequent refusal to submit to a diagnostic magnetic imaging process (magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI), which requires the patient to be encased in a tunnel-like enclosure. Had I taken this diagnostic examination the true nature of my malady, an uncomplicated herniated disc, would have been revealed. The tumor that I was certain was growing in my brain was imaginary.
While suffering from this profound depression, and not wanting to bear the stigma of seeing a psychiatrist, I attempted to self-medicate. I was able to convince one doctor to prescribe Tenuate, an amphetaminelike drug that I used to elevate my energy level and thereby mask my depression (I took 1400 of them in a four-month period). And because I could not sleep, I was able to convince another doctor to prescribe a hypnotic called Halcion (I took 280 of them during the same four months). Still another doctor gave me a prescription for Pamelor, an antidepressant. And there were others. All of these drugs taken by themselves have dangerous side effects. Taken together the reaction can be devastating. In my case it contributed to and exacerbated a diagnosed manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder.
At first I thought my breakup with Joy, initiated by me, would be a positive step in my effort to combat depression. I would no longer have to lead a double life and continue to deceive my wife. That's what I thought. But I missed Joy. Her absence from my life started to take on a new dimension. In my despair, I began thinking of her as someone who could bring me solace. In my hopelessness, she came to symbolize hope. I felt a longing--not for Joy, but for the person whom I imagined Joy to be. I felt that if she would come back to me, I would be whole again.
For seven years I had been the one Joy turned to for advice on how to deal with her own problems and those involving her children. I wanted her to need me again. To accomplish this I embarked on a bizarre campaign of writing outrageous and harassing letters, letters that my mania convinced me would bring Joy back to me.
I went so far as to send a note containing a condom in an envelope addressed to Joy's fourteen-year-old daughter. I knew that her daughter would never receive it because I identified the envelope in such a way as to invite Joy's opening and intercepting it. As I anticipated, the letter was intercepted and never received by her daughter--but the fact that I did such a thing, calculated to distress Joy, was another of my unpardonable and shameful acts.
My behavior never brought Joy back to me for help. Instead it brought her to the FBI and, ultimately, me to prison and ruin.
Shortly after my arrest on November 7, 1992, I was compelled to have the MRI scan that I had resisted for so long. It revealed UBOs (unidentified bright objects) "in the deep right parietal region" of my brain, where I thought my brain tumor was located. According to one study, an increased number of these UBOs "signal hyperintensities suggestive of abnormal tissue" found in bipolar patients.
The aberrational conduct exhibited by me prior to my arrest suggested mental illness, but diagnosis was necessary in order to determine treatment. For this purpose I was referred to Drs. William A. Frosch and Frank T. Miller as the primary examining psychiatrists and to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center as the place for the examination.
Dr. Frosch, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, was the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry of the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and is considered one of the nation's foremost psychiatrists. Dr. Miller, the primary author of the report concerning my illness, was another psychiatrist of note. As a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, he practiced psychiatry under Dr. Frosch at Payne Whitney and was later named chairman of its Department of Affective Disorders.
On November 22, 1992, with the consent of the prosecutor, I was allowed to be taken to Payne Whitney for this examination. I was accompanied by an armed guard and was required to wear an electronic monitor strapped to my ankle. I was checked into the hospital under an assumed name in an effort to avoid the press.
My first day at Payne Whitney was absorbed by physical examinations and written and verbal psychiatric tests. My family members were also interviewed, which disclosed my family history of depression and the brutal suicide of my maternal grandmother.
I was then interviewed by Dr. Frank Miller. In our initial conversation, he asked me to tell him about my relationship with Joy and to describe the conduct that had led to my arrest.
I told him my story, complete with the details of how I assumed the guise of a fictitious lowlife whom I named David Purdy. It was the David Purdy character who was to harass Joy. My "plan" was to convince Joy that she needed my assistance, the assistance of her onetime protector, to rid her of the Purdy menace.
I remember thinking that my interview with Dr. Miller was very brief, lasting only a few minutes. I also remember thinking that I was particularly articulate in explaining my aberrational behavior. Apparently my memory of that session was flawed. The following is from Dr. Miller's notes of this initial interview:
On November 23, 1992, during my first interview of him at New York Hospital, Judge Wachtler's speech was pressured, loquacious, tangential, and circumstantial. It took approximately three hours to get from him information that typically takes 45 to 60 minutes. This occurred because he was unstoppable in his pressure of speech. His mood was expansive and grandiose. He did not understand the gravity of the situation.... For approximately 45 minutes, Judge Wachtler imitated the David Purdy character. When I realized that I was not able to interrupt this monologue I asked two other physicians to join us in the hope that their presence in the room would calm him.
To my dismay their presence only served to intensify his display and I asked them to leave. Although the situation of the interview was sobering and grim, he was not able to appreciate or grasp it. He had very limited insight and his judgement was poor, even though his higher intellectual functioning was intact.
Drs. Miller and Frosch continued their examination and testing, and after my three-week hospitalization, issued their diagnosis, called the Miller Report, which concluded with the finding: "Judge Wachtler's severe mental illness is best categorized as a drug induced and exacerbated bipolar disorder [manic depression]."
Less clinical were the observations made months earlier by my wife, Joan, a trained certified social worker, who dealt professionally with a patient population. Well aware of my depression, she was to make a diary entry in October 1991:
Something is terribly wrong. He's acting strangely. Very depressed, irritable, emotional. Moves his clothes in and out of our house. Spending little time at home. Came back from Florida after taking his mother down and told me it was the worst 3 days of his life--death, old people--he "feels he's dying." Doesn't understand what's happening to him. Feels "disassociated" with himself. Says a beautiful day is ugly. Hasn't slept in weeks even with pills--lost 15 pounds. Doesn't eat at all--drug related?
The Florida trip to which Joan referred was when I took my mother to her North Miami Beach apartment, something I had been doing for years. But this time I noticed that the residents of her building, who had been in their seventies when they moved in--like my mother--were now in their eighties and nineties. They were aging in place, and although death had thinned their numbers you had the sense of being among a great many very old and very frail people.
Men and women whom I remembered being parts of couples were now alone--widows and widowers. They sat around the pool, staring off into space, seeming to remember or trying to remember a different time--a less lonely time.
I remembered walking past a kitchen window. An old man sat motionless, reading a newspaper. There was a small fan atop a table, oscillations in a gentle arc causing his paper to riffle. When I walked past his window again, an hour later, nothing had changed. I'm certain that he was staring at the same page, his head held at the same angle. Was he dead? Did it matter?
I remember wondering what a person like that had to live for--and then I started wondering what I had to live for. I remembered a poem I read a long time ago, "Richard Cory." It told a story of a man who had all the blessings of family and wealth a person could wish for. Everyone envied him. And then one day he went home in his elegant carriage and put a bullet through his head.
I shared these ruminations with Joan at the time and she pleaded with me to see a psychiatrist. At first I rejected her suggestion out of hand. I could not compromise my reputation as a sound-thinking jurist by admitting the need for a psychiatrist. How would the public perceive--or trust--a jurist charged with the responsibility of deciding questions concerning their freedom or fortune if they knew that he was in need of psychiatric treatment? But the pain--and I mean that word in its literal sense--the pain of my depression was a torment that I could no longer endure. Although I would not see a psychiatrist, I did agree to see my physician, an internist.
I saw the doctor privately on Sunday mornings. I felt that too many questions would be invited if I were seen visiting the physician's office. I told the doctor only what I wanted to reveal. I did not speak of my recently ended affair with Joy, or the fact that I was taking the "upper" Tenuate on a regular basis to mask the agony and malaise of my depression. I was ashamed of both my adulterous affair and my growing drug dependency; both connoted weaknesses I was unwilling to confess. I told of my intense headaches and left-side debility, as well as my suspicions of a brain tumor.
She was quick to diagnose my clinical depression and urged me to consult a psychiatrist. I refused. I could not suffer the stigma that society imposes on someone who seeks to remedy a defect of the mind. A stigma which follows the taking of therapy, medication, and treatment. To seek such a remedy would be to publicly confess to such a defect, which my vanity and ambition would not permit.
The lesson of Thomas Eagleton, the U.S. senator from Missouri, was still on the minds of political leaders. He was dropped as a vice presidential candidate in 1972 when it was discovered that he was treated psychiatrically. Although psychiatric treatment given me probably would not be as dramatic as that which he received, would I be subject to the same negative political attitude if I saw a psychiatrist prior to seeking the Republican nomination for governor of New York?
She urged me to take an MRI, to learn more about my suspected tumor. I told her of my claustrophobia. I would only accept an X-ray. She argued that this was a poor substitute, and indeed it was. It did nothing to confirm the presence of the astrocytoma, the brain tumor that I believed, indeed was certain, had implanted itself inside my head.
Even without my telling her of the Tenuate, the doctor thought my ingestion of the various medications that I did tell her about--mostly over-the-counter--was dangerous. She ordered me to stop. When I told her that I would not be able to sleep without the Unisom, Percogesic, and codeine I had been taking, she prescribed Halcion as a substitute. The nortriptyline Pamelor was prescribed to help me overcome the acute melancholia that was plaguing me.
She continued to see me Sundays, monitoring my medication and my mood. I told her I had quit taking other medications. I lied. I was still taking the Tenuate, and all the other drugs that had taken a hold on my life. Between the spring of 1991 and the day of my arrest in 1992, I was to take some five thousand pills of one sort or another.
After my arrest, Dr. Donald F. Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University, perhaps this nation's leading psychopharmacologist, was one of those who examined me and studied my case. He concluded: "It was during the period of high, chronic consumption of Halcion and Tenuate that Judge Wachtler's judgment became gravely impaired.... Similarly, the chronic use of high-dose, high-potency benzodiazepines is associated with states of disinhibition [and] with impaired foresight and social judgment."