Remembering Ken SteeleNEW YORK CITYVOICES
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By Rita Seiden, CSW, Ph.D., Executive Director, Park Slope Center for Mental Health
Our beloved publisher and founder Ken Steele died in his sleep Friday, October 6th, three days before his birthday. He would have been 52. We remember him with love and a tremendous amount of respect. He worked harder than anyone we knew and we will miss him.
Dear Ken. What would I have said and heard if I had known that you were about to die?
I am sure we would have concluded by saying, "I love you," as so many of our conversations did. But what would I have said and heard in the great middle of the conversation?
Everything about you was big: your size, your intelligence, your personality, your drive to make something out of your life after all those wasted years of mental illness, your capacity to bully and exasperate, your ability to convince that your vision needed to be fulfilled. Two weeks before you died, you asked me how could we get a personal trainer paid for. And like many of our other encounters, I knew I didn't know how, but I was convinced that you would find a way. You started New York City Voices out of a simple newsletter that Park Slope Center had conceived. It's true that the Center was there, and the idea of a newsletter, but it was your vision and relentlessness from the outset that gave birth to something very different. When Governor Cuomo signed the Reinvestment Act at Fountain House as a result of your efforts, he said: "The trouble with you people is that you don't vote." You, Ken, heard the call to educate and register mental health consumers to vote, a program now sponsored nationally by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill as the "I Vote, I Count" Campaign and by National Mental Health Association as the National Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project.
When you decided that you needed to tell your story of recovery, it was published in Psychiatric Times and other places. Somehow you knew (or was it your relentlessness?) how to accomplish the public sharing of your recovery. Then there was the announcement of the book agent, and the deal to publish your story by the premier psychology publisher, Basic Books. And the radio and TV appearances. Yes, all along you had help and support from your friends. But most of the time I felt that we followed and supported; you lead us to what we needed to do.
But I don't want to forget the part of the story that makes its ending chapters even more remarkable. You came to me in 1991, more or less mandated to get care by the agency providing your housing. You were a veteran of psychiatric care, most of which had been of dubious benevolence. Whenever you came to see me (which was never as frequently as it was supposed to be), you brought a psychotic whirlwind with you: full of tales of a dead family, a dead heir-to-a fortune lover, a career possibility at The New York Times, a need for special accommodation to smoke in session. Between visits there were frantic and paranoid phone calls. And then you disappeared, calling from out-of-state demanding refill prescriptions!
When you returned to the Center about a year later, my staff didn't want me to take you back. "Are you sure this is wise?" I was asked. Honestly, I didn't know if it was wise. But I knew there was something compelling about you. When you were started on Risperdal in 1994 by Dr. Casimir, it became apparent what was there within. And yet, there were many psychotic and tumultuous hours in the early recovery year. There was more than one time when I said, "I don't think I can do this"; and yet it was mixed with sufficient evidence of your astonishing abilities to be sane, loving, connected, and intelligent that I found that I could continue as therapist, confidante, and colleague.
Just yesterday, hours after we discovered that you had died, Dr. Wilfred Raby, told me that he had learned from you about mental illness. And, maybe more than anything, that is what your taught me: to learn from the patients -- they know more about their illnesses than the professional does; be respectful of what the patient knows; be there, and the patient will show you the same love and respect.
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