My Son's Name Was Fred, by Gwill Linderme York Newman
Reviewed by Vi Orr
Gwill Newman was born into privilege. Her family enjoyed all the comforts of life and vast wealth, with mandatory weekly Sunday dinners with grandparents where they were served from fine china, crystal, silver, imported linens, in the surroundings of fine works of art. She was educated at the best Ivy League schools, and became an extensive, exotic world traveler. When she and her husband bought a home in Cleveland, it wasn't just any house, it was "Greywalls" a 14-acre estate with 30 rooms in Cleveland's best neighborhood whose only previous owners were descendants of General Sherman. But all this did not bring happiness. In My Son's Name Was Fred, Newman writes about the shattering of dreams with the tragic passing of her son at age twenty-two in a state mental institution.
Fred grew up in Greywalls where everything was accessible, everything except health, and his mother was guilt stricken over her inability to prevent the mental illness that began to take over her son's mind. She writes of the contradictions between his youth and his teenaged years. During travels, Fred always won the hearts of other travelers, porters, and pilots. He had a sixth sense for survival. By the age of 17 Fred had declined to a point where he did not know who he was.
Where did these gifts, and this illness, come from? In her search Newman did a detailed study of relatives on both sides of the family--great grandparents, grandparents and other relatives, looking for clues. Was it genetics, environment, past trauma? On his worst days he was the Messiah, Satan, a crazed wild son. She questioned every moment of Fred's illness, hallucinations, aliens, religion, and his daily ramblings.
The first part of this book describes the family's ascent, and the fascinating social history intermingling her Swiss and German heritage, the move from Missouri to Ohio, and the creation of wealth that depended on her grandfather's invention of refrigerator coils ushering a new market after the ice-box. But the bulk of the book describes Fred's hospitalizations during a loveless first marriage, a second happy marriage, and a move to Chicago. Through it all, she was consumed by work as a volunteer - something to which she had been bred - and with Fred's illness her work tightened around mental illness when she became a trustee of the Brain Research Foundation at the Univ. of Chicago. After his death in 1981, she escorted the Kentucky-based Schizophrenia Research Foundation to a national level when it became the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and she became its president.
Yet with all her wealth and work in the mental health field, when it was time for Fred's release from the hospital, where was he to go? He was too ill to live at home, but where were community care facilities everybody said patients were to be released to? She describes the fear, sadness, despair, and guilt arising from dealing with this devastating mental illness. Fred needed these programs. At the same time a change in federal policy was retrenching its commitment to people with mental illness. Research and funding was far from the minds of the bureaucratic system. We had a lot of work ahead of us.
Fred died at the Illinois State Operative Facility of a ruptured aortic aneurism. His mother thought his life was extraordinary although brief and unfulfilled because of the crippling disease of the brain known as chronic paranoid schizophrenia. With anger and grief she wrote a letter which was published by the Sun Times, Oct. 16, 1981, "At Last my Tormented Son is at Peace." The timing coincided with the emergence of family activism nationwide, years when people were coming out of the closet about their relatives with this incurable brain disease, and forming groups within the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Her article touched a lot of people and there was an outpouring from desperate families around the country.
It was from this very Sun Times article that Gwill and I would eventually meet. I called her to ask permission in reprinting the article for the Illinois NAMI "Stateline" monthly newsletter. Both of us involved in mental illness advocacy work. I was a founding member of NAMI (1979) and founding first president of the Illinois chapter of NAMI (1981). It was at the NAMI convention in Washington, D.C., where Gwill, a keynote speaker, was talking about NARSAD. After her speech the audience passed a large silver platter around and collected $3,000 on the spot for NARSAD. Later, I was invited to join the Chicago NARSAD Advisory committee, and I worked with Gwill on numerous activities including fund-raising events and committees to increase public awareness. We were excited by the teamwork of so many families from all over the country, hoping our dedication and mission would lead to more and better research and treatment.
Today there are many organizations confronting the ongoing problems of serious mental illness. NARSAD, NAMI, Mental Health America, and the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, among them. But sadly, there are no simple solutions, and no cure. As she often says in the book, "the answer is blowing in the wind."
