Overview

Max Harding arrived at Brown University as an A student. His descent began then in rebelliousness and a journey he hoped would bring him a life as an author. Inexplicably, he eventually found himself homeless and mentally ill on the streets of New York City at the age of thirty-five. Max was unable to fathom what was happening to his brain and the images and sounds of the world all about him. He roamed the city in full psychosis from small homeless shelters and down-and-out residential hotels to the large Camp La Guardia for homeless men north of the city. He was soon removed from that facility and sent back to New York to be put in handcuffs and eventually consigned to Bellevue Mental Hospital, more of a threat to himself than anyone else. He had given up all hope of dealing with the voices and strange powers that brought him to fully expect his execution at the hands of the doctors and nurses at Bellevue. From the hospital bed from which he awoke the first morning at Bellevue he was eventually able to rise up with psychiatric medication and therapy and the great and generous help of his social worker. He gained entrance into a psychiatric apartment program and then onto work again in mainstream American society. Many of the programs and aid which Max received are no longer available today or are in very short supply. Close to half of the adult victims of over six hundred thousand homeless people in America today are mentally ill and have outrageously become our most disposable citizens. Most disturbing are the returning military veterans with more psychic than physical wounds languishing in agony within this substratum of American society. The terrible actions of a few rare mentally afflicted individuals gunning down dozens of innocent people, many of them children, call out for greater and better treatment of the mentally ill in our society. After thirty-five years of productive work, Max now lives in subsidized housing in Bronx, New York.

Full Product Details

9781500590642

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Born and raised in the suburbs north of New York City, Maxfield Harding was a late bloomer in academic studies in high school and gained entrance to Brown University in 1960. This achievement came more from a need to escape a dysfunctional family than gain academic success and after graduation he joined the Peace Corps in Thailand during the height of the Vietnam War. He married a fellow volunteer after pressure from both their families and lived about in the United States on the fringe of the hippie subculture and the anti-war movement popular at that time. After nine years of marriage and a final divorce, Max found himself alone in New York City, friendless and on the lower stratum of the economy working in restaurants to support a sporadic attempt to develop as a fiction writer. Because of the biochemical makeup of his brain and the great stress of coming homelessness, Max fell victim to schizophrenia and ended up on the streets of New York City and eventually in a mental ward in Bellevue Hospital in that city. With the assistance of therapy, psychotropic medication and great support from the professionals working with this mentally ill population, Max gained entrance into a psychiatric apartment program and left Bellevue to attempt to re-introduce himself back into mainstream society. He received job training in office work and was employed productively for thirty-five years. He is still victim of schizophrenic thinking and problems with hallucinations but has learned to cope with these ongoing difficulties and lives happily in subsidized housing in Bronx, New York.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available