Fruits of a Frightening Journey
by
Timothy A. McCarthy
11/9/20
“If I could put God in a bottle I would smash the bottle,” said the psychopath in 1968. Just think, if this was his plan for the Almighty, what would his wish be for the rest of society?
It is hard to imagine I was once that God-hating psychopath. Even harder to believe is I studied four years for the priesthood; ironically my seminary yearbook photo was labeled ‘devout.’
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How could this happen? My family had many high achievers. Because their successes contributed to my downward spiral I will mention two. Uncle Frank Winant captained his crew successfully through Pearl Harbor and later worked at the highest levels of the Manhattan Project to develop the Atomic Bomb.
At family reunions, there was always mention of John Winant. As the Republican governor of New Hampshire, he conceived the idea of having working youth set aside money for the non-working elderly. President Franklin Roosevelt liked the idea. In bipartisan fashion, he reached across the aisle to make John Winant the first secretary of a program to be called Social Security. After Winant had that operational, Roosevelt asked him to replace Joseph Kennedy as ambassador to England. According to ABC News, it was Winant, together with Winston Churchill, who convinced FDR that for the good of America we had to get involved in World War II. In my mind, I couldn’t live up to my ancestry. Additionally, I was prudish and shy and had few friends.
The fourth year at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore in 1963—1964 was the beginning of my downward spiral. Beset by violent headaches, I reached the point where I lost the power to speak. Both my heart and mind were broken, and the next 13 years were spent trying to get myself fixed. I left St. Mary’s with what was called an anxiety neurosis. Given the events of my last days at St. Mary’s the diagnosis should have included Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
For context, consider my dad’s fourth year at the Catholic University of America. Timothy W. was valedictorian in 1933 when President Roosevelt attended the ceremonies. The media followed the president as dad gave the valedictorian address live over two radio networks while the president listened.
After the event, Roosevelt’s press secretary visited dad to say, “The president would like you to know that tonight’s best speech was given by the valedictorian.” Apparently I was not to follow in my father’s footsteps.
My seminary career ended when I was in an emotional crisis. THIS COULD NOT BE HAPPENING. When the hospital staff left I wandered from my fourth-floor room to floors five, six, and seven, the balcony. I was going to jump. What saved my life was that THE DOOR WAS LOCKED. Reunited with my family the next day such thoughts dissipated. Yet, they would return!
I enrolled in a secular college the next semester where diminished expectations allowed me to function marginally. Removal from my past environment seemed to reduce manifestations of my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. My loss of speech, what psychologists call an implosion, ended. However, the following eight months were the calm before the first of many explosions.
The inciting force seemed harmless enough. Eight months after I left the seminary I led a group of inner-city children to the local zoo for a picnic. However, before the trip ended I was yelling at the children and other adults who made the trip with us. Once home, I called a local newspaper about improprieties I had uncovered while visiting a nursing home in my seminary days. Then came delusional thoughts about running for public office or becoming a rock singer. My mind was outrunning me. Why? I had absolutely no idea. But the next day, August 20, 1964 …
Insanity struck me like a lightning bolt. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know how to stop it. Like a caged beast, I paced the floor babbling impossibilities about my present and future. People around me seemed to be changing. I did not understand that I was the person changing. In this scenario, adrenaline pumps like an open fire hose as it tries to respond to crises it can’t understand. This adrenaline rush creates the appearance of what some describe as, “the strength of the insane.” Before the day ended, I had gone STARK RAVING MAD.
My parents called a psychiatrist who had helped me in the past. He came to my home and gave me a healing injection. I was so confused I remember thinking that either he was killing me, or I was just dying. That same day my parents drove me to Spring Grove State Hospital for the mentally ill in Catonsville, MD.
In the hospital, my adrenaline rush made me babble incoherently and pace the halls like the madman I had become. I first met fellow patients when four of them jumped me to make me stop babbling. I am no street fighter, so I grabbed the nearest flesh and sunk my teeth as deeply as I could into my victim. He bellowed louder than I ever bellowed. Everyone jumped off. This method became my calling card as I threatened to “bite out the jugular veins” of anyone who jumped me again. How strange it seems that a year earlier while wearing my seminarian’s Roman collar, I listened in joy at the Washington Monument as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr declared to us, “I have a dream!”
My institutional history began with a tragic medical misdiagnosis. My rambling and ranting caused me to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Thorazine and Mellaril were prescribed. Known as medical straitjackets, these medicines effectively stop acting-out behavior. However, these drugs are not part of the 24 drugs prescribed today for severe manic depression, my true diagnosis. Manic depression medications correct a chemical imbalance before bizarre behavior begins. The hospital never offered me these medications. So, when overwhelming tensions shoved me back toward “the demons” I was essentially on my own!
During periods of illness and recovery, I had occasional delusions. However, all of us experience traumatic events ingrained in our memories forever. So, if what I say next strikes some as delusional, I respect your right to feel that way. I surely wish you were correct.
In 1968 my classmates at St. Mary’s Seminary would conclude their journey to the Catholic priesthood. On a cold January night, I was beginning a journey of a different sort. As I later wrote, “The demons were returning. I couldn’t function at work. The girl didn’t love me. The whitecoats with their daily injections were waiting. Being a devout Catholic I could not take my life, but suppose something, just happened. Ignoring the 50-mph speed limit, my car shot ahead – 60, 70, 80 until I hit 90 miles an hour. Telephone poles flashed by like so many matchsticks. I swerved over a hill, holding at 90 as my foot stayed firm on the gas pedal. Nevertheless, the car started slowing down as steam poured from under the hood. The car eventually rolled to a stop. My radiator had run dry. I found a wash bucket in the woods and walked to the nearest house to get water for my car. A woman answered the door, saw me with wash bucket in hand, and slammed the door in my face. I didn’t blame her. I looked like the madman I truly was. Walking confused and alone thirty miles from home I found a bar and a stranger drove me home.”
Within a week a circuit court judge ordered me to the Psychopathic Building at Spring Grove State Hospital. As the huge metal doors slammed shut behind me I cried, “If I could put God in a bottle…”
In the mental institution, my third such visit, the addicted and I were an unwilling brotherhood. We shared the same food, and the same dormitory, the same broken hearts, and many of the same dreams. Beneath it all we shared difficulties that joined us at the hip:
- Denial: “This isn’t my fault. I have no issue I need to change.” Yet, paradoxically,
- “There’s no way all that’s wrong with me can ever be fixed.”
- Unforgiveness: Unforgiveness can be addressed toward self, others, or both. It can manifest as resentments or a desire for revenge. Same issue for me except the object of my unforgiveness was God. I felt God had betrayed me after I offered Him my life as a priest.
Mental patient or heroin addict, we all shared these root problems. This is not a complete list but rather the universal starting point of our disorders.
As I listened to a hundred tales, I felt empathy for others in our brotherhood. There was the man who served his country bravely in Vietnam but returned with heroin addiction as well as his honorable discharge. Another had a home in North Carolina he feared he would never see again. One man got a call that his wife just died of a heart attack in the bed of another man. These tragic stories and others like them got me thinking: How about a priesthood dedicated to the drug-addicted? It didn’t seem I faced heavy competition.
Make no mistake-these psychopaths were no boy scouts. A man who slept about 20 feet from me in our dorm was caught with a knife in his bed. He awaited extradition from Ohio authorities for stabbing a man to death. Another man would offer anyone a cup of water (hard to find outside mealtimes) then, as you approached, he would crack you in the teeth with his metal cup and laugh. We had a television room in the psychopathic building that held about fifteen people. Oddly, there was only one chair, the property of whoever claimed it first. I entered the empty room and claimed the chair. A man who outweighed me by more than one hundred pounds entered. A brief discussion followed:
Said the behemoth, “You’re sitting in my chair. I answered, “This is for all of us. I was here first.” The largest left fist I’d ever seen hit me right between the eyes, knocking me over backward. I thought my nose was broken. [It wasn’t]. The attendants watched, but no one helped me or disciplined my attacker. I would not sit in that chair again.
Medicines by daily injection ended my ravings. I was released four months later, but underlying causes remained. Strange as it seems in 1969 I had (still true today) no criminal record. Hired as a parole and probation agent I worked in poor sections of Baltimore City. Though the names and faces were different, the problems were the same as what I discovered in Spring Grove. My unwilling brotherhood was unwilling no more. Curiously, I felt I had come home. But the demons, the demons were still there.
“As I read the histories of these gifted artists it was clear I had shared their illness. Might it be possible I also shared their gift? Suppose I fictionalized my troubled past as a tale of victory in a Hollywood film? Obviously, this is the delusion of a severely troubled mind. Or can modern medicine and persevering prayer change everything?” Timothy A. McCarthy
Dating relationships were complicated. When I found someone I really cared about I felt a responsibility to share the difficulties of my past. I believe that was the real reason many such relationships evaporated.
Dating relationships were complicated. When I found someone I really cared about I felt a responsibility to share the difficulties of my past. I believe that was the real reason many such relationships evaporated.
In 1971 I knew nervous breakdown number four was inevitable. Like the three times previous I would push myself to exhaustion, then wind up in an institution where my cigarettes, my car, and my self-respect were stripped away. I felt certain my state career would be lost. However, my sick leave and good work performance would eventually save my job. As I looked into an ice-covered city lake I realized I could dive in at the edge and come up under the ice. It would all be over in ten minutes.
But I had a mental picture of my two sisters crying, screaming, “No, Tim, no. Don’t do it.” I couldn’t do this to them. I walked away. Within a week I was in the hospital again.
If I were to help the drug-addicted I knew I must first deal with my own root causes. And so, with the help of a Christian psychologist, I turned things around in 1977. He offered his help after I suffered my fifth institutionalization for a nervous breakdown. A member of his staff was quick to point out I was on the wrong medication; that was corrected. After 13 years I found genuine medical support. We worked together for two years as he helped me see my value as husband, father, and advocate for the addicted. The shame of my past failures didn’t matter anymore.
My form of denial was ignoring my medicine. To take it was admitting I had an illness that demeaned me. I would not (could not ?) make that admission. However, once I got the correct medicine I never skipped a dose again.
As to my profound sense of unforgiveness toward God, I realized it was keeping me “locked in the past at the point of pain.” God did nothing wrong. The priesthood was my plan for God, not God’s plan for me. The shame vanished, and I learned to forgive myself as well for all the times I didn’t know how to stop the breakdowns.
I learned that forgiveness, though it has a large emotional component, starts in the intellect, not in the feelings. For this reason, forgiveness is a virtue that can be taught. Forgiving may sometimes help the unjust aggressor. But it always helps the one who forgives. I learned to forgive quickly. Remembering the failures of my past could no longer derail me. Eventually, for matters long passed, they mattered not at all.
So, by early 1978 denial, shame, and unforgiveness were all successfully addressed. The breakdowns stopped happening. And so, it has remained for 42 years and counting.
In spite of my five nervous breakdowns I had never been convicted of any crime. Therefore, with my seminary training as a credential, I got a job as a Maryland probation agent.
BREAKING THE BACK OF DRUG ADDICTION
I brought unusual credentials to my work. My seminary experience enabled me to recognize the spiritual power of the 12 step movements. My incarcerations helped me see the folly of long-term jail to deal with disease. Using public agencies I sent stumbling addicts to inpatient detoxification–not to jail. Failing clients were off the street in seven days- before they committed a new crime. Even those who ran off completely got an option: To those who telephoned me, I said,“ Get into the Salvation Army or a thirty-day program and I’ll change your warrant to a summons. The police won’t be chasing you anymore. You will walk at the violation hearing if you finish your inpatient program.”
Consider the parent whose son experiences the explosive and damning ecstasies of heroin euphoria. Mom and dad try intervention. He refuses. Should they send him from their home to live with other addicts and possibly die? He has absolutely NO interest in treatment. But their son, in this fictional scenario, is also seeing me on probation. I request arrest on technical charges. He serves sixty days. We start again. Still no interest in treatment – another sixty days. If he has two years suspended I can lock him up twelve times. I can do what no parent can do. I remove his job, his car, his friends, his ability to pay his credit cards or his rent, and his freedom.
This is never done to punish but to “raise the bottom” for the client who will not or cannot “raise the bottom” for himself. If I must use this approach most clients become willing to embrace treatment. Doing otherwise simply costs too much.
A PILOT PROJECT
My agency understood the techniques I was using. They offered me the opportunity to use them on my 81 clients in a one -year pilot project. The results: recidivism under 6% over the entire year. Contrast this with a man leaving the Department of Corrections (DOC) after serving out his full sentence. Recidivism from DOC clients after one year is 50%.
At the invitation of management, I published, “Unhooking The Hooked Generation” with the American Probation and Parole Association in 1987. In 1989 at the invitation of management, I appeared with four of my graduates on three Baltimore television stations. Documentation for all these events is found on my website, http://takinbackthestreets.com.
Also in 1989 something extraordinary happened. In Miami Dade County Florida, following my published blueprint almost to the letter, the National Drug Court Institute was formed. By following my blueprint they were also able to match my success. The National Drug Court Institute operates today on a $65 million annual budget in 3000 courtrooms in the United States and Canada. How curious that it all began with a healed mental patient operating with 81 people in a district court in Catonsville, MD,
Because my illness blindsided me and almost destroyed me I wanted to find out more about it. A groundbreaking book by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire, offers a powerful new perspective. When the illness is properly managed, as mine is now, it may be a potential gift.
Some of those who found that gift are familiar to us: novelists, like Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville; actors and actresses, like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Mariah Carey; and composers like Tchaikovsky and Handel. Handel’s Hallelujah chorus was written in a manic episode. When the episode ended Handel added the finishing touches. As I read the histories of these gifted men and women it was clear I had shared their illness. Might it be possible I also shared their gift? I intended to find out.
I am 42 years healed and I am not afraid of my past. Suppose I could fictionalize my journey as a tale of victory? To get the attention of high-risk youth this must not be a drug education film or a character drama. Write an action-adventure tale role-modeling recovery. With Hollywood help and more than a hundred rewrites, I completed it recently. It is time to approach sponsors interested in a new and dramatic answer for heroin addiction. Dr. Thomas Cargiulo, former director of the Maryland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration has read my entire script. He says I’ve created a pitch for potential producers. It reads:
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I would summarize the film’s opening as follows:
The beautiful Angela West, witness to a drug murder, flees to a parish priest for help. Nearly shot off his altar Father Max prepares for an unlikely battle. How will the spiritual tools of a priest fare against the guns and guillotines of his deranged opponent?
Teaming up with Parole Agent, Phil McGuire, father initiates a plan to rescue their victim. A dying heroin addict holds vital information. By rescuing the addict:
View the 5-minute YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKQmH90Jm_s
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This clip features one of ten techniques I have fictionalized to reduce the addiction crisis. I have used this procedure personally, with court concurrence, nearly 100 times.
When I wrote Unhooking The Hooked Generation for the American Probation and Parole Association in 1987 I never suspected its ultimate impact. My failing addicts went to drug detoxification–not to jail.
But the arrival of fentanyl has changed the equation. Many addicted never enter the courts. A generation raised on video games and action films has no interest in drug education films or character dramas. An action-adventure tale capable of holding any general audience is key. TAKIN’ BACK THE STREETS is just such a tale.
Spiritual issues, which are broader than religion, haunt every addict. We know revenge exists, but who can produce a pound of it? For that reason, I wrote Letter to a Failing Heroin Addict http://takinbackthestreets.com/letter-to-a-failing-heroin-addict/
We former mental patients are constantly shredded in the national media. Consider this year’s film, JOKER. It earned an academy award. Might those of us who permanently recover also have a right to be heard?
As others examine my story should they look to my five institutionalizations for nervous breakdowns or the recovery blueprint I fashioned. Adopted and improved by the judges, it is used today in 3000 courts in the United States and Canada. Despite my severe psychiatric history when TAKIN’ BACK THE STREETS is released as a film the proof of my permanent healing will be clear to all.
Timothy A. McCarthy
worthywarden7@gmail.com
443-610-7584