On a Saturday afternoon last September, David Barazani left his one-room apartment in Uptown and went to his family`s home in Edgewater. His father, Morris, an artist and teacher, was alone. His mother, Gail, an expert in chemical hazards to artists, was away in Peoria giving a lecture. David demanded money. His father refused.
”You took money from your mother`s purse, and now you`re drunk,” Morris Barazani remembers saying. ”I`m not giving you more money to drink with.”
David scowled. ”I said I would call the police if he didn`t leave,” the father said. ”I saw him reach into his pocket. I started for the front door. He caught me there.”
According to his father, they struggled out onto the sidewalk. David, who had a paring knife from the kitchen, pinned his father down. Morris said he was stabbed five times. David left his father on the street. He went into the house. Minutes later, he came out, kicked his father and said: ”Now call the police.”
Those who knew David Barazani as a child, growing up in Old Town, say he was sweet and outgoing. Leading a dozen neighborhood boys, he played endless games in his backyard, Hide & Go Seek and a version of Knights & Dragons with wooden daggers. He was a good student, imaginative and a voracious reader.
”He was never a boring child,” says a family friend. ”He played rough, but he was really a gentle kid. You had the feeling he was going to be an artist.” That was before David`s schizophrenia emerged.
Now, David Barazani, 34, sits in Cook County Jail awaiting trial for the assault on his father. It was not the first time he had attacked family members. Twice before, his parents had to call the police. They have had to turn him out of their home, a painful act. They have tried to find help for their son. They have found almost none. Their struggle colors all their days, but they continue to try. ”How can we abandon him?” asks Gail Barazani. ”He has no one else to turn to.”
This is the story of the Barazani family`s nightmare. So far, the nightmare has lasted for 17 years and provided vivid confirmation that no effective way of dealing with schizophrenics has ever been devised, a sad fact known all too well to concerned mental healh professionals and the families of the millions of victims of the mental illness.
The Barazanis are not alone. The Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a support group the Barazanis joined in 1983, has 30,000 members across the country. Most are parents sharing problems of dealing with mentally ill children. The Alliance lobbies for more government concern, research and better treatment for the mentally ill, but beyond providing places to live, survival money and concern, there is little parents can do, especially when, as in David`s case, they can no longer safely permit them to remain at home.
Most of these mentally ill people, like David, are schizophrenic. Estimates range from 1.5 to 5 million schizophrenics in the U.S. today. On any given day, 125,000 of them are in hospitals, for short stays, after extreme breakdowns. An additional 145,000 are in alternative-care facilities, such as halfway houses or nursing homes. Many vegetate at home with families. Or, walking the streets, they become bag ladies and skid-row derelicts, wanderers talking to the voices that overpopulate their minds.
Once, David Barazani was a promising writer. At Senn High School in the early 1960s, he wrote poetry and short stories. The Wascano Review, a Canadian literary magazine, published two of his poems. David, then 16, was delighted but typically underplayed his achievement. ”I hear you had poems published,” said a friend of his parents. ”Yeah,” was all he replied.
The first crisis came when he was 17. One afternoon, a month before he was to graduate from high school, he tore up six of his notebooks, saying they were junk. He packed the treasured books he had collected since he was little and hid them in the basement. His parents, badly upset by the outburst, sent him to a private psychiatrist. It was the first in a succession of attempts to get help for their troubled son.
That fall, David entered the University of Illinois at Chicago. He enrolled in the department where his father taught art and design. He sailed through first semester exams. He became an honor student. But during the winter break he told his parents he was dropping out of school. He was, he said, ”too dumb to do the work.”
His parents took him to the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute at the West Side Medical Center. Primarily a research center, the Institute showed little interest in David`s case because, his parents were told, it was ”not a unique research question.” The following year, David went for help to a psychoanalyst. David underwent an evaluation and was told, his parents say, that he was ”OK and should go home.”
Three days later, David, at home, imagined that an army led by Mayor Richard J. Daley was massing in the alley behind the family`s Edgewater house. They were coming to get his father. David was hospitalized at Lake Shore Hospital. Two weeks later, he crawled out on a third-story hospital window ledge. He was trying to escape so he could free his father from ”the trap.” During three months in hospital, he saw a psychiatrist regularly. Over the next five years, David was hospitalized three more times when hallucinations overcame him and he became disconnected from the world.
Morris Barazani, now near retirement from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was chairman of the department of art and design, is a short, slight, intense man of Spanish-Jewish heritage, a painter of abstract expressionist works. Gail Barazani attended the University of Chicago after graduating, as a scholarship student, from Francis Parker School. As a young woman, she experimented with sand-painting and plastic objets d`art that she sold at art fairs in Old Town and Hyde Park. They were married in 1948 at the Gold Coast`s Fourth Presbyterian Church.
The couple lived first in a basement apartment in Hyde Park. Morris found work in the steel mills. Seeking a more comfortable haven for artists, they moved to California, then to Morris Barazani`s home town of Detroit, where he ran an art gallery. David, their first child, was born in 1951. In 1952, the family settled on a back street in Old Town, and Morris got a job as a display designer for Goldblatt`s store on State Street.
Cramped on the ground floor of a small house were the parents, David, then two sisters, plus studio space for the huge canvasses Morris Barazani painted. Furniture came from thrift shops, but Gail Barazani managed to add stylish touches with crystal, china and linen napkins. The focal point was a big round kitchen table. Recalls a friend: ”The house was chaotic, but that table was always filled with friends and young painters. The coffee pot was always on.”
In 1963, the family moved to a larger house in Edgewater. David had a small room of his own. After he graduated from high school, he became a skilled carpenter. He build a studio for his father, remodeled the kitchen, and renovated the family farmhouse in Boscobel, Wis. He did remodeling for family friends. About five years ago, he fixed up the attic and moved up there. In his own space, he felt more independent. He sat, watched TV–and
”thought.”
In 1981, he worked for a year, renovating houses in Uptown as part of a project financed by the federal CETA program aimed at helping the marginally employable. As the oldest, most experienced carpenter in the crew, he trained youngsters. It was a rare experience for David, more than just a job.
Periodically, when David earned a little money, he moved out of the family home, trying desperately to be independent. He lived in fleabag hotels and once in the basement of a family friend. But always, unable to support himself and live alone, he returned home. When the CETA program was abolished, David went in search of other work. He rode CTA buses endlessly, checked out want ads. No one would hire him. He was bewildered. With his good record with CETA, why couldn`t he find a job? One reason was that this tall, strong, handsome, curly haired man has a distant look in his eyes, reflecting the distracting voices in his head. Even brief encounters with him, under circumstances when he is calm and relaxed, are not easy.
Depressed by losing his CETA job, he pushed himself further into himself by dropping his medication. Lonely, he also went to bars and drank, often too much. David`s illness is heightened, his parents feel, by drinking. It is when he is drunk that he gets out of control. ”It goes in cycles,” Morris Barazani reports. ”For some reason, he gets worse every spring. You can sense it building up, the way he talks about bizarre, paranoid things. It builds until he reaches a crisis, like falling off a chair.”
His language is sometimes violent. Though he doesn`t say exactly what outrages him, he often shouts: ”You`re trying to castrate me.” In 1980, during one such outburst, he battered both his parents. Police took him into custody. Calmed down, he was released several hours later.
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In 1983, he turned on his younger sister. He beat her severely. His parents called the police, put David out of the house and changed the locks. David was arrested, put under court supervision and ordered to go to the Uptown Mental Health Center. A social worker there advised his parents to cut their son off–completely. Give him no money. Don`t let him in the house. The social worker, they recall, said David was refusing to face his illness. He needed to hit bottom and recognize he needed help.
After that, David lived in parks and in abandoned buildings in Uptown. He ate at Salvation Army hostels, churches and shelters. He tried to return home. Refused entry, he slept in the backyard. His parents called police. David agreed to sign himself into Chicago Read Mental Health Center in Oak Park. Once there, he changed his mind. He refused treatment and signed himself out the next day.
A social worker at the hospital asked if he wanted help. He refused, saying he didn`t need help. He had no money. His clothes and a few possessions were in a bag he had been carrying around all summer. A social worker at the Uptown Mental Health Center recommended the Seventh Day Adventist Sojourners, a group that assists people released from mental hospitals. A Sojourner found a small apartment for David and obtained food stamps.
For most of the next year, David remained stable. He applied for welfare. The Barazanis supplied him with several dollars a day to supplement his monthly check–about $193 plus food stamps–so he could continue to look for work. As his mother put it: ”At least it was something to keep him busy.”
Once a month, he went to Uptown Mental Health Center for counseling. A psychiatrist at the center prescribed stelazine, an anti-psychotic drug. He attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. His parents relented and gave him a key so he could come home, get something to eat or watch television. He visited regularly and peacefully. Over the years, David periodically had taken the drugs prescribed for him. But then he would balk because, he said, he was afraid of ”side effects.” A second psychiatrist said the pills were no longer necessary.
Without medication, David got worse. He started drinking again. His parents worried, as they had worried so many times over the last 17 years. Mantaining, as they had through it all, a calm, almost stoic attitude, they watched with dread for signs of deterioration, wondering what, if anything, they could do as their son grows older–and further away from their help.
Until the 1950s, attempted cures, such as they were, were forced on the mentally ill. Treatments often were barbarous–lobotomies, electric shock, isolation, strait-jackets. Most mentally ill persons were locked up in institutions. But with the discovery of anti-psychotic drugs in the 1950s, the practice developed of releasing patients after short stays, with prescriptions for drugs. The hazards are that mentally ill people may neither remember to take the drugs nor have the money to buy them. In the 1960s came legislation to protect rights of mental patients. In many cases, they gained the right to sign themselves out of hospitals when they themselves believed they were ready.
Unlike many other mental diseases, which have been recognized since ancient times, schizophrenia is a relatively recent diagnosis for people who confuse fantasy and reality, seem to live in a private world and, as Swiss psychologist Carl Jung once put it, think and act in real life as normal people do in their dreams. Theories of its cause range from family environment to biochemical imbalance. Drug therapy, involving large doses of tranquilizers, is the most common treatment and, in some cases, is successful. Among the millions of mentally ill persons in this country, only a few are violent. Of 200 violent offenders handled by the Public Defender`s Office in the last six months, only half a dozen were considered mentally ill. David Barazani is one of them. What should be done with him? Not everyone agrees.
Says Barbara Winer, executive director of the Isaac Ray Center at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Hospital, a lawyer who deals with the mentally ill:
”When you have a person who is mentally ill, who has a history of not taking his medication, who has engaged in repeated violent behavior, the best way for the family and the victim is to insist on prosecuting that individual, handling him through the criminal justice system. He is a criminal. His mental illness should not be used as an excuse for letting him out of the criminal justice system.”
George Nichols, an attorney in the Public Defender`s office, disagrees.
”If it is at all possible,” he says, ”such people should be kept out of this system. They can only get worse.”
One option is for David to plead not guilty, by reason of insanity, to the charges of attacking his father. But according to Donald Paull, a lawyer- psychologist who heads the mental health division of the Cook County Public Defender`s Office, only 50 of 400 insanity pleas last year were upheld, a strikingly small number among the 25,000 indictments in the state. If David were to plead insanity, and was found guilty but insane, the court would retain jurisdiction over him and he would be held in a prison psychiatric hospital, probably Menard Correctional Center, for at least six years. If he is found sane, and convicted, the judge could opt to place him on probation with the condition that he undertake treatment.
”It is so easy to get lost in the system here,” says Paull. ”I`m not terribly optimistic about the chances of a mentally-ill person getting probation. Yes, we have some facilities, but too many people just get lost.” Much depends on which judge hears David Barazani`s case. ”Some judges feel it`s a good route to go,” notes Paull. ”Others feel it`s a complete waste of time. It`s the luck of the draw.”
If locking him up is necessary, the Barazanis want David in a state prison hospital, where he may get treatment, rather than in prison where, in all likelihood, he will only get worse. But for the walking wounded in our society, it is not much of a choice. As Gail Barazani, her voice cracking, once asked a friend, ”How do you put your own son away?”