Chuck Elliot

The day Chrysalis House closed, Chuck Elliot cranked up his Sony Walkman
and began a four-day dance with manic-depression.

Along the way, he spent two sleepless nights at his home in Normal Heights
and one pacing around a nearby park.

By midnight on the fourth day, he finally slowed down. Two policemen found
him resting in the doorway of Channel 8's studios in Kearny Mesa.

Elliot had gone there hoping to get on TV and discuss San Diego County's
shrinking mental health budget. The cops took him to the emergency room at
County Mental Health (CMH) on Rosecrans Street. From there, he was shipped
to Southwood, a private psychiatric hospital in Chula Vista. He remained
one month.

Elliot is one of 2.2 million Americans with bipolar disorder, which can
cause alternating episodes of mania and depression.

He had lobbied for months to save Chrysalis House, a home for mentally ill
in Golden Hill. He had been a resident there for six months and later
dropped in on weekends for group therapy.

But the county slashed another $3 million from its mental health budget,
and on Sept. 14, 1992, there was no more Chrysalis House for Elliot or the
12 people living there when it closed.

OCT. 16, 1992. OUT OF THE HOSPITAL. His first day home from Southwood,
Elliot learns he owes a towing company $615 for storing his '81 Porsche
924, a decaying remnant of his former life.

The Porsche had run out of gas 36 hours before Elliot himself did. He had
parked in a red zone during his manic episode and left the motor running.
The Porsche was in a storage yard for a month.

Holding a telephone receiver in one hand and jotting notes with the other,
Elliot tries to convince a clerk he should pay only a $47 towing fee. He
can't afford the storage costs, he says. It's too much for a man who
lives on $631 a month in Social Security Disability Insurance.

Elliot's biggest fear is winding up broke on the streets, wandering the
trail to nowhere blazed by thousands of others with mental illnesses.

His one-room, $300-a-month apartment is not far from homelessness. It's in
a converted corner market in Normal Heights. Four tenants share a kitchen
and bath.

Taped to crumbling sheetrock in Elliot's room is a newspaper story
headlined, "Budget Deadlock May be Broken." On the opposite wall is the
face of Albert Einstein with the quote: "Great spirits have always
encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

Golden oldies vibrate through a plastic radio on the nightstand. Above it
is a tiny Post-it rainbow sticker, around which Elliot has printed these
song-inspired words: "Here is the rainbow I have been waiting for. Going to
be a bright, sunshiny day."

Elliot speaks calmly, but his writing hand trembles. His lithium and
Tegretol -- known to most patients as "meds" -- keep him north of
depression and south of mania. But they also make him edgy.

Elliot loses the argument. If he wants his car back -- and he does -- he
will have to pay the full $615.

NOV. 3. ELECTION DAY. Elliot sits on a lumpy couch in his apartment,
searching through the newspapers, lists, computer manuals, meeting agendas
and junk mail stacked on his coffee table.

He is forever making lists on scraps of paper. 10:30 -- call Fred; 11 to
2:30 -- errands; 3:30 -- nap. Nothing is too trivial to be noted.

Beneath a can stuffed with pens and pencils, he finds a sample ballot.
It's a national election, but he is more interested in local candidates.
Mental health, he says, isn't a national issue.

A bumper sticker on his door says, "It's Crazy to Cut Client Care." (Some
mental health patients refer to themselves as "clients" of the system.)

Elliot has become a client activist. He is a member of Clients and Others
for Action (COFA) and several other groups that are advocates for the
mentally ill.

While walking to his polling place, Elliot decides he wants Susan Golding
for mayor and Bill Clinton for president. His least favorite candidate is
Ross Perot, whose campaign theme song is Patsy Cline's "Crazy."

NOV. 19. STIGMATIZED. Elliot stuffs his briefcase with papers and drives to
his first COFA meeting since his release from Southwood. He was COFA
chairman at the time Chrysalis House closed. The members elected a new
leader while he was in the hospital.

Medication usually controls bipolar disorder, but many people experience an
energy boost if they don't take their pills. The COFA members assumed
Elliot quit taking his meds to get the manic rush that launched his recent
episode. It's a breach of self-control they cannot tolerate.

Elliot gets into trouble because he sometimes "plays with his meds,"
lowering the dosages to increase his energy, says his psychiatrist, Dr.
Fred Berger.

Elliot says he might quit COFA if he doesn't get back the chairmanship. He
didn't belong in CMH anyway, he says. He did nothing wrong and should have
been left alone.


He has felt this way after every hospital stay, including his first one in
Las Vegas in 1982. He was making contacts and selling software designs at
an electronics convention when his mind whirled out of control.

Much of that first episode is a blur. Elliot remembers calling his friend,
Darlene Berke, in Los Angeles after the hotel assistant manager told him he
was "like a 45-rpm record in a 33-rpm world."

By the time Berke arrived, Elliot was about to fly off the turntable.

"Chuck was running around, talking in dots," she says. "He wasn't speaking
in sentences, he was saying, like, `dot dot dot dot.' Morse code or
something."

He wouldn't go home with her, so Berke left him at the hotel. Two days
later, he called her from the psychiatric ward at Nevada Southern Memorial
Hospital.

"He had gone upstairs, taken all his clothes off and had gone back
downstairs and streaked through the casino," Berke says. "And that's when
they picked him up."

At the time, Elliot, who holds a doctor of education degree (Ed.D.) from
USC, was running his own video production business and designing computer
software for an electronics company. Berke lost touch with him after that
first episode. She remembers him as "very brilliant, always about 10 years
ahead of himself."

"He bought an Apple computer in 1979 and taught himself how to program it.
Then he taught himself how to be a technical writer and actually went to
work on manuals to teach other people how to program their computers.

"He was a kind and gentle man, and I feel very bad for what he has gone
through. He had it all, and now he is left with basically nothing. It's
scary."

Elliot arrives at the COFA meeting early and sits quietly as eight members
drift in. No one welcomes him back. Elliot decides not to bring up his
presidency.

Frustrated, he turns to the person next to him and says in a small voice,
"I've been stable for seven weeks. I only had one bad week."

THANKSGIVING DAY. HOLIDAY BLUES. Elliot sits on his bed, a frown visible
behind his thick, white beard. A blanket covers the room's only window.

He is 46 but looks much older. Countless sleepless nights have withered his
face. He drinks Slimfast but is overweight from too much starchy food and
too many binges at Chinese buffets.

Elliot has no family. His wife divorced him in 1978. His adoptive parents
died years ago. He was born Steven Kossor in Chicago, has lived in
Baltimore and Los Angeles and moved to San Diego 11 years ago.

He never knew his birth parents.

He has lost touch with everyone he knew before he got sick. He has few
friends. He is an activist as much for companionship as for civic duty.

Worse than the loneliness, he says, is the boredom. He desperately wants
back into the mainstream.

He sends out stacks of resumes, but he doubts he will ever find work. His
last job -- technical writing for a Chula Vista electronics firm -- ended
in 1988 with a rush of mania.

Elliot was going on 100 hours without sleep when, at 2 a.m., he hauled
magazines, books, fruits and vegetables from his broken-down Porsche to his
desk. He doesn't remember why.

His boss came in a few hours later, saw the mess and its rumpled maker and
fired Elliot on the spot.

Wearily, Elliot pushes himself up from his sagging bed. He decides to
accept an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner at a home for the mentally ill
in Oceanside.

Elliot eats in silence at a long dining table. Afterward, he sits in a
stuffed chair near the front door, wearing a faraway look that blocks out
the other guests.

"Everywhere I go, it's mentally ill this and mentally ill that," he says.
"I get tired of it."

JAN. 7, 1993. A TURNAROUND. At midnight, Elliot is wide awake, sitting
cross-legged on his bed. And he is laughing. He hasn't been up this late
since he left the hospital 12 weeks before.

He confides he has met a woman, Diann Smith. A mutual friend introduced
them on Christmas Day, several hours before Elliot dined alone at the
Hungry Hunter in National City.

Diann is seeing another man. But not for long.

JAN. 24. A QUICK DECISION. Elliot and Smith decide to marry. They have been
dating 10 days.

Smith, a licensed vocational nurse, says it isn't too sudden. They are a
perfect match. Same illness. Same hopes and fears. They can take care of
one another, she says.

She was married once before. A doctor said her husband's death three years
ago triggered her illness.

"Chuck is the most brilliant man I have ever met," she says. "I am so
lucky."

MARCH 20. WEDDING DAY. The ceremony is perfect. At the reception in Balboa
Park, the grinning groom looks dapper in his rented tuxedo. On his arm, in
a white wedding gown, is the rainbow he has been waiting for.

"In Shakespeare's plays," Elliot says, "the distinction between a tragedy
and a comedy is that the tragedy ends with everyone dead on the stage and
the comedy ends with a wedding."

Later, at the head table, Elliot goes over his handwritten list for the day
-- an entire 8 1/2 -by-11-inch sheet of paper -- crossing out what has been
done, jotting in new times for what hasn't. He runs his pen over an entry
that says, "2:20 p.m. Get married."

"He's obsessing over his list," Diann says. "It's part of the illness."

APRIL AND EARLY MAY. STARTING A NEW LIFE. The newlyweds settle into
Diann's one-bedroom apartment in the College Area.

Elliot, energetic and eager to be the provider, decides to start a
nonprofit company to teach doctors, nurses and social workers about mental
illness. He calls it Mindstar.

He also begins writing a book, "Crazy Pages," detailing his experiences in
the mental health system.

From Chapter 1, his account of what happened in Las Vegas:

"I had been invited to a media party, a chance to meet the president of
Omni magazine. I was looking forward to it; it was six hours away. My first
inclination was to sleep, but I wound up pacing my room and thinking. I
kept going for 13 hours, walking and thinking, missing the party. I
calculated that at the normal walking speed of 3 mph, 13 hours was 39
miles. I walked 39 miles in the desert. My bizarre thought was that this
exceeded Christ's 30 miles in the desert. The Las Vegas Hilton is in the
desert, although air conditioned and carpeted."

MAY 20. A CALL FROM THE WHITE HOUSE. Elliot represents the California
Network of Mental Health Clients in a teleconference call linking him to
the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.

He arranges to use an office in the CMH administration building in Point
Loma. He invites all the COFA members. No one shows up.

But with his wife looking on proudly, Elliot gives a solid presentation on
the telephone. He says mentally ill people need job training and suggests
converting closed military bases to schools.

Assistant committee chairman John Lancaster, coordinating the
teleconference from Washington, calls Elliot and the other participants
"great Americans in the movement for human justice."


MAY 21. ENTERING POLITICS. Elliot is elated about the White House call. He
decides to run for Judy McCarty's 7th District seat on the San Diego City
Council. His plan is to shine the political spotlight on mental health.

He sets up a campaign staff and calls it Team7. It consists of Elliot, his
wife and five colleagues from various mental health organizations, none of
whom shows much interest.

JUNE 27. RUNNING FOR OFFICE. The campaign is progressing slowly, but Elliot
is in high gear. He sits at his kitchen table, moving credit cards in and
out of plastic holders, arranging them in order of importance. A can of
Mace and a pager are attached to his belt.

He has been up all night.

"Adrenaline keeps me going," Elliot says. "It energizes the heart and
stimulates the brain."

Diann is worried. "He's trying to take on too much at one time," she
whispers. "It's too much for a sick man to do."

Elliot picks up a stack of index cards. He frequently changes the greeting
on his answering machine. For two years he has logged them on the 3-by-5
cards.

The top card is from June 25. The greeting is still on the tape: "It's
Friday and yesterday we went to the Del Mar Fair and saw Jefferson
Starship, the premier rock 'n' roll band of the 1970s, and they sang (he
sings), `If only you believe in miracles, so would I ... I ... I.' Cue Di,
(Diann's voice) `Only if you believe in miracles, so would I ... I ...
I.' "

"I was coerced," Diann says, smiling.

Elliot picks up the telephone, trying to keep up with his four new pager
numbers. He pushes a button and Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" plays
through the earpiece. Elliot sings along.

An alarm sounds. It's one of four clocks set to go off every hour to
remind him to check his messages. He shuts off the alarm and Arlo Guthrie
and begins listening to the same messages he heard an hour earlier.

Suddenly, Elliot forms a gun with his thumb and forefinger and says: "You
are looking at a man who can't take it anymore!"

For the campaign, he has decided to forsake his mental health platform and
focus on crime. "If you emphasize mental health," he says, "they'll think
you're crazy."

JUNE 29. RUNNING ON EMPTY. Elliot's red eyes are wide open. His hair is a
sweaty tangle of knots above his forehead. He wears tight, black sweat
pants and matching T-shirt.

It is his fourth day without sleep.

"He's exhausted," Diann whispers. "He has been calling Hollywood all night
long, trying to get people to support his campaign. Actually, he's getting
them to call back. Whoopi Goldberg's agent called."

Elliot tapes phone numbers and blank election forms to the walls of the
sweltering apartment. His hands shake.

He has important errands to run, and he's in a hurry. He needs to take a
car key to the mechanic repairing his Porsche. He has to buy office
supplies. He has to order a pizza.

But before he can go anywhere, he must make a sweep of the apartment to
make sure everything is secure. He starts in the bedroom.

"The phone is in the desired position," he announces.

"It's off the hook," Diann says.

"It's in the DESIRED POSITION!"

Elliot runs to secure the living room. Diann replaces the receiver and the
telephone rings immediately. She hurries to the kitchen to monitor the
answering machine.

It's someone from the city clerk's office, an election worker returning
Elliot's call.

"Take it!" he commands.

Diann freezes. She doesn't want anyone from the city clerk's office
talking to her husband while he's going manic.

Elliot explodes.

"Take it! Lift it! PICK IT UP!" he yells, starting toward Diann.

Suddenly he reverses field, crosses the living room in three quick strides
and rips the vertical blinds from the sliding glass door.

"This is for you!" he screams at his wife. He kicks the door, opens it,
blasts through. Diann follows, trying to calm him.

He is yelling incoherently, not talking in dots, but close. She goes inside
and dials 911. The police are on their way.

Elliot snatches the phone from her hand, ripping the cord from the
receiver. He runs back outside, climbs a fence and hurries toward El Cajon
Boulevard, two blocks away.

"Is it illegal not to sleep?" he asks. "Is it illegal to have racing
thoughts?"

A few quick steps later, he announces, "I'm not crazy. I'm angry."

Two police cars turn on El Cajon Boulevard and park nearby. "Chuck," calls
officer Richard McCoy, climbing out of his car. Elliot slows, cringing,
then continues walking.

McCoy and officer Karen Cyktor close in fast. Elliot turns and in a rush of
words explains that his wife refused to answer the telephone, ruining his
political career.

The officers put him in McCoy's car. Back at the apartment building,
Cyktor says, "Chuck, let's make a deal. I think you need a doctor."

Elliot's mind is whirling, plotting. "I can see him later. I have a lot to
do." He spins toward Diann. "Get in the car. I'm driving."

The officers gently handcuff him. He compliments them on their technique:
"Best I ever had," he says.

Twenty minutes later, in the tiny admitting room at the CMH emergency
psychiatric unit, Elliot tells a doctor, "I'm angry, but not crazy. I am
mad at my wife. I asked her to pick up an urgent call. I asked her five
times and she wouldn't."

"How long have you been married?" the doctor asks.

"One hundred and thirty two days," Elliot says.

The doctor wants to give Elliot an anti-psychotic medication.

"No way," Elliot says.

"Why not?"

Elliot's eyes are frozen in an angry gaze. His teeth are clamped together,
lips pulled back.

"NO. NO. NO!" he says. "Can I have another doctor?"

A nurse leads Elliot to the emergency-room bathroom to collect a urine
sample. A patient chart on the wall has three names printed in black grease
pen, including "C. Elliott." As he walks past the chart, Elliot extends a
finger and rubs out the second "T."

"It's Elliot," he says. "Two L's, one T, six letters."

Minutes later, another nurse is drawing blood from his arm. Elliot smiles
and begins to sing, "I have been splattered by too much innocent blood ...
"

Elliot finally agrees to take some meds. He is asleep in 15 minutes.

Within a half hour, an ambulance arrives and takes him to Southwood
hospital.

JULY 7. RUNNING IN THE HOSPITAL. At 7 a.m., Elliot leaves a message on a
Union-Tribune reporter's answering machine: "I, Dr. Chuck Elliot,
officially announce that I am officially a candidate for City Council,
District 7."

Elliot has been hospitalized about 20 times, he says, always with a police
escort.

This time, he remains at Southwood two weeks, leaving against the advice of
psychiatrist Berger, who also is associate medical director of the
hospital.

"I think a little more time would have helped, but he was able to take care
of himself," says Berger, whose services to Elliot are paid for by
Medicare.


Mentally ill patients in California cannot be held against their will more
than 72 hours unless they are a danger to themselves or others. Doctors
must arrange a court hearing to force patients to take meds.

Many people with bipolar disorder are successful professionals, Berger
says. "Chuck is very bright, but he hasn't really gotten control enough of
his illness to take anything to fruition."

Once a month, Elliot shows his Medi-Cal card at a drugstore and picks up
his supply of meds. He has a routine for Lithium: first thing in the
morning (two tablets), last thing at night (three more).

He admits he has quit taking it for up to three days -- "not many times,
but a few times" -- out of boredom.

"Not the boredom opening the pill bottle and taking the same thing all
these years, but boredom with the state of mind that one is put into,"
Elliot says. "If you're manic, to be normalized is not fun."

Many people who have experienced the energy jolt the mania of bipolar
disorder provides miss it when they are medicated, says Nelson Freimer, a
researcher and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of
California San Francisco.

"Millions of Americans take cocaine to create artificially the state
bipolar people have naturally," Freimer says.

JULY 23. A POLITICAL SETBACK. Elliot misses the filing deadline for the
City Council race and won't be on the September ballot. He needed 200
signatures; he collected 18.

But he plans to file as a write-in candidate and stay in the race. Election
rules give him until Sept. 7 to gather the remaining 182 signatures.

"I still have the need and desire and constituency to want to run," he
says.

SEPT. 3. DIANN TAKES A BREAK. Diann checks herself into UCSD Medical
Center. She is stressed from trying to keep up with her husband. The stress
has caused a memory loss and sent her into a depression.

SEPT. 9. COOKING. Elliot's refrigerator is stocked with 12 jars of a thin,
gray liquid he calls shark soup. Nine more containers are in the freezer.

"I boiled it for a few days, crock-potted it and then microwaved it," he
says. "I paid $6 for the shark and it fed me for six days."

Every electrical appliance in the apartment is on: two TVs, a radio, tape
recorder, computer, crock-pot, toaster oven and microwave. The microwave is
nuking a plastic clip used to reseal potato-chip bags.

Diann is due to leave the medical center in a few hours. Elliot is
expecting a call from a friend who will drive him to the hospital to pick
her up. The Porsche is still in the shop.

Elliot has cashed an IRA to buy an IBM computer to coordinate the Team7
City Council campaign staff, organize his Mindstar company and write his
book. He also is planning a movie script based on the book.

The living-room daybed is piled with newspapers, books, videos and wooden
shelves removed from one of the walls. To tidy up, Elliot drapes a blanket
over everything.

But computer manuals, magazines, newspapers and election forms cover the
the living-room couch and chair and every inch of the dining-room table,
except for a single place setting at one end.

Elliot paces the living room, telephone in hand, listening to his messages
over and over. With the line occupied, his friend cannot get through.

Finally, Elliot remembers he was supposed to pick up his wife. He calls the
hospital. Diann has checked out. He calls 911 and reports her a missing
person.

SEPT. 10. DIANN RETURNS. Elliot is upset at Diann for spending the night
with friends and coming home a day late; Diann is unhappy because he failed
to show up at the hospital.

"Despite the acrimony, we hugged," Elliot says. "I initiated it."

Diann surveys the once-tidy apartment with a look of wonder. But when she
reaches for a stack of newspapers on the living-room chair, Elliot stops
her.

"No. NO! You can't move anything," he says. "It took me five days to get
things like they are."

He runs outside. Diann is close behind. She calms him this time, preventing
a return trip to CMH.

SEPT. 21. ANOTHER POLITICAL SETBACK. Judy McCarty is re-elected. Elliot
says he got 10 votes, but they didn't count because he missed the deadline
to file as a write-in candidate.

Team7 will become a City Council watchdog group focusing on District 7,
Elliot says.

"We've got a lot of work to do," he says.

OCT. 15. COMING DOWN. Elliot is slouched in the living-room chair. He looks
tired.

Diann is outside, clutching a large envelope containing dozens of letters.

The letters, written in 1976, are signed by professors and researchers from
colleges all across the country. Some request copies of Elliot's doctoral
dissertation; others praise it.

Elliot's research paper examined methods of individualizing classroom
instruction. A UCLA professor wrote to say it gave him "several important
insights."

"Chuck didn't want me to show you these letters," Diann says. "He thinks
it would be like bragging."

The pride in her voice is palpable.

"I know he's been acting up lately," she says. "But he really is a
brilliant man."

epilogue

CLARK BROOKS
27-Feb-1994 Sunday