SAN FRANCISCO — The idea was to go out in an emotional swan dive, a lunge for the afterlife that would stretch his 17-year-old imagination. He settled on a plan and shared the details with a Facebook friend: He would drop DMT, a powerful psychedelic, and then cut his throat.
“Everyone was telling me what I could and couldn’t do — doctors, my parents,” said Frank, now a 19-year-old college student. “I was going to hurt myself, to show people, ‘Look, I am still in control of my life.’”
And so, in time, he was. Frank, who eight months earlier had received a diagnosis of psychosis, the signature symptom of schizophrenia, and had been in and out of the hospital, gradually learned to take charge of his own recovery, in a new approach to treatment for people experiencing a first psychotic “break” with reality.
At a time when lawmakers in Washington are debating large-scale reforms to the mental health care system, analysts are carefully watching a handful of new first-break programs like the one that treated Frank in New York as a way to potentially ease the cycle of hospitalization and lifetime disability that afflict so many mentally ill people.
