In a psychiatric ward in Upper Manhattan, Arvind Sooknanan made a plan for his life. He would drop out of high school, take the G.E.D. test and go on to college, be the first in his family to get a degree.
He was 18 years old, living with a mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, and he had been brought to the hospital after a driver on the George Washington Bridge spotted him trying to jump off. Of all the psych wards he had been through, he told me recently, that one, at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, was the nicest.
We were talking in an empty office at Fountain House, whose free “clubhouses” are run for, and partly by, people with serious mental illness. Since that episode on the bridge, Mr. Sooknanan, now 26, had passed the G.E.D. test, earned a college degree and, at the age of 21, run the campaign for the first South Asian woman elected to the New York State Legislature.
He had also become, through Fountain House, a model for what people with serious mental illness can accomplish, and an ambassador to the lawmakers who set mental health care policy. He provides perspective on that homeless person talking to himself on the subway, hearing voices, scaring the other riders. Too many times, he said, he has been that person.
On a recent morning at the organization’s main clubhouse in Midtown Manhattan, he recounted struggles that were hard to reconcile with the figure calmly sharing them: 20 hospitalizations before he was out of his teens; parents who thought he was inhabited by a “spirit”; stints living on the subway or in city parks — and, over and over again, the anguish of being handcuffed by police officers, hospitalized against his will, held for weeks until the doctors cleared him to leave.
“I’m not sure if you can tell,” he said, “but the mental health responses in my life have not been all that great.”
He is now trying to build a life as a professional, knowing that his mental illness can uproot it at any time. In idealistic moments, he has a plan to reshape mental health care in America.
Around the clubhouse, a five-story red brick building that feels more like a social club than a health facility, a few dozen members attended a jobs workshop, composed a newsletter, prepared lunch or just hung out. Some read in the library; some talked to themselves. Each had a diagnosis of serious mental illness.
Mr. Sooknanan, who grew up in the Bronx, the son of Guyanese immigrants, discovered the clubhouse in July 2018, when his therapist told him about a program for people with interrupted educations. By then he had twice enrolled at colleges and been asked to leave because of mental health episodes. At one, he was escorted off campus in handcuffs.
His first day at Fountain House, the executive director handed him $20 and told him to make photocopies of his enrollment documents and then return with change.
Mr. Sooknanan was stunned.
“If you know anything about New York City and the Bronx, especially the South Bronx, you’d definitely not give a stranger $20 and expect them to come back with change,” he said. “Much less someone with serious mental illness. When you’re in a psych ward, they wouldn’t even trust you with a toothbrush by yourself.”
That small gesture of trust made him feel welcome, a part of something. “It really transformed my life from that moment on.”
He began spending more and more time at the clubhouse, volunteering for different tasks. The house was intentionally understaffed, so that much of the work had to be done by members.
Mr. Sooknanan flourished there, discovering skills he did not know he had. Yet his psychiatric care still leaned heavily on antipsychotic drugs, which he said made him feel like a “zombie.”
With help from Fountain House, he got into Lehman College, in the Bronx, where one of his first-semester professors was Jenifer Rajkumar, the state director of immigration affairs. He was open with her about his mental illness, which sometimes kept him out of class. Schizoaffective disorder, which affects three out of 1,000 people, combines symptoms of schizophrenia — including hallucinations or delusions — with mood episodes, which can be manic or depressive. Despite his absences, he finished the semester with straight A’s.
That summer, Ms. Rajkumar asked him to help with a series of “know your rights” trainings she was organizing for immigrants in southern Queens.
“He was extraordinary,” she said. She saw his disability, she said, but also his commitment. “He is brilliant, a hard worker, dedicated, and those are all the ingredients.”
When she decided to run for State Assembly in 2020, she asked him to manage her campaign. He was just 21, with no political experience.
“Remember, up until that point, I was bouncing around from hospital to hospital,” Mr. Sooknanan said. “I didn’t even think I could get through a semester of college. No one thought I could. She was the first person who ever believed in me.”
It was the early months of the pandemic, when stories of emotionally disturbed people committing random violent crimes peppered the news. Mr. Sooknanan’s father died of Covid in April 2020, leaving him with family responsibilities on top of the stress of learning how to run a campaign.
He struggled visibly, Ms. Rajkumar said. “There would be times he would leave and I would wonder where he was going. He would tell me later that he spent the night wandering the streets or in the subway.”
But it did not slow him down, Ms. Rajkumar said. He was still hiring staff, canvassing, creating political strategy, even delivering groceries to constituents. The clubhouse had closed because of Covid. “The campaign was all that I had,” he said. “It was something for me to focus on that wasn’t about grief, something I knew was going to be meaningful.”
When he was hospitalized briefly, Ms. Rajkumar simply brought meetings to the psych ward. At one point, she got him a room in a hotel on Central Park South for a night so he could steady himself.
Even with his mental illness, she said, he was crucial to the campaign. “What he can do in three hours, a lot of people can’t even do in one week. We always knew that sometimes he’d have to take care of a mental health issue, but he would always then be back and be OK.”
In one extended manic episode, he spent a month sleeping on the subway or in parks, washing in the bathroom of a McDonald’s in Harlem. Finally, someone at Fountain House steered him to a city-run respite center with peer support for people experiencing mental health crises. It got him off the street.
“I was able to shower,” he said. “I was able to change my clothes. I actually lay on a bed. It’s pretty transformative, what your own space and a bedroom and finally being able to get some sleep can do.” He stayed for a week, until he was stable enough to go home, and then later moved into supportive housing run by Fountain House.
In June 2020, Ms. Rajkumar won the Democratic primary, making her a sure bet to win the seat, which she did.
In the lull afterward, the strain of the campaign and his father’s death caught up with Mr. Sooknanan.
“I was hearing voices intensely,” he said, describing them as sometimes unintelligible, or like the screech of electronic feedback, but always with him, “like a toxic best friend.”
On July 19, he left his phone and wallet at home and drove to the National Mall in Washington. “I felt like the government was after me, so I had to go meet the president and beg for mercy,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense, but I also thought I had to kill myself before they killed me.”
He was picked up by the Capitol Police and taken to the hospital, where he spent about a week or 10 days. It was the last time he was involuntarily committed.
Back in New York, Mr. Sooknanan got more involved at Fountain House, teaching a G.E.D. class, tutoring or just socializing. When elected officials visited the clubhouse, or when staff members lobbied officials, Mr. Sooknanan was called on to tell his story — very effectively, said Mary Crowley, an executive adviser at the organization.
“It was quickly apparent to me that he was just an incredible advocate,” Ms. Crowley said. “I’ve been on Capitol Hill with him a couple of times, and I’ve seen the response that electeds have to him. Arvind is very eloquent about explaining what people need, using his own story, but also explaining why this works.” Mr. Sooknanan also joined Fountain House’s board of directors.
The public role suited him, especially as the aftereffects of the pandemic brought more attention to mental illness — along with calls to expand involuntary commitment, which he opposes, calling it “demoralizing and dehumanizing.” He helped Ms. Rajkumar draft a comprehensive mental health care proposal and wrote an opinion essay with Representative Ritchie Torres, who lives with depression, about the need for more services in the Bronx.
At the same time, he watched in horror two years ago as an emotionally disturbed man named Jordan Neely, who was acting in a way that scared people in the subway, was choked to death by another rider — and then again as that rider, Daniel Penny, was acquitted in the killing.
“It was searing,” Mr. Sooknanan said. “He was just struggling; he just needed someone, something, some basic food or water, which he was asking for.”
Jordan Neely, he said, could have been him. “I know how the world thinks of people like me,” he said. “A lot of people think that for people with serious mental illness, dying is justifiable. It’s a very scary thing.”
Ms. Rajkumar is now running a long-shot campaign for public advocate of New York City against the incumbent, Jumaane Williams. Mr. Sooknanan signed on as senior campaign adviser.
On a recent evening, the two met at a diner in SoHo for a strategy session. Mr. Sooknanan wore a starched white dress shirt and sat in front of a laptop and a half-eaten salad; Ms. Rajkumar wore a red dress, as always. The rapport between them was close, intimate.
“In a way, this has been its own therapy,” Mr. Sooknanan told her, in part because the work gives him less time to think about the voices in his head. “It can be very stressful, but I can’t wait to see you win.”
For Mr. Sooknanan, the voices and manic episodes have not gone away, and have not responded to medication, said his psychiatrist, Jeanie Tse, who is also the senior medical director at Fountain House.
But now, Mr. Sooknanan said, he has a community around him, people he can lean on when he feels an episode coming on. If he’s absent for too long from Fountain House, there are people who will check on him; if he’s behaving erratically, they will support him. It is the mental health care he never had before, when he only ricocheted from hospital to hospital, crisis to expensive crisis.
He is now lobbying for funding to make clubhouses like Fountain House a common leg of the mental health care system, arguing that they save money and provide care that hospitals don’t. He would like to expand the model even further, to create whole blocks or neighborhoods run for and by people with mental illness, redirecting money that now goes to hospitals or day treatment programs.
“Every major city has a Chinatown,” he said. “Why couldn’t we have a mental health town? It could just look like any other neighborhood. The difference is that it’s accepting. And that Walgreens that you could walk into, or that local pharmacy or local grocery store — it’s now being run by people with serious mental illness.”
In the meantime, the clubhouse has helped him see his mental illness as a part of his life, not an impediment to it. It was a simple lesson that cut against so many preconceptions about mental illness.
“I started accepting that I was going to have manic episodes, psychotic episodes. And I’m going to feel down, I am going to hear voices.
“And that’s OK,” he said. “I will still be able to live life. I’ll still be able to achieve whatever goals I set out to achieve.”
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
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