Something magical occurs in the process of drawing a picture, writing a poem, creating music, or participating in movement, dance and drama. There are many theories on how the healing process is facilitated through creative expression of the psyche. Exactly what is this magical process? No one answer has been scientifically proven thus far, however... we do know the process works.

Please take a moment to read the article and testimonials below to find out what some of our clients and their families have to say about Sara's Center.
NOTE: Since the publication of the articles below, Sara's Center has successfully purchased our home. However, we still need and appreciate your support which helps cover our monthly expenses -- including mortgage payments.

Color Their World / The Mentally Ill Draw on the Arts to Help Soothe Their Troubled Souls
By Katti Gray

For three days 1993 Glenn Garvin roamed Eisenhower Park, acting out the 23rd Psalm under the baseball field lights he believed were heaven's stars.

He salvaged a partly full bottle of grape juice from a garbage bin, pressed it to his forehead, then his lips. And, in a final act of anointing, Garvin sprinkled the drink on strangers crossing his path during those three delusional days in East Meadow. {Correction: Glenn Garvin sprinkled grape juice only on himself, not on passersby, during a manic-depressive episode described in Sunday's LI Life cover story}

It was a manic episode in his manic-depressive life. From it, and the time two years later when he believed himself to be Jesus Christ, Garvin has drawn some parallels: "I was born April 5, the same day that some people believe Jesus rose from the grave. I was 33 when I went into the hospital the first time; that's the age they say Jesus was crucified. I am a Jew. But do you see what we, Jesus and I, had in common? I know it sounds strange but it was a tremendous experience. I loved everybody during those three days. I felt very much at peace with myself."

The memories streamed out as Garvin, 52, sat at a conference table with four other poets in a Hempstead center for people confronting the hard knocks of being diagnosed as mentally ill. More often than not, they said, they have been jobless or underemployed, despite advanced college degrees and desire to work. Much of their time is spent shuttling between social service agencies and doctors' offices. They must decide whether to swallow pills that can contain psychotic behavior but also produce damning side effects. They fret over how others perceive and treat them.
They view themselves, to a considerable degree, as social outcasts. But they also find their personal chaos liberating. And there are epiphanies they gather together and put in writing. Poems Garvin wrote after his religious episodes and works by other members of the group - musings of their minds and hearts - are contained in a first volume of poetry published last year by Consumer Link, a Hempstead nonprofit organization that serves the mentally ill.

Consumer Link clients are finishing a second volume that, in part, promotes a belief that the arts, from poetry to painting, can be therapeutic for the mentally ill. The therapy is grounded in the notion that art - whether creating it or experiencing the works of others - can help a fragmented soul find its core. It is not so much the artistic product that counts (given the fluid definitions of what constitutes art) but the energy poured into the process, proponents say.

" The Czech leader Vaclev Havel wrote about freedom. Che Guevara wrote about freedom. Language is about culture, people and religion. It is about declaring your own identity," said Deborah Tunney, 47, a poet from North Hempstead who's been diagnosed with a type of depression.

" If I have a cold, I do not say, 'I am a cold,'" Garvin of East Meadow interjected during that roundtable chat at 3-year-old Consumer Link. "So, I have manic-depression. But I am not a manic-depressive, manic-depression does not define me ... Our poetry is a way of controlling ourselves." In addition to crafting poetry, he is pitching to book publishers a 62-page novella based on his mental illness.

One aim of all those writings is to stir within those who consider themselves sane a bit more consideration for a sick person's plight, said Robert Langley, Consumer Link's director. His staff of 16 paid and volunteer workers - trained as lawyers, nurses and what-have-you - all have been diagnosed with various mental illnesses.

" The stigma is still there that people receiving psychiatric services don't ever get better, that it's a lifelong illness," Langley said. "There are people here who have been in state hospitals who were told they would never leave the back wards. They are the very people writing this marvelous poetry."

Hanging on a wall at Sara's Center in Great Neck is a drawing cast in pastels on paper. It portrays the diminutive upper torso of a woman with a very thin neck, thrice as long as her head and encased in spiraling wire. Her head is tilted back, chin jutted skyward, the irises stuck severely in corners of her eyes. On this and every other day that he enters the center's Sun Room, that piece transfixes Edward Regensburg, an artist and certified art psychotherapist who runs the place.

" Isn't it magnificent?" he asks a visitor, not quite expecting an answer.
The diagnoses of Regensburg's clients range from multiple personalities (in which one individual has several fully developed psychological selves) to schizophrenia (marked by hallucinations, delusions and extraordinarily short attention spans).

" We try to bring everybody at the center into the present moment," he said.
Sara's Center, a private, nonprofit facility, is 24 years old. Regensburg said its menu of classes in such areas as poetry and journal writing, painting, sketching, dance and tai chi has helped cut the number of times the center's 45 outpatient clients have been hospitalized for treatment of a mental health crisis. A 1997 report by the center concluded that for the two years prior to joining Sara's Center, 35 clients were hospitalized a total of 66 times; another five required no hospitalization. During the two years after arriving at Sara's Center, 33 required no hospital stay and the seven who did saw their total admissions drop to 10.

" We don't cure anything but this is the ultimate stress reduction program," said Regensburg of East Northport, who is also a hypnotherapist. "What's right with us becomes what matters and what's wrong with us falls by the wayside."
Patrick, a Sara's Center client, lives in a group home (like others at the center who are concerned about being ostracized by neighbors, he asked that his last name not be used). He has had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder since he was 12, for 40 years now. With his ailing mother in the hospital, he realized last month he would not have a traditional Thanksgiving family meal, which was unsettling. As he had for several mornings before the holiday, Patrick was at the center creating "healing circles," coloring blank pages with markers artificially scented with fruit. (Aromatherapy is also a big thing at Sara's Center.)

" This is me being a chicken," Patrick said, pointing to the color yellow. "This is me being blue. And this is me being kind of dreamy like." His finger landed on mauve.

" I come here five days a week because I love the arts. I love culture, I love singing," he said. "I am a very emotional person and this place helps me a lot."

Rosie's artistic bent first surfaced during childhood. She has made greeting cards and sold them, so her peers call her one of Sara's Center's more accomplished artists. She says the distinction is meaningless.

" You don't have to be a great artist to be in the group. All the art is important. It helps us express the complications of what goes on in our lives," said Rosie, 44, diagnosed 30 years ago with what she said has, over the years, been some combination of "manic- depression ... paranoid schizophrenia and OCD," or obsessive- compulsive disorder.
Those complications are reflected in her piece, framed and mounted on a wall opposite Patrick's work, she said. Among other scenes, it shows a cat, her favorite pet, and a hand reaching up.

" I like bright, psychedelic, Peter Max-type things. Here, in this art, I am whimsical, happy. I have a lot of joy," she said.
These days, she is asymptomatic, in love with a man she calls wonderful, getting along with her parents and relishing the community of Sara's Center.

Backed by various scientific studies, the American Psychiatric Association advocates music as a form of art therapy. But the association has no official position on whether other arts are beneficial, said Kimberly Cordero, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based group.

To be certain, though, there are those who believe other art forms, given their ability to stir the senses, are no different.
" People have different intelligences. Some have spatial, some have musical, some have other stuff. No matter what the form, they all have benefits," said Steven Greenfield, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Nassau County, which launched Consumer Link. Like Sara's Center, Consumer Link has offered art therapy since it opened.

" We often get stuck...," Greenfield said. "The arts create openings in the way people think. They help them get unblocked. The arts help people identify talents they might have been unaware of. And any talent builds self-worth and strengthens the ego."

When a stroke disabled Dr. Paul Rosenbaum and forced him out of his practice as an oral surgeon a decade ago, Rosenbaum fell into a clinical depression. As he inched toward recovery, regaining the speech he temporarily lost and enough strength to walk on his own, arboretums and museums became his points of refuge. He journeyed there, though, not as an artist but as a budding art lover.

" It brought me back to the real world. Everything else looked insignificant," said Rosenbaum, 75, of West Hempstead, as he led 14 people through Nassau County Museum one day this fall.

Leading tours to art museums and galleries is a regular endeavor for Rosenbaum, a Consumer Link volunteer. On this day he was holding forth on surrealist art being exhibited at the Roslyn Harbor museum and coaxing his entourage to chime in.

" Surrealism is where you have all levels of artwork, dreams, fantasy, things that really aren't real. When you see them you can actually go and interpret - in your own mind - what they mean," Rosenbaum said.
Members of his Consumer Link group mostly just stared as Rosenbaum talked, sometimes nodding in agreement, sometimes pushing their faces as close as they could to the paintings without actually touching them. One woman asked if she might be excused to eat her lunch.

Jean Popowitcz, though, was taking it in, seizing the day as a respite from what ails her. "I'd rather not go into it but I do have a condition," said Popowitcz, 56, of East Meadow. "I've gone on a number of these museum trips. Being here is a lot of fun, an escape, like a mini-vacation from everyday life."

Whether there were any fledgling artists in the museum group did not matter, said Gary Hallman, 35, a Consumer Link counselor and ordained minister from Hempstead. Exposing to the arts those whose lives often are so cloistered is what remains key.

" Art gives you a holistic view. When you see how things are created, how they start - when you see the blueprint - you also begin to see how your own life can work out," said Hallman, diagnosed with manic-depression at 18. For seven years now, he has been free of any mental health crisis.

Long before he deemed the arts a mode of therapy, Paul Nachbar was writing and painting. His work has been shown in local galleries and on the covers of a couple of offbeat Long Island magazines.

Nachbar contributed poems to and edited the first and is assembling the second book of poetry, due out next month, at the offices of Consumer Link, where he earns a small stipend for leading the poets' project.

" What I want to do, since poetry is a minor art form at this time in history, is give something to the world, expand my insights so I can - to use the cliched phrase - help others. The poetry seems to do the trick when a lot of modalities of therapy don't. It is connecting to the world," said Nachbar, a Lynbrook resident who has been diagnosed with 10 different illnesses.

The poems he is helping to edit carry such titles as "In Search of Home," "Remember Me My Friend," "Echoes" and "The Blues by Any Other Name."

The recent discussion among the 30-, 40- and 50-something poets in that Consumer Link conference room was equally wide- ranging. There was laughter; it dulls the pain, they said. But there were also lamentations over mates never found and children never birthed, over feeling bullied by life. One man who works as a mental health caseworker wondered how a career unfettered by his being labeled psychotic might have advanced.

Even as they shun use of the word "normal," the poets cited the ways in which they try not to stand out. And they talk of defending themselves against mental health workers who have what they contend is outright disdain for the mentally ill.
" Did the staff ever try to dissuade you from ruminating, finding a corner for yourself and just thinking?" Greenlawn poet Sherry Taub asked no one in particular about a certain service agency.

" Yes," Deborah Tunney said. "They would say you were..." and then she and Taub finished the sentence together: "...isolating."

Taub: "In the therapeutic community, isolating means..."

Nachbar: "Being too busy or too dreary or too something."

Taub: "So writing provides a means of expression in a world that does not want to hear what you want to say."

Tunney: "...Where expression of strong emotion is often interpreted as pathological."

Taub: "The general public sees any mental disability as akin to being a sociopath or psychopathic murderer."

Tunney: "We might take medicine every day but we still have gifts. To make judgments about other people based on their wealth or perceived erudition or rank or disability is wrong."

Somewhere in that back-and-forth was the suggestion that their artistry is their way of fighting back. Consumer Link's agenda, in fact, includes registering the mentally ill to vote, lobbying for health services members believe work, and leading physicians and other health-care providers in workshops on alternative therapies.

Kathy Dellis of Huntington Station conducts some of that retraining. She also has read her poetry on public television.

...It could have been the dark
or a dream
or only the need to wander
into warmer territory.
It's quiet now
In the thin space between waking and sleeping.
His grandfather rolls on his side.
His grandmother is still,
Her hand on his bony shoulder.
Even in her sleep,
She reaches to touch.
Even in her sleep,
She loves him.

Dellis, 45, titled that "Grandson."
She believes in the power and purity of her words. Her fellow poets believe the same.

" To write poetry is me saying that I'm a person, too," said Howard Diamond, 42, of Lynbrook. "Writing is a release even, instead of hitting the wall or kicking the TV across the room. That's where my anger used to go."

" I write because it keeps me alive," Tunney said. "It is my art and it is my survival."
Sara's Center can be reached at 516-482-1550. To buy a copy of the Consumer Link poetry collection, or for other information about the program, call 516-489-0100.

© 2000 Newsday, Inc. Reprinted with permission - www.newsday.com

A Haven At Risk
By Joan Swirsky

It won't be easy for Patrick John to leave the place he calls heaven if Sara's Center in Great Neck loses its lease this week. Patrick John, a 52-year-old former hairdresser who has attended the not-for-profit psychiatric day-care facility from Monday to Friday over the past 14 years, is among 50 adult clients - most diagnosed with schizophrenia - who will have "no place like it to go,'' said Edward A. Regensburg, who has been the executive director there since 1992.

Mr. Regensburg is trying to mobilize support "from anywhere I can find it'' because the woman who founded the center in 1976, Marion Berliner of Great Neck, is retiring to Hawaii.

She was inspired to establish a therapeutic center when she was teaching art to emotionally troubled children and realized that as they aged, they were all but forgotten. Her husband, a surgeon, gave her the spacious, turn-of-the-century colonial house where the center is located and provided most of the operating funds for the first several years.

Originally Sara's Center, named for Mrs. Berliner's mother, offered programs for people with autism, mental retardation and learning disabilities. But in 1984, it received a state license - as the only creative-arts therapy center in the state - to run a day treatment program for mentally ill adults, making it eligible to bill the state for Medicaid reimbursements.

Mr. Regensburg and his board have to decide on Friday if they can afford to buy the house, which Mrs. Berliner still owns, or find another location. The alternative, he said, will be for Mrs. Berliner to put the house up for sale on the open market. Similar homes in the residential neighborhood sell for $400,000 to $600,000.

Kathryn Meng, a lawyer in Uniondale who has been a board member for 20 years, said the Berliners have made it clear that the center could purchase the home from them for below-market value and that they would supply the mortgage.

"But even with a 10 percent down payment and closing costs and a generous rate of interest,'' she explained, "monthly payments would be at least double, maybe triple what they are now. What we're hoping is that with enough charitable contributions, the mortgage can be reduced or we can buy the house outright, which would eliminate the monthly payments, except for taxes.''

"Can we afford it?'' Mr. Regensburg asked. "Yes, but not comfortably. If attendance remains high, we'll need an increase of at least $75,000 in operating funds'' each year. "And if transportation is taken away, which may happen because of the new social-service department's restrictions, we'll need an additional $250,000.''

He said he sent a barrage of letters to "everyone with influence and power.''

"But it's a Catch-22,'' he added. "If you appeal to the state, they send you back to the county, and then the county tells you they're broke.''

He said he wanted the state or the county to subsidize Sara's Center as a pilot program "to demonstrate how public funds can be used to deliver quality care at a reasonable cost,'' and he included in his letters studies that demonstrated that 97 percent of clients who attended the program were able to reduce their medication and that 90 percent experienced a reduction in the physical symptoms of their illnesses.

"But most people didn't respond,'' he said, "and those who did essentially shrugged their shoulders because money is the issue'' and government social service programs do not have the money.

"If a person like Bill Gates heard about us and realized the value of our type of holistic care, our problems wouldn't exist.''

The Center is one of 85 psychiatric after-care treatment centers on Long Island, 38 of which are in Nassau. Most are affiliated with hospitals that offer a range of programs in satellite clinics. As a result of such programs, the number of patients at Long Island's three state-operated psychiatric centers has dropped over the past three decades to 2,300, from more than 33,000.

Mr. Regensburg, a former art psychotherapist at North Shore University Hospital, said Sara's Center is unique in its focus on the arts and the degree to which it integrates music, art, exercise, meditation and the skills of daily living and socializing with traditional "talk therapy.'' Other offerings are aromatherapy, tai chi and guided imagery.

"We offer the only alternative to the traditional, institutional medical model of care,'' he said.

Ricky, a 43-year-old musician who has been attending the program for 4 years, said, "At other programs, there may be one nurse or one doctor for 150 patients, and some people might attend the activities but lots of others just sit around and grub cigarettes and money. That never happens here.''

Rosie, an artist whose work has been featured in several exhibitions, is 44 and has been attending Sara's Center for over a year. She said she had been hospitalized 15 times since her teens but since taking a new antipsychotic drug, "I've been symptom-free and now I can help other people. There have to be places where people like me can go and this is the best place of all because it's like a family, not too structured and not too unstructured."

A parent of one of the clients, Joan Millman of Westbury, said: "When a person is diagnosed with schizophrenia, he loses all his friends and there's tremendous loneliness. Sara's Center is like a second home where everyone is respected and treated like a human being. There's nothing white or sterile about the place and everyone's art is appreciated, even if they're not a Picasso.''

Lucy Ann, 24, another client, has suffered from mental illness since her teens and attended various programs. "It's like a home to me here,'' she said, "and the staff are like Guardian Angels. No other program has ever met my needs like this one. The doors should stay open here."

Schizophrenia strikes one out of 100 people, afflicting men and women at about the same rate. The onset occurs most often between the ages of 16 and 25, when people are just about to savor their first taste of independence or embark on careers or intense relationships.

Modern research has revealed tantalizing clues to the biological and genetic roots of the disease. Studies in Finland, Wales and England have linked schizophrenia to damage to the fetus caused by infections in the pregnant woman during the second trimester, when the child's cerebral cortex takes shape. Sophisticated diagnostic techniques and medications can now be directed at the damaged areas of the brain with increasing precision.

Symptoms include an inability to concentrate, withdrawal, visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions of persecution and an inability to assess reality. In all cases, caring for oneself, holding a job and having satisfying relationships are disrupted. Burdened as well with a predilection to alcohol and drug abuse - which may be forms of self-medication - as well as major depression, about 20 percent of schizophrenic patients attempt suicide, and 10 percent ultimately succeed. This ratio contrasts dramatically with suicide in the general population, which is one in 10,000.

Vowing to fight to keep Sara's Center open, Mr. Regensburg said, "We're treating some of the most fragile and vulnerable people in our society, and we can't let them down."

The article above appeared in the Long Island Section of The New York Times on Sunday, April 2, 2000.