March 1970

March 1970 is the turning point in Dominick Birdsey’s retrospective account of Thomas Birdsey’s illness: after months of signs Dominick could not or would not recognize, Thomas’s condition became unmistakable. The date also anchors a longer history in which periods of improvement and institutional control alternately shaped the brothers’ lives.

The Date and Its Setting

Dominick places the date nine months after the summer of 1969, when he and Thomas, home from their first year of college, worked as seasonal groundskeepers. They mowed and trimmed the small Indian cemetery on the grounds of Three Rivers State Hospital, near the Sachem River and the sacred burial grounds of the Wequonnocs. The location foreshadows the institution that would later become central to Thomas’s life, although at the time the brothers were simply working there during their summer break.

Dominick’s account distinguishes the early signs from the crisis that followed. Thomas’s illness had already begun to emerge in ways his brother did not see, or did not want to see. March 1970 was when that uncertainty ended: Thomas’s mind brought him to his knees, in Dominick’s stark description. The date marks not the beginning of every symptom, but the point when the illness could no longer be treated as a faint, unrecognized possibility.

A Hinge in Dominick’s Recollection

The date is narrated from a perspective more than twenty years later, during a return journey with Thomas to the state hospital. Dominick measures the intervening years through accumulated changes: he graduated from college, taught high-school history, and started a painting business; his mother and a baby died; Dessa left him, and he later became involved with Joy. Yet despite the passage of time and the many changes in his own life, he was once again accompanying his brother to a hospital.

That retrospective structure makes March 1970 both a personal memory and a dividing line. Before it, Thomas’s illness could remain half-seen; afterward, the brothers’ lives repeatedly organized themselves around episodes, treatment decisions, and the prospect of another return to hospital. Dominick recalls not a steady progression toward recovery, but a cycle in which the family learned to hope for reasonable intervals between severe episodes.

A Long Course of Treatment

The years after March 1970 did not follow a simple course. In 1977 and 1978, Thomas had a relatively good period. His doctors concluded that he was not manic-depressive, stopped his lithium, and prescribed Stelazine. After a change in doctors, the dosage was raised from six milligrams a day to eighteen. Dominick later found Thomas severely impaired and describes confronting the doctor who had prescribed the increase; a nurse told him that staff had tried unsuccessfully to reach the doctor over the weekend.

There was another more hopeful stretch in the early 1980s. In 1983, Dr. Filyaw started Thomas on Haldol, after which Thomas improved enough to move to a group home and take a maintenance job at McDonald’s. He asked Dominick to photocopy his first paycheck before they cashed it, then framed the copy for his bedroom wall. A ten-dollar bill he kept with it was later stolen. Thomas also had a girlfriend, Nadine. These details show the significance of the improvement in ordinary, concrete terms: work, a room of his own, a relationship, and a paycheck worth preserving.

From Hospital Grounds to Institutional Time

The hospital property where the brothers once worked and Hatch Forensic Institute, at the rear of the grounds, belong to different moments in Thomas’s story. Hatch is presented as a maximum-security institution surrounded by fencing and razor wire, holding both people involved in highly publicized violence and patients whose cases are less prominent. Its doors, Dominick observes, rarely lead back out; the surrounding town is more interested in keeping people it fears confined than in their rehabilitation. The contrast lends the brothers’ youthful summer work a grim retrospective weight without making it the cause of what followed.

Later, Thomas’s stay is governed by a formal sequence of observation and review. After he is admitted to Hatch under a Physician’s Emergency Certificate initiated by a surgeon at Shanley Memorial Hospital, the hospital has fifteen days to assess whether he is dangerous to himself or others; his family cannot secure his immediate release. The restrictions are also physical and routine: security staff search his belongings, catalog and store personal items, and require approval for reading material, while Dominick is told Thomas must be restrained. These later procedures make visible how the crisis that became unmistakable in March 1970 led, over time, to a life shaped by institutional decisions.

The Psychiatric Security Review Board’s later decision to retain Thomas for a year, with another review scheduled for October 1991, extends that institutional timeline. Thomas’s case was to be reconsidered for release or another twelve-month period, while his social worker requested a review after six months. March 1970 thus remains the remembered onset of an unavoidable crisis, but not a single event that explains the years afterward: the account follows illness through changing treatment, modest recoveries, and decisions about confinement that repeatedly set the terms of Thomas’s and Dominick’s lives.