Frank Spool received experimental treatment at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital

Frank Spoel’s experimental treatment at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital turned a decision he understood as a short alternative to prison into a prolonged and damaging confinement. Coordinated by Joseph Wieder, the program subjected Spoel and other inmates to experimental medication; in Spoel’s later account, its procedures and effects left him feeling less like a patient than an object of institutional control.

From Arrest to Commitment

In the fall of 1985, Spoel was arrested for mugging a man after a dispute over counterfeit perfume. He had sold two boxes of cigarettes for the perfume, discovered that more than half the bottles were fake, and gone looking for one of the men to demand his money back. A fight followed; Spoel beat him and took the cash in his pockets. Because he did not disclose the cigarette transaction, the arrest was treated as a mugging. The injured man had a clean record, while Spoel had dropped out of school and already received warnings for breaking the law.

His court-appointed attorney, Terry Duanne, presented Spoel with a choice between trial as an adult, which could mean five to eight years in prison, and being declared temporarily insane by a medical expert. Duanne advised the latter and suggested Spoel would leave hospital within a couple of months. To Spoel, Trenton Psychiatric Hospital seemed preferable to Bayside Prison, and the commitment initially appeared to be a limited way out of a more serious sentence.

Wieder examined Spoel, concluded that he had bipolar disorder, and recommended commitment to a mental hospital. Spoel was taken to Trenton a few days later, still expecting to be released after a short stay. That expectation was soon overturned: three weeks after his admission, he was moved to a special ward with about ten other inmates, all between twenty and thirty and described as violent offenders.

The Experimental Ward

Spoel later learned that he and the other men were receiving experimental medication as part of a program coordinated by Wieder. The ward’s procedures included questions, choosing colors, and completing questionnaires. Spoel recalled feeling that the men were being used as experimental subjects rather than treated as people. When Wieder visited, Spoel challenged him about the arrangement he believed Duanne had described: that his commitment would be brief and connected to a legal compromise. According to Spoel, Wieder said he did not know what he meant, maintained that Spoel was there because of mental problems, and said treatment should continue for as long as Wieder considered appropriate.

The conflict was not only about the medication but also about how long Spoel could be kept and who had authority to decide. He said he spoke with Duanne a couple of times, but his lawyer eventually told him that a year would have to pass before he could ask a judge for discharge or transfer to a lower-security hospital. Spoel found this unbearable in light of the original offense: he had beaten a man and taken eighty dollars, he said, but that sum did not even make up for what he had lost in the cigarette deal. The sentence he had expected to avoid seemed to have been replaced by a confinement whose terms he could not control.

Reported Effects and Reassessment

Spoel described terrible nightmares and uncertainty about whether he was awake or dreaming after the treatment began. He said the medication had done him more harm than good. The other men, in his account, suffered terrifying headaches; as the program continued, many spent much of their time tied to their beds while hallucinating. He also reported that they vomited their food and developed skin rashes. These are Spoel’s retrospective descriptions of the ward and its effects; the account gives no independent clinical assessment of the medication or the other patients.

A year after his admission, a new attorney, Kenneth Baldwin, told Spoel that he had taken over the case from Duanne, who had left New Jersey. Baldwin applied for a judge to re-examine it. Spoel again faced Wieder, who refused both to discharge him and to approve a transfer to Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, where the regime was easier. Spoel was sent back to Trenton. The review therefore failed to deliver either the release or the less restrictive placement he sought.

Closure, Release, and Significance

About six months before Spoel finally left, the inmates were moved to other wards and the experimental ward closed. Their treatment was changed. Spoel said the nightmares and headaches stopped and that he began to feel better, but the effects did not disappear altogether: he still woke without knowing who he was and described his nerves as crawling. He tried to conceal his distress and remain on good terms with those around him, hoping to show that he was not insane.

At the next review, Wieder was no longer on the commission. Spoel’s request for discharge under legal supervision was approved, and he left the hospital a couple of weeks later, in October 1987. The account does not present release as a clean restoration: he had endured the closure of the ward, a change in treatment, persistent disorientation, and a long wait for a decision made without Wieder on the commission.

As recalled by Spoel, the episode places the language of diagnosis and treatment beside the practical power to confine, medicate, and delay release. The same medical authority that identified his condition and recommended commitment also, in his account, set the terms of treatment and initially rejected his requests to leave or transfer. The eventual change in treatment and the commission’s later decision mark real changes in his circumstances, but they do not erase the gap between the brief stay he expected and the years he spent in the institution.