Hi everyone – it is with sadness that I report that Robert Neugeboren has died. He was the subject of a documentary made by his brother Jay – “Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival” and a book, “Remembering Robert”. Many of you will remember that Robert presented at our annual conference with his brother Jay. We will express out condolences to the Neugeboren family on behalf of the ACL community.
The article with pictures can be found at http://nyti.ms/1KNs25y
From The New York Times:
Robert Neugeboren, 72, Dies; Faced Psychiatric Abuses
The man on the screen is asked: If you could look back and say something to your 19-year-old self, what would you say?
He is in his late 50s, graying, slightly disheveled, with a scruffy mustache and soap-pad beard, enormous glasses and curly hair. When he speaks, it’s a bit of a mumble because he has no teeth.
“Have a good life, and have a happy one and a healthy one,” he answers, adding, after a pause, “which I’ve had, except for the hospitalizations.”
For a viewer of this scene, shot in 2000 or 2001, that “except” is a poignant one.
By that point in the movie, a 2002 documentary titled “Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival,” it has been revealed that the man, Robert Neugeboren, whose profound mental illness did not undo him intellectually or undermine his capability for wit and charm, had spent most of his adult life in institutions, often subject to isolation, physical punishment and numbing medication.
The documentary, by Lawrence R. Hott and Diane Garey, which was shown on public television — along with the 1997 book by Mr. Neugeboren’s brother, Jay, from which it was adapted — made Mr. Neugeboren a celebrity of sorts in the world of the mentally ill: a survivor of the horrors of mistreatment, a case history for those who point to the positive effects of kindness and talk therapy, and, perhaps most of all, the embodiment of the bottomless mystery of the human mind.
Mr. Neugeboren died on Oct. 25 at the nursing home in the Bronx that was his most recent residence. He was 72.
“The death certificate said ‘natural causes,’ ” Jay Neugeboren said in an interview on Thursday. He said Robert had been hospitalized more than 100 times since his first breakdown, in 1962, shortly before he turned 19, when he flung open the door of a moving car and threatened to jump out.
In the film, Jay Neugeboren explained further: “He tried to strangle our father that night while he was sleeping. He tried to make love to our mother. My parents took him to a psychologist, who said he didn’t see any problems.”
Robert proceeded to urinate in the psychologist’s office. “Then they took Robert away in a straitjacket,” Jay Neugeboren said.
What followed, according to Jay, was decades of anguish for Robert and his family. He spent time in many institutions, including the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where the Neugeborens say he was beaten, and for many years at the South Beach Psychiatric Center on Staten Island, where he was fed an ever-changing and ever-escalating menu of drugs, rarely saw a therapist, and, when he became rambunctious, kept in isolation for weeks at a time, a treatment with the euphemistic name “reduced stimulation.”
Robert’s condition was never accurately diagnosed, perhaps because no such diagnosis was possible.
In his book, Jay Neugeboren wrote: “He was schizophrenic when enormous doses of Thorazine and Stelazine calmed him; he was manic-depressive (bipolar) when lithium worked; he was manic-depressive-with-psychotic-symptoms, or hypomanic, when Tegretol or Depakote (anticonvulsants), or some new antipsychotic or antidepressant — Trilafon, Adapin, Mellaril, Haldol, Klonopin, risperidone — showed promise of making him cooperative; and he was schizophrenic (again) when various doctors promised cures through insulin-coma therapy or megadose-vitamin therapy or Marxist therapy or gas therapy.
“At the same time, often in an attempt to minimize side effects, other drugs were poured into him: Artane, Benadryl, Cogentin, Kemadrin, Symmetrel, Prolixin, Pamelor, Navane.”
Robert Gary Neugeboren was born in Brooklyn on April 17, 1943. His father, David, worked, not terribly successfully, in the printing and stationery business. His mother, the former Anne Nassofer, was a nurse. The marriage was stormy. In the early 1970s, after coping with Robert’s illness for a decade, his mother gave up and decided to move away and saw Robert rarely after that. His father died in the mid-1970s. For more than 40 years, his brother, who is his only survivor, took responsibility for his care.
Robert went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where he was a classmate of the chess genius Bobby Fischer and performed in school productions. He eventually graduated from Forest Hills High School in Queens and spent two years at City College. He aspired to be a filmmaker and worked for a time in his 20s as a film editor.
Jay Neugeboren, the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, said that, worried about exploiting his brother’s agony in writing about his own, it took him 20 years of thinking about it before he dared to attempt a book. He said he took his brother to lunch to raise the subject.
“My hands were shaking when I said to him, ‘I’d like to write a book about you and me,’ ” Jay said, adding that it would include Robert’s breakdowns and hospitalizations and everything else. “And you know what he said? He said, ‘Why would you think I wouldn’t want you to write a book about me?’ ”
Among other things, the book drew the attention of Dr. Alvin Pam, then the director of psychiatry at Bronx Psychiatric Center, who offered to work with Robert. And though, upon his arrival, the staff consensus was that Robert would have to lead the rest of his life in a locked hospital ward, he was discharged within two years and lived for more than a decade at a supervised residence facility in Manhattan, with few painful episodes.
He was able to get around the city on his own, take classes, play an active role in the documentary — which was filmed over several years, beginning before Robert moved from Staten Island to the Bronx — and even work part-time for pay.
More recently, some of his more serious difficulties had returned. However, Jay Neugeboren said, “He outlived and outperformed all prognostications.”