She always feared Pilgrim from afar, but it helped her regain control after 11 suicide attempts

Even in the depths of the depression and uncontrollable mania caused by her bipolar disorder, Alarece Matos couldn’t imagine herself at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, a place she feared while growing up a few miles away.

“When you look at Pilgrim on the outside and you’ve never been there before, you think of ‘mental institution’ — those movies, you think of people running around screaming and throwing their hands in the air and hurting each other,” the Middle Island woman said. “You don’t think of a place where you can go and get help.”

After attempting suicide 11 times, losing job after job, and obtaining largely ineffective  care seven times at shorter-term community psychiatric hospitals, Matos credits Pilgrim with turning her life around.

“I’m looking forward to going back to work and this time being able to keep a job,” said Matos, who is living independently and studying to earn a medical office administration certificate at Hunter Business School in Medford. “With the coping skills I have now, I’ve learned how to be able to function in society the way I should.”

Matos, 41, said she lost 10 jobs, mostly in telephone customer service, after customer complaints of either gushing friendliness when she was manic, or rudeness when she was depressed, or after bosses and co-workers became fed up with excessive perkiness one day and intense negativity the next.

“The times I would show up to work manic, they would think I was on drugs,” she said. “And there were times I was so depressed, I would call in sick because I didn’t want to be around anyone, I didn’t want to get up. With all the call-ins, you lose your job, because you become unreliable.”

Her typical stays of three to four weeks at community psychiatric hospitals provided temporary help, but after she left, she stopped taking her medication and didn’t keep appointments with outpatient therapists.

In late 2016, Matos was traumatized when a woman she believes had an untreated mental illness tried to kill her at a Brooklyn homeless shelter where the two were living.

Matos said she woke up one night to find the woman on top of her with her hands around her neck, trying to choke her. She was able to fight the woman off, and a few days later, she checked into Stony Brook University Hospital’s psychiatric unit, where a therapist’s description of Pilgrim’s approach to treatment dispelled Matos’ longtime fears about the center. She voluntarily checked in.

Matos said a key reason her six months at Pilgrim succeeded, where previous professional treatment failed, is peer specialists, people who work at Pilgrim who themselves have a diagnosed mental illness. They are trained to help those just entering recovery or early along in the process.

She could relate more to peer specialists than therapists and psychiatrists. 

“It made it a lot easier because it wasn’t just someone saying, ‘Aw, you’re going to be OK,’ ” Matos said. “It’s someone actually telling you, 'It’s going to be fine. I’ve been through this; it takes time, but you can do it.’ ”

The emergence of peer specialists is one of the biggest changes at Pilgrim, said Kathy O’Keefe, the center's executive director. As recently as two decades ago, the common thinking among mental health experts was that someone with a mental illness likely couldn’t help another person with a psychiatric disorder, O’Keefe said.

“Now, there’s an acknowledgment that having a community behind you keeps patients from feeling isolated,” said Stephen Berg, Pilgrim’s operations director. 

Matos said the medication she takes — Latuda and Lamictal — and therapy have helped control her mania and depression. But they haven’t entirely eliminated them. Pilgrim taught her ways to cope.

“If I feel my mania coming on, I go for a walk” or call a family member, a former Pilgrim resident or peer specialist, she said.

While at Pilgrim, she began painting and meditating to help reduce anxiety and depression.

Matos regularly confronts misunderstandings about Pilgrim and mental illness.

“When I tell someone I’ve been to Pilgrim, they’re like, ‘Oh, God, you’ve been to Pilgrim? So you’re crazy?’ ” she said.

The stigma of mental illness — and of psychiatric centers such as Pilgrim — prevents many people from acknowledging even to themselves that they need help, Matos said.

Yet without Pilgrim, Matos believes the mania, depression and anxiety that she has struggled with for years would still be controlling her instead of her controlling them.

“Pilgrim helped me see it’s OK to be who you are,” she said. “It’s OK if people don’t understand. As long as you know who you are and you want to get better, that’s what’s important.”

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com@DavidOlson11

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.