Getting My Life Back: Liz Jezierski, Austen Riggs Former Patient, 2021

In the depths of the pandemic, things could not have been harder for someone struggling with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Anxious, depressed, unable to leave the house, Liz Jezierski felt life was not worth living. But through hard work and perseverance during her seven months at Riggs, “I got my life back and I got it back better.”

Born in 1997 and raised in Connecticut, she described her family of four as being shaped by rigid values and an environment that didn’t actively engage emotions. “Mental illness was something that happened to people with trauma or—quote-unquote—bad lives or something like a parent died or they had a bad situation growing up.”

Early on, however, Liz recalls a sense of unease permeating her life. “I was always that kind of kid that was really anxious about fitting in and connecting with other people,” she said. Grade school days were marked by episodes of being bullied, developing an eating disorder, and struggles with anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts.

“I remember my first intrusive thought. I don’t remember how old I was, but I was a kid. I remember thinking, what would happen if I just unbuckle my seatbelt and open the car door?” (Liz subsequently learned that intrusive thoughts are often part of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or OCD.)

Liz began seeing a therapist in her early teens, but she described the sessions as being “surface-level,” and that she held back from opening up because she was concerned about what her therapist might share with her parents.

Her mental health struggles, however, were far from surface-level. She developed an overwhelming fear of leaving her house. She quit her job. She experienced panic attacks about cleanliness and loss of control. “I was going through a bottle of hand soap a day because I was washing my hands so much.” And she thought more and more about taking her life.

In August of 2020 she was hospitalized at an in-patient facility for a week and a half. But that stay was focused on crisis stabilization, not the level of treatment she felt she needed.

She began looking into longer-term care and discovered Riggs through an internet search. She said the description of the Center’s approach—in particular Riggs’ experience with so-called “treatment resistant” depression—struck her as a good fit. There was a hitch, however. Her parents’ insurance at the time (which she was on) wouldn’t cover treatment at Riggs and they couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket.

Within a few months, things had reached the breaking point. “Shortly after Christmas of 2020, I remember coming downstairs and telling my mom ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ Something has to give. I need treatment.”

Her parents, understanding the grave risk she was facing, were able to get a different insurance plan that would cover Riggs treatment.

Though relieved to be admitted, the transition to the Center was not easy for Liz. She arrived at a point in the pandemic when Riggs isolated new patients for several days to ensure they were COVID-free. Upon entering the isolation admission room where she would live and start her treatment, she saw a bar of hand soap in her bathroom and that immediately brought her to tears. “It was something so small, but it felt like the end of the world.”

Challenges would persist over the first several weeks. She stopped eating regularly, resulting in significant weight loss. Riggs provided support through a dietitian, nurses, and her clinical social worker, but the Center does not offer primary care for eating disorders. To ensure proper care, Liz was facing transfer to a facility that specializes in that area. Engaging with other patients in the community—one of the core elements of the Center’s residential treatment approach—also proved difficult for Liz who was still wracked by the childhood trauma of feeling like an outsider.

Though there wasn’t a singular breakthrough moment, she slowly began to make advances. Seeing a doctoral-level therapist four times a week—the foundation of Riggs care—enabled her to build trust she had not previously experienced with a doctor. Taking the lead in conversations with her therapist proved to be a marked departure from Liz’s previous treatment experiences. These conversations went beyond the superficial, probing deep-rooted experiences, to examine things often buried in the unconscious. “It’s a very different type of therapy. They are not going to do it for you, but they will be there with you as you do it.”

Her work in therapy, coupled with the fear of discharging to an eating disorder center, enabled Liz to overcome her reluctance to take meals. “If I left and went to eating-disorder treatment, in the back of my head, I knew I would die if I left here. I knew this is where I needed to be, and I really fought hard to do that,” she said. 

And then there was coming to terms with being part of the patient community. “I realized it felt very similar to when I was in high school. I felt like there was a group of cool kids and things like that. And then I put it into perspective: we're in a psychiatric hospital, for lack of better terms there are no cool kids,” she said. “Everyone is here with their own struggle. And one day I just sat down with them and started talking.”

That understanding helped Liz navigate two of the most intense elements of the community experience, the case conference, and the Task Group. The former is the culmination of the initial six-week period of evaluation and treatment. The event brings together a patient’s interdisciplinary treatment team along with numerous clinical staff from all facets of the treatment experience to share their assessments and recommend next steps. The Task Group is a patient-run group with elected patient roles that attempts to identify, clarify, and resolve individual and group conflict or alienation through communication; it discusses the often-troubling behavior of an individual patient with the goal of helping that patient understand the effect of their behavior on the community and on themselves.

“It was really interesting to see that dynamic and have other people chime in and give their advice on how your existence in a community impacts everyone else,” Liz said. She summed up the transition from isolation to integration: “You can come here and do nothing, but it's not going to be productive and it's going to get expensive. You have to come in with the mindset that what you're doing is hard work. But in my opinion, it was worth the hard work in the end.”

While life after Riggs still presents challenges, for Liz new opportunities have arisen. She finds her work as a hospice volunteer coordinator both engaging and rewarding. She’s taken up burlesque dancing—in large part because the other dancers offer a sense of community very similar to what she experienced at Riggs. And next year, she and her fiancé are looking forward to a June wedding.

“It’s a vast difference from the girl that was just barely surviving,” Liz said.

Asked what she would share with people wrestling with mental health issues, Liz underscored the need to understand you’re not alone. “It's okay to reach out for help. We are not meant to do this alone. It's too hard.” She added, “I believe there's something out there for everyone that can help them, whether it's here (Riggs) or not. But for me, here was the place. I don't like to say it saved my life because I saved my own life, but it gave me the tools to do that.”

If you are a former Riggs patient who benefitted from treatment at the Center and would like to share that experience with others, please contact John Zollinger, Director of Communications, at: john.zollinger@austenriggs.net or 413.931.5816. Alternatively, you can fill out this form.