UUP responds: Member heals heroes’ emotional wounds

It was a touch of kindness in a time of distress that brought Stephen Goldfinger back to his hometown of Brooklyn and to Downstate Medical Center, the place where he’d first volunteered at 15 years old.

Today, Goldfinger, a Brooklyn HSC UUP member who is the psychiatric coordinator at Downstate, is making sure that the kindness shown him gets passed forward. He and his staff are treating, at no charge, firefighters traumatized by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the nearby World Trade Center.

The impact of the terrorist attacks has been so profound at Downstate that Goldfinger has further helped to create a permanent Trauma Treatment and Study Center in the psychiatric area at the hospital to help people deal with traumas of any nature.

His return to Brooklyn began with his own trauma. Goldfinger was working at Harvard University as director of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center when he received a phone call that both his parents were severely injured in a car accident. He called an associate from Downstate, UUPer Martin Kesselman — whom Goldfinger said he barely knew — to check on who was handling his parents’ care.

“Kesselman called his wife and the two of them sat with my mom while my dad was in the operating room,” Goldfinger said. His father died while Goldfinger was in transit.

Kesselman is now Goldfinger’s boss.

“I took a job here 10 days later,” Goldfinger said.

Although he started researching psychiatry in the Downstate labs as a teenage volunteer working with animals, Goldfinger did not always stay on a clear path to his chosen work. After undergraduate college, he spent a year traveling around the northern hemisphere — including Afghanistan.

“I spent most of my time in Asia where Buddha lived and taught,” Goldfinger said. “I was trying to decide whether or not to go to medical school or to a Buddhist monastery.”

He said he eventually figured out that “medicine was my way of practicing my belief in the sanctity of life.”

While he still travels frequently to Thailand and Japan, his primary focus is psychiatry at Downstate. And right now, that focus falls heavily on the firefighters.

Immediately after the attacks, he helped to set up a crisis service for people, including Downstate staff, affected by the disaster. He also worked some shifts treating people at the Family Assistance Center set up at Pier 94 for families of the victims.

Then, Goldfinger and his staff offered to see any firefighter from Brooklyn or Staten Island.

“These guys have seen horrors we can only dream of,” Goldfinger said. Some of them are the only survivors from groups of their buddies. Some were buried alive and had to dig their way out. They witnessed massive, personal, gory death. Some have insomnia, panic attacks, intrusive vision and post-traumatic stress disorder. And four months after the attack, another seven firefighters’ bodies were found and the survivors had to start going to funerals all over again.

Ongoing terrorism is new for Americans, Goldfinger said, and “we don’t know the impact of that kind of trauma.”

Helping them is a way out of the rubble. It is part of the outreach that Goldfinger has helped initiate at Downstate.

“Downstate is the only state-run medical facility in New York City,” Goldfinger said. “We have obligations that are different than private facilities.”

For him, those obligations come in the form of community activity — the bee in his hive. He just negotiated an agreement for Downstate to provide health education for Job Corps trainees. Community education days have been held at the hospital, where the public is invited to learn about anxiety or schizophrenia.

Under his direction, a plan was implemented to have all psychiatric residency students at Downstate spend a year rotating through a homeless shelter. For it was among the homeless that Goldfinger found the home in his own heart.

Working with the homeless, people with AIDS and disenfranchised kids has added richness to his life. At his first job in San Francisco, he moonlighted to see patients in poor areas of the city. As a result, homeless street outreach formed the first half of his career.

“The passive listening model wasn’t for me,” he said. “Going to a shelter with nursing staff and soaking their feet and listening to them was.”

Later, in Boston, he used a federal grant to help create 120 units of permanent housing for the homeless mentally ill — run by the homeless mentally ill; they decide the house rules.

“These were people who had very little to live for. Now they take their meds because they don’t want to lose their housing,” Goldfinger said.

Years after he returned to New York, he was working on a series of training tapes on rehabilitation from schizophrenia. The recovered schizophrenia patient doing the tapes (Ken Steele, author of “The Day the Voices Stopped”) recognized Goldfinger. He related how Goldfinger came to him years ago in San Francisco as he lived in a cardboard box, got him into a mental health program and a place to live, thus beginning the long journey to his recovery.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center, Goldfinger has been asked to speak at several conferences about the impact of the attacks on the homeless.

“One population we don’t think about is the people who lived in the streets. We have no idea how many homeless people or illegal aliens died in the attacks,” he said.

— Liza Frenette