Living With Schizophrenia, in Prison and Out

Sedlis Dowdy is serving an eight-year sentence at the maximum security Elmira Correctional Facility for assault in the first degree. In and out of mental hospitals from an early age, he’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has spent a quarter of his life in solitary confinement. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez interviewed him in October 2014 for the WNYC series Breaking Point: New York’s Mental Health Crisis, which examines the nexus of poverty, mental illness and the criminal justice system.

Here, Dowdy talks about the challenges he faces as a prisoner coping with a mental illness, and his experience on the streets of New York City. Some 9,000 people serving time in New York State prisons have been diagnosed as mentally ill, and so have 40 percent of the inmates in the city’s Rikers Island jail.

This is Dowdy’s second term in state prison. He is scheduled to be released in five years.

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