The Shrink Next Door
Part 6: ‘What Did I Do to You?’
For the first time in nearly 30 years, Marty makes a phone call to an important person.
Phyllis Shapiro was visiting her daughter in Texas when her cell phone rang. It was hard to make out what the person on the other end was saying, she recalls, though it sounded something like “brother Marty.”
After all this time.
Shapiro had been bracing for this call for decades. Her brother, Marty Markowitz, hadn’t talked to her since the early 1980s, when he started seeing a Manhattan psychiatrist and severed ties with his family. Now it was New Year’s Eve 2010. Struggling to hear the caller, she wondered: Does Marty need a kidney? Is he dead?
Soon it became clear. Her brother was on the other end of the line — and he wanted back into her life.
Would she take him?
Shapiro would soon hear her brother’s story — how he said the psychiatrist, Isaac Herschkopf, had taken over his life. That only sparked more confusion. “Why didn’t you stand up to him?” she says she wanted to ask. “What was wrong with you? Where were you?”
The answer to many of those questions emerged in the previous episodes of this podcast, along with Herschkopf’s vehement denial, in a series of letters, that he’d been Markowitz’s “Svengali.”
In this closing episode, Shapiro, Markowitz and family members grapple with the three-decade hole in their lives and ask whether it’s possible to make amends. The family’s other pressing concern: Should the doctor be held to account — and if so, by whom?
Some of those questions remain unanswered. Bloomberg, which has heard from former patients of Herschkopf’s since this podcast began, has invited the doctor to participate in an interview for a future episode. So stay tuned.