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Eleanor J Riese 1943 - 1991

Eleanor J Riese of San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA was born on September 4, 1943 in San Francisco to Casper Riese and Ora G. (Meyer) Riese. She had siblings Nancy Estelle Riese, Chapman David Riese, and Madeline D. (Riese) Jones. Eleanor Riese died at age 47 years old on April 6, 1991 in San Francisco, and was buried at Home of Peace Cemetery in San Francisco.

Eleanor J Riese

Eleanor Jeanne Riese

San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA 94110

September 4, 1943

San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, United States

April 6, 1991

San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, United States

Female

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Eleanor J Riese Eleanor Riese (1943 - 1991)

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Eleanor J Riese's History: 1943 - 1991

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Introduction

Eleanor Jeanne Riese was born to Caspar Edward Riese (1893-1943) and Ora M. Meyer-Riese (1904-1987) in San Francisco, California, and had siblings Nancy Estelle Riese (1927-2011), Chapman David Riese (1930-2011), and a half sister Madeline Diane Riese-Jones-Takamine (1934-2005). Eleanor was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 25, and was in and out of hospitals throughout her adult life. She sued St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco for her right to refuse antipsychotic medication, and went to trial in 1989 when she was 44 years old. Her lawyers argued that she developed physical symptoms caused by the antipsychotic medication that she did not consent to. At the time, California had protections placed to protect patent's rights to refuse treatment with the LPS Act, however, this act did not specifically address those patients suffering from psychotic episodes. The court decided unanimously that patients who were involuntarily committed to health facilities for short-term crisis care COULD refuse to take antipsychotic medications. Eleanor's life story gained attention with the release of the movie "55 Steps" which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. A synopsis of Eleanor's life has been presented on Ancestry. It includes her inspiration for the movie "55 Steps". See Her story on Ancestry - by Robert Tull for more details. On IMDb, the movie is described as follows: "When patients' rights lawyer Colette Hughes goes to meet her new client, Eleanor Riese, a patient in the psychiatric unit of a San Francisco hospital, she has no idea that besides taking on an uphill legal battle to improve treatment for mental patients in hospitals, she is meeting a woman who will make it her mission to transform Colette's workaholic life." Helena Bonham Carter played Eleanor, who had been diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, in the movie. See The steps to 55 Steps by Mark Bruce Rosin to read an article by the writer of the movie that recalls his meeting with Eleanor and explaining why he wrote the screenplay.
09/4

1943

Birthday

September 4, 1943

Birthdate

San Francisco, San Francisco County, California United States

Birthplace

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Ethnicity & Family History

Eleanor was Caucasian born in San Francisco California. Her father Caspar Edgard Riese (1893-1943) was also born in San Francisco, however, her paternal grandfather David Riese (1853-1918) was born in Stolp, Havelland, Brandenburg, Germany, and her paternal grandmother Therese Strauss-Riese (1859-1932) was born in Forbach, Moselle, Lorraine, France.
Nationality & Locations

Eleanor was a US citizen who was born, raised, and lived her entire life in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
Early Life & Education

Eleanor graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco, California, in 1962. This public high school in the Richmond District opened on August 4th 1936.
Religious Beliefs

Eleanor was Roman Catholic.
Military Service

Eleanor never served in the military.
Professional Career

While not a "professional", Eleanor was a tireless advocate for mental patients' rights and even pursued court cases in that area of expertise.
Personal Life & Family

Eleanor J Riese was a brave advocate for the rights of psychiatric patients. With a big heart, she stood up for her friends who were mistreated at Saint Mary's Hospital and fought for better treatment for all patients. In 1989, she made history by successfully suing the hospital for her right to refuse antipsychotic medication. Her court victory ensured that patients who were involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities could not be forced to take medication without their consent. In 1989 she accomplished a milestone as she won a legal case against her treating hospital and Medical Centre. She had created a significant change where involuntary psychiatric patients had the right to exercise informed consent to the use of antipsychotic drugs. And that patients had the right to refuse psychiatric pharmaceuticals and not be coerced without the patient's consent, like Eleanor had so cruelly experienced while in hospital. Eleanor's story of her legal fight became a tribute and later a film titled, "55 Steps" (Eleanor & Colette) in 2017, starring Hilary Swank and Helena Bonham Carter.
04/6

1991

Death

April 6, 1991

Death date

complications to her kidneys associated with her medications

Cause of death

San Francisco, San Francisco County, California United States
Death location

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Gravesite & Burial

mm/dd/yyyy
Funeral date
Home of Peace Cemetery in San Francisco, California United States
Burial location
Obituary

The following appeared in The San Francisco Examiner in San Francisco California on Friday April 12th 1991: RIESE, Eleanor J. - April 6, 1991; beloved daughter of the late Ora M. and Caspar E. Riese; loving sister of Nancy Riese, Chap Riese and Madeline Takamine; a native of San Francisco; a 1962 graduate of George Washington High School. Friends may call Saturday and Sunday and are invited to attend the Vigil Service Sunday 2:00 PM at Halsted N. Gray-CAREW & ENGLISH, 1123 Sutter St. A Funeral Mass will be offered Monday 1:00 PM at All Hallows Church. Interment, Home of Peace Cemetery.

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Eleanor J Riese lived 29 years shorter than the average family member when died at the age of 47.

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8 Memories, Stories & Photos about Eleanor

Robert Tull

21 favorites

09/27/2019

Eleanor J Riese

A photo of Eleanor J Riese

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

Comments

Kathy Pinna

32.7k+ favorites

05/05/2021

Her story on Ancestry - by Robert Tull

When Eleanor Jeanne Riese was born on September 4, 1943, her father, Caspar, was 50 and her mother, Ora, was 39. She had one brother and two sisters.

She died on April 6, 1991, at the age of 47, from complications to her kidneys associated with the medications that she had been forced to take against her will by Mental Health Professionals.

A motion picture was made about her legal battle with her mental health professionals while she was still a psychiatric in-patient from 1985 to 1988. She eventually won her legal battle, and thus the laws were changed in favor of the psychiatric patient's right to refuse psychotropic medications if they so desire.

No longer did mental health professionals have the right to force psychotropic medications upon their patients. The movie was titled "55 Steps." As a result of Eleanor's legal fight, schizophrenic patients could no longer be forced into taking psychotropic medications against their will.

The damage had already been done to Eleanor's body which led to her early death. Now with psychiatric patients being empowered, many thousands of schizophrenic patients became homeless throughout the United States as they became unable to function within American Society without the help of psychotropic medications.

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First Last

13 favorites

01/20/2023

The last line should read

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First Last

13 favorites

01/20/2023

The last line should read "Now with psychiatric patients being empowered, many thousands of schizophrenic patients became homeless throughout the United States because they were refused drug free psychiatric hospital care within American Society in retaliation for asserting their international human right to refuse dangerous psychotropic drugs."

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Kathy Pinna

32.7k+ favorites

05/05/2021

The steps to 55 Steps by Mark Bruce Rosin

Fall/2018

Early in my freshman year in 1964, a student in my Soc II class, Heather Tobis Booth, AB’67, AM’70, told me about a student organization, VISA, that visited patients at a psychiatric institution. The next Saturday, I joined her and other VISA members on the bus to Chicago State Hospital, where I was assigned to visit patients in the closed women’s ward.

I’d never been to a mental hospital before, nor, to the best of my knowledge, had I met anyone who had ever been a patient in one.

I remember stepping off the bus and following other students to the building that contained the closed women’s ward. I remember the unpleasant smell of the building and doors being unlocked and relocked by the hospital staff as we proceeded from one corridor to another. I remember walking past a room where, I inferred from the multiple showerheads, several patients showered at the same time. Some of the tiles were cracked, and the room was dingy and decrepit.

We were led to a large high-ceilinged, linoleum-tiled room, where women patients sat in chairs, mostly doing nothing. I don’t remember if there was a television, but there might have been.

A few memories are particularly vivid. The most intense are of a woman I used to talk with every Saturday, starting the first day I was there, and of a teenage girl who was admitted to the ward later in the year.

The woman was in her 60s. She had an Eastern European accent. She told me she was from Lithuania and that she had been a meat packer. She also said she had been married. She felt extremely isolated in the hospital, and I had the impression that her husband had divorced her or perhaps was still married to her but had abandoned her to the institution. I never asked her to clarify this because her former life was clearly a painful subject for her, and I didn’t want to cause her any more suffering. We student visitors were never told what the patients’ lives were like before entering the hospital or what their diagnoses were, so I had no idea why she was there. What I noticed about her was that she was always sad. Perhaps she had been institutionalized for depression.

The teenage girl who came into the closed ward that spring was 16 years old. She was outgoing, impulsive, and very energetic. I believe she might have had a mild intellectual disability. I gathered from her conversation with me and other VISA members that her parents had institutionalized her because she had allowed boys to become intimate with her, and they were afraid she would get pregnant. On subsequent Saturdays, I watched her deteriorate in hygiene, dress, and spirit. I felt that she did not belong there, that whatever her diagnosis, she should not be in a ward where she was at least 20 years younger than any other patient. I spoke to a nurse about it, but she said there was nothing she could do.

I also vividly remember the hospital staff going around with a tray of medication in tiny pleated paper cups, dispensing one to each patient. We student visitors never knew what kinds of pills were in the cups or how the nurses knew which cup to give to each patient. But many of the residents were so medicated that they seemed to be sleeping while awake.

When I returned to college for sophomore year, I didn’t resume my weekly visits to the hospital. I also gave up my former goal of becoming a psychiatrist. I changed my major from biology to that most more pleasant to me than inorganic chemistry—a requirement for premed.

It was a time of social activism on campus. I became involved in demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War. Instead of attending the official graduation ceremony in 1968, I participated in the anti–Vietnam War graduation ceremony in another building on campus, where we students wore black arm bands and Noam Chomsky gave the address. I graduated with the conviction that social activism on behalf of justice and human rights can help improve the world.

Twenty-four years later, in 1992, I was living in Los Angeles and working as a screenwriter. One day, listening to public radio while driving in LA’s endless traffic, I heard an interview with Jim Preis, executive director of Mental Health Advocacy Services in Los Angeles. He was telling the interviewer how fulfilling his job was. He’d started doing it while he was in law school, and was still working at the same organization years later because the work meant so much to him.

As I listened, I found myself immersed in memories of the closed women’s ward at Chicago State Hospital. I remembered the elderly woman from Lithuania and the teenage girl. I remembered the elderly woman from Lithuania and the teenage girl. I remembered patients sitting in the visiting room in a medicated stupor. Through the radio station, I got a phone number for Jim and arranged to meet him. When we got together, I asked him if there was a case he’d worked on for people with mental disabilities that might be the basis for an inspiring film.

Jim told me about Eleanor Riese, a woman diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, who became the plaintiff in a lawsuit to improve the treatment of patients in psychiatric hospitals. He told me about her lawyers, Colette Hughes and Mort Cohen, who, like Eleanor, lived in the Bay Area. Jim had filed an amicus brief in the case. As he talked about the lawsuit, I knew I had to write a film about Eleanor, the remarkable woman at the center of it.

So began the process that led to my writing 55 Steps, which stars Hilary Swank as Colette, Helena Bonham Carter as Eleanor, and Jeffrey Tambor as Mort, and is directed by Bille August. My wife, Cynthia Hoppenfeld, has a featured role as Eleanor’s best friend, an older nun who shares Eleanor’s devout Catholic faith. When Cynthia read my completed screenplay all those years ago, she loved the role but was too young to play it; when the film was finally made, almost 25 years later, she was just the right age.

Eleanor Riese is a born protagonist, a woman whose life demands to be written about. In 1985, when she initiated her landmark human rights case to give involuntary, competent mental patients in nonemergency situations in California hospitals the right to informed consent to medication, she was 41 and had been on antipsychotic medications for years. Most of the time she lived on her own in an apartment where, following the tenets of her faith, she devoted herself to making rosaries for prisoners of conscience and to caring for homeless people in her neighborhood, providing them with toothbrushes, toothpaste, and the use of a bathroom. At times, she said, she would become overwhelmingly afraid and anxious, and would admit herself to a hospital. The experience that made her file the lawsuit occurred when, after one such occasion, the hospital staff wouldn’t listen when she told them that they were overmedicating her. Suffering many severe side effects of these medications, she wanted the hospital to respect her desire not to be given the drugs that she knew would hurt her and didn’t always help her. In her statements for the case, her insight into this is impressive; her eloquence is powerful.

Ultimately, what kept me working for so many years to get 55 Steps made was my respect for Eleanor and for her lawyers, Colette and Mort. I wanted to make the film to honor them and this important civil rights case.

e impetus to work all these years to tell this story began with my visits to Chicago State Hospital with the other students in VISA. It is an experience that never left me. Other experiences in the College, too, were indispensable. The ability to do the necessary research and to write the screenplay owe much to my time writing and editing at the Maroon and studying English lit. Four years of Doc

Films screenings deepened my engagement with film and my desire to tell stories through film. And directing plays for University Theatre honed my sense of what makes characters come alive on the page and what brings them to life in performance. One of those plays, presciently, was Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy The Changeling, in which aristocrats indulge in the demeaning practice of going to a mental hospital to watch patients as an entertainment.

It was a thrilling day when, a week before starting to film in San Francisco, we had our first table reading of the script for Hilary and Helena. Hilary, Helena, Bille, and I sat at a table in a hotel room in Los Angeles, our scripts in front of us, pencils in hand, a pitcher of water, and four glasses. I’d never heard the lines I’d written for Eleanor and Colette read aloud, although I’d lived with them for so many years. Even in this reading, which was casual and meant to give the actresses an opportunity to discuss any lines they’d like me to polish, it was moving to see and hear them breathing life into their characters, interpreting lines in ways I hadn’t imagined, in ways that I loved. It was also moving to see the rapport they already seemed to be developing as collaborators. Everything I felt that day I’ve continued to feel since.

At the first prerelease screening of the film, the audience of 1,900 gave 55 Steps a standing ovation. As I rose from my seat to stand with them, I couldn’t stop smiling—all these people standing and applauding to pay tribute to Eleanor, Colette, and Mort.

After the screening, one woman thanked me for writing it. Several people told me they were excited about the theme of social activism for human rights, because it is so important in today’s world. I was especially moved by audience members who told me that through meeting Eleanor in the film, they realized that their past views of people with mental disabilities were far too limited and that Eleanor had opened their eyes.

Just as Cynthia and I were about to leave the theater, a woman came up to us to say that she had had psychiatric problems over the years and had been in institutions several times. She told us that Eleanor’s story was her story, and that she was so glad it had been told.

Comments

Robert Tull

21 favorites

09/27/2019

Eleanor J Riese Relatives

A photo of Eleanor J Riese

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

Comments

Robert Tull

21 favorites

09/27/2019

Eleanor J Riese Relative

A photo of a relative of Eleanor J Riese

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

Comments

Lisa Kosten

13 favorites

11/04/2022

Did the Menningitis cause both Hydrocephalus and schizophrenia to Eleanor Rieske?

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Daniel Pinna

10.5k+ favorites

08/10/2022

Eleanor Riese Case - Rise v St. Mary's Hospital & Medical Center

The following is an excerpt from the Riese v. St. Mary's Hospital & Medical Center Court of Appeals of California from December 16th 1987 which provides the details of Eleanor's experience:

Appellant Riese has a history of chronic schizophrenia, apparently stemming from childhood meningitis. She was first hospitalized in 1968, at age 25. In 1969, an internist prescribed the antipsychotic drug Mellaril; appellant showed immediate improvement, moved into her own apartment and was not hospitalized for approximately 11 years. By 1981, however, appellant had developed bladder problems associated with long-term use of Mellaril. Her medication was changed but she decompensated to the point that she had to be hospitalized for two weeks in 1981. She was rehospitalized in 1982 and placed back on Mellaril on the theory that her bladder was already so damaged that more or less Mellaril would not affect its potential recovery. In 1984, appellant switched doctors and was placed on Moban, which did not help her symptoms. She then stopped seeing the doctor, [209 Cal. App. 3d 1309] decompensated and was hospitalized, the hospitalization from which the present litigation arose.

Appellant was admitted to respondent hospital as a voluntary patient on June 12, 1985, for an acute exacerbation of chronic schizophrenia. According to the report of the initial consultation, she had previously been treated with Mellaril but had not been taking the drug for five weeks. According to two psychiatrists who reviewed her records, appellant's failure to continue this medication was not the cause of the increasing agitation and anxiety, hallucinations and paranoid ideation that led to her hospitalization.

Upon admission, appellant signed a voluntary inpatient's consent form for antipsychotic medication, indicating that she had been informed of the nature of the drugs and their possible side effects and understood her right to refuse the drugs. The form specified the drugs Mellaril and Cogentin. On June 16, appellant consented to have her medication changed to Molindane (Moban). On June 17, the medication was changed to Navane, this time without execution of a consent form. On June 18, appellant was switched back to Mellaril, at an increased dosage. Appellant complained that Mellaril made her sleepy but agreed to take 100 milligrams 4 times a day. The next day she complained of dizziness and dry mouth and insisted that the staff had given her too much medication. When appellant became more agitated and refused medication she was forcibly injected. fn. 3

At this point, on June 19, appellant was made an involuntary patient under Welfare and Institutions Code section 5250, on the ground that she refused medication and became violent, was unable to cooperate with treatment and was actively psychotic. Thereafter, appellant was apparently switched back to Navane and given medication intramuscularly when she refused to ingest it orally. Appellant complained that Navane had adverse physical effects (dermatitis and swelling of the ankles) and at one point agreed to take Mellaril in order to discontinue the Navane.

On June 26, 1985, it was recommended that a conservator be appointed for appellant, who was assertedly unable to provide for her own food, shelter and clothing and delusional about medication and therefore unable or unwilling to accept voluntary treatment. (§ 5352.) A temporary conservator was appointed on July 2 (§ 5352.1); a conservator was appointed subsequently on August 5, 1985. (§ 5350.) The court authorized the temporary [209 Cal. App. 3d 1310] conservator to place appellant for psychiatric treatment. (§§ 5353, 5358.)

On July 10, appellant was discharged to a board and care home, but she did not do well and was readmitted to the hospital on July 12. Her medication was changed to Serentil, with orders providing for intramuscular injections if she refused. Appellant continued to suffer from swollen feet, urinary problems, shaking, memory loss and seizures. While appellant attributes these problems to her use of medications, respondent contends that appellant was delusional about the medications.

Comments

Keith Taylor

12 favorites

03/07/2022

I missed a statement made by Eleanor in the movie that she had undone a brain operation that likely caused the illness, that she was sane up to that point. Did I hear right and if so what was the operation for.

Comments

Chanel Wade

12 favorites

06/16/2022

It was something about having a shunt put in her head/brain to drain fluid out due to having something Meningitis! Lol sorry can’t remember what the “something” was, but it was meningitis after it! Cheers💞🇦🇺

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