Mental hospital, or school, job?

Fate of mentally ill teens often depends on getting appropriate help early

Norris Burns works on a mandala on June 2, 2016, at the ArtMakers' Place in Kansas City, Kan. The Wyandot Center uses the art studio and gallery as part of its treatment for adults living with mental illness.
Norris Burns works on a mandala on June 2, 2016, at the ArtMakers' Place in Kansas City, Kan. The Wyandot Center uses the art studio and gallery as part of its treatment for adults living with mental illness.

KANSAS CITY, Kan.-Not here.

If Tyler Skinner was going to live his life in a fight against schizophrenia, it would not-by God-be here, he told himself. Not in the Kansas state mental hospital at Osawatomie.

He was 20 then, two years ago, launching himself into the heart of the nation's struggle to intercept mental illness at its most critical, but most elusive, point in people's young lives.

It took fear of the troubled state hospital to light Skinner's fire and inspire his grasp for new treatment strategies.

Never again did he want to fear the fights he saw. No more fearing the patients, men and women, sneaking between the halls.

"I hit that point where I knew my schizophrenia was going to be with me the rest of my life," he said. "It had to sink in. I wanted the help."

There he was, like so many of the one in five American teens or young adults who experience a debilitating mental disorder.

Headlines tell of a mental health crisis in this country: Not enough funding to help the most vulnerable people. Poorly run and sometimes dangerous state mental institutions. Troubled people committing terrible crimes.

Too many people slip past programs that could help; too many end their lives by suicide.

Hundreds of thousands each year who are newly engaged with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression or other serious mental illness teeter between a chance to thrive, or a descent toward dependency, delusion, incarceration, homelessness or death.

"The longer the symptoms go untreated, the greater the risk," reads a report from the National Institute of Mental Health.

One psychotic break increases the likelihood-and intensity-of another.

This is why Skinner grips his new life here, in the community work of Wyandot Center's young adult and Early Intervention Team program.

It is why survivors of mental illness are creating Active Minds support groups on college campuses.

It's why Steve and Karen Arkin of Overland Park, Kan., whose son died by suicide at college, are creating a "Speak Up" effort to raise awareness, and developing an app to ask for, or send, help.

It's driving efforts to require mental illness awareness training among teachers, and to seek Medicaid expansions to increase treatment options for such a mercurial, stubborn and often-uninsured age group.

Encouraging research from the National Institute of Mental Health is showing "it is entirely possible to halt psychosis" in many cases, said Cindi Keele of the Missouri National Alliance on Mental Illness.

"We can stop the trajectory (into debilitating illness)," she said. "Young people can manage those symptoms and go back to school. They can go back to their jobs."

LEAVING THE COCOON

Andrea Lockett seemed to float into the healing circle of art.

Her fingers played across the surface of swirling images that she and her new friends have been drawing under the care of the Wyandot Center's Early Intervention Team.

Not at home. No longer cocooned in numbing isolation with her illness.

The caseworkers and therapists in programs like these struggle against the nature of teens and young adults who would sooner disappear alone than step out into the current that would help them.

Lockett and her group mates on Thursdays have been at ArtMakers' Place in Kansas City, Kan., making a mandala.

It's a circular mural, explains the studio coordinator, Tiffane Friesen-Masimbi. The energy radiates like light from the center, or ripples like water. It has a pulse, she says.

Other days they meet to meditate, or stretch their bodies. Some days are for sports and games. Some days are for therapy sessions.

"I like lying on the ground, taking deep breaths and not thinking about anything," said Tevin Platt, 20. "It eases my mind."

Visits by police officers and 1 1/2 difficult years in foster homes brought him and his emerging schizophrenia into contact with the support group.

If only they'll come and share this healing together, there is motivation to stay on complicated medications, the counselors say, and blend in again, and hope again.

"The hard part is that many (young adults) won't acknowledge illness," said Jennifer Krehbiel, team leader of the Early Intervention Team.

"A lot of families don't know what to do either," she said. Parents will want to deny the illness as much as their child. Early symptoms can look a lot like "regular adolescent defiance."

SHARING SECRET PAIN

All that Joe Pickert's new friends saw at the University of Kansas was the fleet, lean runner.

They didn't know how much weight he'd lost. To hear them talk, they envied his vigorous health.

What they didn't see was the anorexia eating him from the inside. They didn't see his dry, cracking heels, his brittle nails, the colds, the nosebleeds. They didn't know his running had become an isolating, psychotic exercise.

"I had no vocabulary to talk about anxiety," Pickert said. It seemed no one did, whatever their ills. "An underground epidemic," he said.

Only when he suddenly could not sleep anymore did he go home to see a doctor.

It's better to be talking about it, he said.

Jane Gray, 19, is doing the same at the University of Missouri-Kansas City with a new Active Minds chapter.

At first she kept her hospitalization for severe depression and self-harming during high school a secret between her and only her closest family and friends.

"I was good at putting the mask on," she said. "I didn't know anyone else had these problems."

Her liberation came after she saw a story in her hometown, St. Joseph. A 19-year-old woman, Colby Harvey, was going into schools and telling of her fight with mental illness.

Gray found Harvey on Facebook and determined she had to follow the same path.

"I was almost relieved," Gray said.

Once she spoke out, they came to her-friends and strangers with their secret pain.

Now she could see how many teens couldn't tell their parents. Or how many tried only to see their parents shelter themselves in disbelief.

Nationwide, more than 1,100 college students die by suicide in a year.

"A lot of people are very lonely," she said. "Suffering in silence."

BREAKING THE CYCLE

Here's another problem. An unfortunate intersection.

Mental illness most often emerges before an individual is 25 years old, hitting smack at the point in people's lives when they are often poor in finances and often uninsured or under-insured.

They typically have not yet been identified as having a disability.

"They will be in a Saturday night crisis that may be resolved, but there is no follow-up," said Rick Gowdy, director of the Division of Behavioral Health at the Missouri Department of Mental Health.

"Then two weeks later, they are back in the ER," he said. "We are spending a lot of money on cop calls, courts, incarceration and emergency room workups, but all this money does not help break the cycle."

IN CONTROL

Andrea Lockett will be earning her high school diploma through a special program in the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools.

She wants to continue in college, learn business and be an event planner, she says. And she can see it now.

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