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 says. "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 stricken 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 in Kansas City, Kan.
It is why survivors of mental illness are creating Active Minds support groups at colleges.
It's why Steve and Karen Arkin of Overland Park, Kan., whose son killed himself at college, are creating a "Speak Up" effort to raise awareness, and developing an app to ask for, or send, help.
It's driving state 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, says Cindi Keele of the Missouri National Alliance on Mental Illness.
"We can stop the trajectory [into debilitating illness]," she says. "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.
"I had anger issues," the 21-year-old says. She once spent six months in Osawatomie.
"Now this is my life. I want to get out of the house and have fun."
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 have been here at ArtMakers' Place in Kansas City making a mandala on Thursdays.
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," says 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," says Jennifer Krehbiel, leader of the Early Intervention Team.
"A lot of families don't know what to do either."
Parents will want to deny the illness as much as their child. Early symptoms can look a lot like "regular adolescent defiance."
In the program's first year, leaders sometimes have spent three months or more returning to some of the people they want to help, trying to get them in the door.
"At that age you're wanting to fit into your peer group," Krehbiel says. "You downplay [the illness]. You don't talk about it. You're going to take care of it on your own. You stay with your friends and wait for something big to happen."
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 says. It seemed no one did, whatever their ills.
"An underground epidemic," he says.
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 says.
The Active Minds chapter the 20-year-old helped start in his renewed academic career at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park aims to help all students open up about mental health.
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 says. "I didn't know anyone else had these problems."
Her liberation came after she saw a story in her hometown, St. Joseph, Kan. 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 says.
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," Gray says. "Suffering in silence."
Jason Arkin of Overland Park was one of them. He killed himself at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., in 2015.
His parents, Karen and Steve, know that Jason called the campus clinic for help and learned there was a waiting list. The clinic gave him the numbers to other resources and urged him to call them, but he didn't.
It should be easier to gang the community together, Steve Arkin says.
Let sharing be easy and widespread, he says. The foundation he and his wife started and the Shuchart Foundation for Mental Health Awareness are developing an app that taps resources. It would connect someone in mental distress to a resourceful ear, or allow someone close by to seek help on their behalf.
"Are we talking to each other?" Steve Arkin asks. "Are we sharing ideas? Are we identifying who's at risk?"
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 and uninsured or underinsured.
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," says 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. 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."
Missouri is seeking a waiver with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by which $7 million in state funding would trigger some $12 million in matching federal funds in expanding Medicaid for these vulnerable young people.
Without it, many are headed to a lifelong dependency on disability income, says Mark Stringer, director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health.
The Mental Health Crisis Prevention Project, expected to be approved for a waiver later this summer, would aid some 2,400 young Missourians over the next five years.
They would be connected to therapy, case management and employment assistance that can lead to independent living.
"They [people with mental illness] want to work," Gowdy said. "They want to get a job. They want to be like anyone else."
IN CONTROL
Good health is radiating like the ring of color and the paper flowers of their mandala.
Lockett will be earning her high school diploma through a special program in the Kansas City Public Schools.
She wants to continue in college, learn business and be an events planner, she says. And she can see it now.
The young adults involved in the program at Wyandot Center feel saved, Skinner says.
He's working at a food shop in Kauffman Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals in Kansas City, Mo., while studying business and marketing at a community college across the line in Kansas.
"I want to be able to tell people this," he says. "You can control this disorder. I can still do what I want to do."
Family on 06/29/2016