Did you know that many people who struggle with mental illnesses — such as bipolar disorder, severe depression and schizophrenia — mark their college years as the coming-of-age time for their diseases?
Denise White knows this clearly. Her son, Braelon, was in his sophomore year of college in 1984, when he arrived home for Christmas break a different person. His parents noticed the change immediately.
Dressed in all-black clothing, he explained to his mother that his attire helped improve his grades. He also told her that he frequently played pick-up basketball games with members of the Bulls.
White told me that she noticed her son, who’d been incredibly social in high school, was suddenly quiet and withdrawn.
“He wasn’t violent,” she said. “But he just kept coming up with these strange fantasies. Then there was the day we went to buy a gift for a friend, and he rushed over to me in the store, warning me that the gift was evil. I told him to stop acting crazy.”
Crazy is a word she doesn’t use anymore.
White is a member of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side. The church, known lately as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s church, has a congregation of more that 8,500 members and a wellness ministry that offers a support group for families dealing with mental illness.
On Friday, the Whites participated in Trinity’s fifth annual candlelight march. It’s the church’s way of illuminating the issue of mental illness while sharing information within the African-American community and even Trinity during May, Mental Health Awareness month. About 100 people turned out to march from Trinity at 400 W. 95th St. to Oakdale Covenant Church at 9440 S. Vincennes Ave.
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White started the support group in the church seven years ago. She adopted the group from the Chicago-based Community Mental Health Council, on the South Side.
Dr. Carl Bell, president of the Community Mental Health Council, and White were trying to figure out a way to de-stigmatize mental illness within a community and culture that has so many other stigmas surrounding health care.
“Initially, we weren’t aware that out son’s problem was related to a mental illness,” said White, now a board member with the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Greater Chicago. “We thought maybe he’d gone off to college and started using drugs.”
When a neighbor called one day to say her son was running down the street chasing a car, his parents took him to a nearby emergency room. He was hospitalized for a couple of months and diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Since then, there have been ups and downs. White said her son returned to school but at times refused to take his medicine, because it doesn’t mix with alcohol, and landed back home.
“My husband and I put him out at one point,” White said. “We told him that he must take his medicine or he had to go. This was very hard. He was our only child.”
Her son, now 41, never finished college, but he does live alone and is self-sufficient.
Bell told me that often if you talk to seriously mentally ill people, they will tell you that they were having symptoms at age 10, 11 or 12. (Braelon White said he doesn’t recall earlier symptoms.)
But it isn’t until 19, 20 or 21 that the illness draws attention. During that time, especially in college, the pressures of life tend to bear down.
“In medicine, the old way is to wait until the disease truly becomes manifest,” Bell said. “But if you’re trying to intervene before then, then we’re talking about identifying this and treating it in pre-adolescence.”
Bell said that some of the early warning signs such as anxiety, “magical thinking” and insomnia can be fairly generic, but there are screening tests that can pinpoint more accurately whether the child is suffering from a mental illness or just experiencing the rocky road of adolescence.
This preventive approach isn’t without its detractors. Bell said that with the pool of mental health dollars shrinking, parents of mentally ill children worry that too many dollars will be diverted away from care and services to prevention.
It seems that when we hear talk about mental illness these days, too often it’s after some God-awful tragedy. With more awareness and tools to identify problems early, perhaps more of these stories can have far more positive endings.
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