Linda K. Schmitmeyer

“I spent a few months in jail.”

“I was homeless several different times during my illness.”

“Isolation was the worst part.”

“If the police came, my plan was to jump headfirst from our roof onto the cement pad outside our house.”

— Four guest speakers who have a mental illness talking to law enforcement at a Crisis Intervention training on May 2

This past week, during a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training in Butler, my husband, Steve, and several others with a serious mental health condition shared their experience living with mental illness. Listening to them talk about their lives, I thought: How courageous to stand before a score of police officers and share your darkest, most private thoughts. In the acute stage of their illness, each had had encounters with law enforcement.

The speakers were part of a 40-hour educational program designed to improve the way first responders and the community act in response to someone during a mental health crisis. Held the first full week of May — Mental Health Awareness Month — the training includes information on mental health and mental illness, crisis resolution skills and access to local community services.

As I listened to Steve tell his story, I thought of our family’s challenge with his illness. We were in our early-40s when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and until that time our life had unfolded mostly as we’d imagined: We met and fell in love at college. We had three healthy children. Steve worked as a mechanical engineer for an engineering society that developed standards for the aerospace industry. I taught writing part-time at Butler County Community College but was mostly a stay-at-home mom when the children were young.

This was the 1990s, and initially Steve and I struggled to understand an illness that can affect mood, personality and thinking. Through that long decade of illness, Steve made countless visits to psychiatrists, took a dozen different psychotropic medications and spent years in therapy. I quickly found a full-time job and did my best to shield our children from the instability and confusion that often is a part of a mental illness diagnosis.

With the support of many, Steve was able to achieve remission, although he never worked as an engineer again. Still, 25 years later, as I listened to him tell the officers about the night he planned to jump from our roof if I called the police during a psychotic episode, tears welled in my eyes as I remembered those turbulent times.

The other speakers also shared how mental illness derailed their lives: How, during a lifetime of struggling to stabilize the illness, one had been prescribed more than 150 different medications; how a messy divorce triggered a downward spiral into mental illness; how self-medicating with alcohol masked the speaker’s condition for a decade; and how the isolation that stems from having a deeply stigmatized illness led to a life of loneliness. Today, like my husband, all the speakers are in recovery, rebuilding lives different from what they’d imagined for themselves.

Today, following COVID’s long siege, no one need look far to find a friend or family member struggling with a mental health condition. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in five experiences a mental health condition each year and one in 20 has a mental illness that significantly alters the course of their life.

Scientists have come a long way in understanding how our brains work, and today there are more effective medications and better treatment protocols. But it is the lived experience of these speakers that will change our hearts, for in talking about their illness, they are increasing awareness and reducing stigma. To them I say, “Thank you.”

Linda K. Schmitmeyer serves as secretary for the NAMI Butler County PA Board of Directors. She is the author of “Rambler: A Family Pushes Through the Fog of Mental Illness.” Learn more at https://lindaschmitmeyer.com. For more information on CIT, visit https://www.citinternational.org.