Helping teens overcome mental illness

Three moms, who know the pain of raising teens with mental illness, have laid the foundation for this Halifax home, which provides not just practical help but, more importantly, hope

By: Kim Pittaway



The house that helps heal mental illness

The three-storey Victorian house on Halifax’s Barrington Street doesn’t look like the kind of place where lives are saved. Sunlight brightens rooms filled with comfortable chairs and couches, art supplies and computer stations. Casually dressed staff move from desks tucked in corners to hang out with the youth who drop in over the course of the day. But while the scene looks, well, mundane, the effect is transformative. “Without Laing House, I’d be dead,” says one young man bluntly.

Laing House is a non-profit organization geared to providing “social physiotherapy” to young people with mental illness. The goal? To offer safety and hope, and in more practical terms, to help its members — not clients, since as members they help shape and guide the organization’s decisions — make friends, return to school, find work and live independently while recovering from the often devastating effects of a young adulthood interrupted by schizophrenia, depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder.

Saving lives by providing help—and hope

“If Rosemary [Hamilton] hadn’t created Laing House, I don’t know what would have happened to my son,” says Linda Black. The two long-time friends are drinking tea in the comfortable sitting room of Hamilton’s home, overlooking Halifax’s Northwest Arm, as a rainstorm lashes the windows. Black is petite and precise, with a mind that turns goals into to-do lists into accomplishments. Hamilton looks more the part of doting mother than saviour, although mother bears don’t always look fierce until they’re fighting for their young.

Along with more recent friend Dani Himmelman (out of town on vacation on this particular afternoon), the women are connected not just by their experiences as mothers of children with mental illness, but more importantly by their commitment to building and sustaining Laing House — the solution they say their own families needed. Hamilton used an inheritance from her mother — nurse Norah Laing, who had suffered from schizophrenia herself — to create the centre named in her honour. Black has been a tireless fundraiser: The masquerade ball she coordinated until recently has raised more than $500,000 in just three years. And Himmelman has become the linchpin in Laing House’s parent group, providing the support she couldn’t find when her own daughter was ill. But they aren’t doing this selflessly. “Laing has helped me heal,” Himmelman explains. “It still helps me heal.”

The 16- To 30-year-olds who frequent Laing House look like the kids you’d see hanging out in a campus coffee shop: fresh-faced, joking, full of life. But each is fighting not to be a statistic, battling daunting numbers: They are among the estimated 10 to 20 per cent of all youth who have a mental illness (half of those illnesses begin by age 14). Suicide is second only to car accidents as the leading killer of young people, and when these Laing members say the house has saved their lives, they mean it literally.

Saving some of those lives is what Rosemary Hamilton had in mind when she and her husband, Keith, set out to create Laing House more than a decade ago. Their son had struggled with mental illness throughout his teens and into his twenties, and the couple had seen first-hand the gaps in a medical system that often failed to recognize the condition in young people and when it did recognize it, focused only on medical treatment, providing little help in dealing with the painful social losses the illness creates.

Re-building a social life following illness

For the Hamiltons, their son’s mental illness became apparent while he was away at university. (He prefers not to be named. In his thirties now, his illness is under control.) At first, they thought drugs were to blame, but it soon became apparent that something else was going on. He lost weight, was sleeping a lot and excluded his parents from his life. In a way, he was lucky: As a physician at the local hospital, his father was able to help his son access good medical treatment. Still, it wasn’t easy. “He was so lonely,” says Hamilton of her son’s shrinking world. Eventually, medical interventions, his parents’ support and his own hard work at re-establishing his connections to the world contributed to his recovery. But through it all, Hamilton was struck by how isolated he’d become. “When someone breaks a leg, we deal with healing the bone and then physiotherapy helps them learn to walk again,” she says. “When someone has a brain illness, we medicate the chemical imbalance, but we do an awful job of providing that social physiotherapy, helping them get back on track and make up that lost ground.”

Prior to her son’s illness, Hamilton’s mother had passed away. Already financially comfortable, she decided to use her substantial inheritance to help support other young people with mental illness. Months of research followed, with phone calls to youth-directed facilities in the United Kingdom and United States.

Eventually, Hamilton had her plan: a program geared to helping young people reconnect with others their age, where they'd be given guidance in finding work, going back to school and learning to live independently. The youth would be involved in the decision-making about the program. And flexibility would be critical: Members wouldn't be dropped if they missed a meeting. This wouldn't be tough love: It would be "come as you are."

"When you have been as ill as these young people have been, it can take every ounce of your energy just to get yourself to Laing House in the first place," says Hamilton. "We weren't going to punish them for being late."

By 2001, Laing House was nearing its opening. Meanwhile, Linda Black decided to call her old acquaintance Rosemary. The two had been Brownie leaders together years earlier, before Black moved to New Brunswick. She'd heard that Hamilton's son had been ill, and now, as she grappled with her own son Simon's illness, she reached out to someone she hoped would be able to tell her what to do. For two years, she'd struggled to find help for Simon. A psychologist told her that her husband was too hard on the boy and that it was just normal teenage stuff. It wasn't: Eventually, a referral to the early psychosis program in Halifax (there was no such program in New Brunswick) led to a diagnosis of psychosis. For months, Black travelled back and forth to Nova Scotia with Simon, ultimately moving in with her mom in Halifax so that her son could get consistent treatment, while her husband carried on his job in New Brunswick to support the family.

"Come to Laing House," Hamilton suggested.

Gaining the confidence to speak up

As critical as Simon's medical treatments were, Black credits Laing House and the friendships her son made there with helping him build a life. "It was a place where there was no shame about his illness," she says. "He could joke about it, talk about it." But Simon talked to more than just his new friends about his illness: As he built up confidence, he started taking part in Laing's Youth Speak program, talking to high school students about mental health issues and giving presentations to pharmacy and law students, police and firefighters, among others. "They really want to listen to us!" he told his mother after one speech. (Now in his twenties, Simon lives independently and works at a Halifax-area hotel.)

Around the same time, Dani Himmelman's daughter Jenna also found her way to Laing House. Jenna had been struggling with depression and anxiety for five or six years. "It's not just that our children's lives shrink as friends disappear, as they lose connections to school and jobs and other activities, but our children shrink as well. It's like watching pieces of them being taken away," observes Himmelman. Thoughtful and open, she's the kind of person you could see yourself turning to in a crisis, someone who would know what to say—and know when to push you to stand up for yourself.

Himmelman explains that because the teen years are critical to self-development — a time of first jobs, first relationships, first apartments — a life interruption at this age can create significant gaps in a teen’s ability to handle daily challenges. Add to that the shame and self-blame of not coping, and the likelihood of relapse increases. Then with each successive episode, young people fall further behind and struggle longer and harder to get healthy again.

It’s not something the outside world always understands. When Jenna was first diagnosed with depression (she was later diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder), her high school teachers and principal offered the Himmelmans support. But as Jenna’s illness continued, her mother was told that Jenna “should just get over it and get on with her life,” and the support diminished. Before long, Jenna transferred to another high school.

But through Laing House, she found meaningful support and part-time work. Still, she struggled. “Healing the brain doesn’t happen quickly,” says Himmelman. “And Jenna had lost so much of her confidence, of who she was.” After years of illness, Jenna com- mitted suicide in 2004.

Today, Himmelman talks about Jenna with both sadness and admiration. “She tried so hard to get well.” And while discussing Jenna’s death isn’t easy, she says it’s important. “It’s a betrayal of her if I don’t talk about her in a way that values that she was here for 23 years and was loved by us all.”

Supporting parents of mentally ill teens

Himmelman has frequently felt blaming eyes cast her way. “There are people who still see mental illness as a parent’s fault, and especially as a mother’s fault. And even where you’re not explicitly blamed for the illness itself, you’re suspected of contributing to it,” she says. “Many times, the medical system doesn’t see you as a mother, it sees you as a problem. And as much as I know I didn’t cause this, you carry that blame around. Other parents who’ve been through it understand that.”

And so when Hamilton approached her in 2007 about facilitating a support group for parents at Laing House, she said yes. “Connecting with these women, with Rosemary and Linda, has been critical for me,” she says. “And to be able to do that for others, to be able to say it’s not your fault and here’s how we can help each other, well, it’s like having someone help you find your way through the dark.”

Black agrees. “There’s always someone else’s child, someone’s else’s family out there who’s going to need help.” As all three speak of their children’s struggles and the efforts of other members of Laing House, they speak of resilience as well as loss, of success even in lives — their children’s and their own — changed forever by illness. “When somebody has a stroke and learns to walk again with a walker, we don’t berate them for not walking unaided,” says Himmelman. “We celebrate their success. Why should it be any different with mental illness?”

This article originally appeared in the February/March 2010 issue of More Magazine