2008 Affiliate President Conference Call Schedule Posted Calls will be held from 12:00 to 1:00 PM on the Thursday prior to the Board of Directors meetings/calls. 2008 Board of Directors Meeting Schedule Posted Family to Family Teacher calls: 2nd Wednesday of the month. If you would like to be on the call, please contact Lisa Moore at lmoore @namitexas.org.

We Must Help Those Fighting Simply to Live

by Bruce Hight, the Austin American-Statesman, Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Unlike a lot of paid spokespeople for advocacy groups, Kern brings some harshly earned experience to her job at the alliance, having endured mental illness for almost 25 years. Thanks to help from family, friends and professionals, as well as new generation drugs, Kern said, she now has a life.

And that's what she wants others struggling with mental illness to know:

"You can have a life. You do not have to be stuck in a hospital, a halfway house, a drop-in center."

But they can't do it by themselves.

"Our Legislature and the public need to be educated more on mental illnesses and the true fact that treatment works," Kern said in an e-mail message after an interview. "However, at this rate of monies being cut for services, the future looks bleak for people with these illnesses."

Kern was reared in a devout Catholic family in Dallas, graduated from Texas Christian University, married and had a little girl. And then she got sick.

"I started hearing voices and was delusional," she said. "My family encouraged me strongly to go to a hospital."

At first she was diagnosed as having postpartum depression, but later she was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder. Her family, she says, was astonished; there was no history of mental illness among her relatives.

Kern did enter a hospital in 1981, paid for by her family's insurance. Throughout the 1980s, though, she was in and out of hospitals. She got divorced and her former husband eventually got custody of their daughter.

Kern would do "really weird things," like pack a suitcase with books, or, when she still had custody of her daughter, take her and drive to other states for no reason.

About 1989, she moved to Marble Falls, into a house her father owned but eventually sold. She got help at the Burnet County Mental Health and Mental Retardation center; one time, she said, an attendant there drove 30 miles to make sure she was all right. Federal disability insurance paid some of her bills.

Still, she heard voices and had strange, but very real, sensations: "Sometimes I felt like I had a hole in my head and words were being thrown into it. I told folks I was the Queen of the Alphabet. I was a little disappointed when I found out I wasn't."

In 1996 came a major breakthrough for Kern, thanks to Risperdal, a new-generation drug for treating mental illness. Taken with other drugs, as well as therapy, Kern became able to function more or less normally. A volunteer position with the alliance turned into a full-time job, and the health insurance at her job helps pay for those drugs.

Today, Kern said, "I have the best life anybody could have -- I don't take a single thing for granted . . . everybody deserves to have a life -- to work, to own a home, to have dogs and cats."

Kern stresses that the drugs were not enough. She benefited from a loving, loyal family and friends, as well as mental health professionals who would not give up on her: "Somebody told me once, when I was being hospitalized over and over and over, you're a good investment."

But there's not enough help out there. Advocates for mental health services say the state chronically underfunds its Department of Mental Health-Mental Retardation, leaving 25,000 people with serious mental illness and retardation on waiting lists.

And with the state budget squeezed hard by declining state revenue and talks in the Legislature of severe cuts in social services of all kinds, there's an air of desperation among many of those who need help and those who try to provide it. For example, mental health services for more than 24,000 people could be reduced or lost altogether.

Kern's story shows that the help needed isn't about just sedating disturbed minds. The idea is to enable them, like her, to experience the simple but gratifying pleasure of ordinary life -- and to contribute to society.

As Kern, now a homeowner, pointedly notes of her new life, "I am a taxpayer."