Family Support Group Offers Help

Karla Oyler knows that if she’s in a room with four other people, at least one of them is likely to suffer from a mental illness. The rest are likely to have a family or friend confronting the disease.

A resident of Kansas City, North, Oyler learned the statistic when her now-deceased mother began dealing with mental illness. She learned that help is hard to come by, especially the kind of everyday, practical help that families often need.

“I was surprised to learn that mental illness strikes one person out of five in this country,” she noted. “It might be as dramatic as schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder, like Monk on television, or maybe a one-time panic attack. But I was surprised it’s that widespread because no one talks about it.”

Even with October’s National Mental Health Day, Oyler’s interest is more than average. She’s recently volunteered to help the National Alliance on Mental Illness Greater Kansas City Family Group sponsored by Tri-County Mental Health Services. Although the organization has for years met monthly at Tri-County, Oyler and other members are reorganizing the group to provide more focused information.

“It’s good just to meet with other families who share the same issues,” Oyler explained. “But especially if it’s a sudden onslaught of mental illness or it’s new to them, they don’t know where to turn. This gives them a positive step to ensure that their relative is treated with as much education and caring as possible.”

Working with Tri-county’s Outpatient Services Manager Richard Odiam, the group is scheduling topics and speakers for each meeting. The group is open to any interested or concerned person, whether or not their family member is a Tri-County services consumer.

“When a family member has been recently diagnosed, there's often a lot of shock and disbelief,” Odiam said. "People frequently aren't sure how to support their loved one or to get the assistance they might need. Knowing you're not alone and that there are resources can be tremendously important.”

A former administrator with 40 years experience, including 24 years with a major accounting firm, Oyler said the impact of mental illness on a family can be staggering. “I’ve seen in a short time how dramatic mental illness can be and how affected loved ones are by it,” she said. “You wonder how family members can make it through being caregivers or trying to be guardians. You wonder how they make it day to day.”

A major problem remains the opinions of others. “Even in my own family I see that there is still a stigma about mental illness,” she said. “We can talk about alcoholism and we can talk about drug abuse, but mental illness is still kept under a cloak. I think that’s because there is such a misunderstanding about mental illness.”

One change in recent years has been the dramatic increase in research showing physical differences in the brain among those with mental illness. Like a computer that has a hardware problem, these physical and chemical imbalances can be treated, although there is one critical difference.

“I think of mental illness as having a computer problem that’s so hard to diagnose and very difficult to understand,” Oyler said. “So we go to a professional and have them do what they do to computers. Sometimes it cures the problem; sometimes it just keeps it from recurring until the next time. But unlike our computers, we can’t just throw out people.”

Fortunately, help is available for patients with a mental illness, as well as their families and friends. Oyler especially cited information available through NAMI. “For people like me who’ve stumbled for years, this is truly information you can rely on,” she concluded. “It’s really helpful.”

The Tri-County Family Support Group meets from 6 to 7:30 p.m. the first Wednesday of each month in Room 140 of the Tri-County’s offices at the Northland Human Services Center, 3100 NE 83rd Street, Kansas City, North. For further information, contact Tri-County, (816) 468-0400.

Tri-County Mental Health Services, Inc. is a private, not-for-profit community mental health agency delivering behavioral health-care to individuals and families residing in Clay, Platte and Ray counties. Last year, Tri-County programs assisted approximately 9,000 area residents while providing prevention services to over 40,000 individuals in concert with some 500 community volunteers.