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There's an intensity that is hard to maintain. The trauma, the stress, the searches, it's hard

to explain the toll that it takes. I'm a pretty strong woman, but it is such a strain,

such a strain. The not knowing is the worst. It's the worst. I describe it as a tunnel.

You go through a grieving process. There is a process that you go through when you grieve.

And with someone where you don't know what's happened, you're stuck in that tunnel. You can't go through those steps that you go through when you lose somebody.

Because you're not going to give up hope. You just have to hold on somehow to hope.

Hello and welcome to episode 38 of The Vanished. Tonight I will be discussing the 2007 disappearance of 34-year-old Adam Kellner from his home in Stevens and Ranch, California.

I interviewed Adam's mom Cheryl for this episode. There is something that makes Adam's disappearance different from anyone else that I've covered up until now. Adam was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was in college.

As I'm sure most listeners know, I like to choose cases that are different, uncovered, and sometimes offer us an educational aspect. I thought this one fit all three categories.

Cheryl's struggle also brings to light some issues with the mental health system in this country.

One interesting thing about schizophrenia is that symptoms are most likely to emerge between the ages of 16 and 30. This is exactly what happened with Adam.

Cheryl explained to me that Adam had a normal childhood, he excelled at both soccer and tennis, and had a lot of friends.

She also explained how Adam started experiencing symptoms in college and began to self-medicate with drugs, which is very, very common.

As he began to graduate from high school and go off to college, we observed some different behavior patterns with Adam.

Because my family had no experience or knowledge of mental illness, when he went to his first freshman year of college and he flunked out and came home and at that point he was living with his father's father and I had joint custody.

He was living at his father, he began to steal money from his father and he was using drugs.

Like most parents, we thought we had a drug problem and his father got him into rehab and at one point he kicked him out of the house and made him go live in this crummy little apartment by himself and played the tough love with Adam.

I was living in California, my son was living in Miami and with his father basically couldn't hold down a job and again as I say we thought we were dealing with a drug problem.

He would come visit me and I observed some behavior that I thought wow he's really seriously on some kind of drugs cocaine perhaps because I saw him talking to himself and gesturing to himself and it scared me.

We didn't quite know what was going on, he would go back to his father and again the behavior was so extreme that his father basically said I can't handle this anymore and he sent him out to me and this was in 1996.

And through a very long process of education reading, getting a diagnosis finally we realized that we were dealing with a former schizophrenia and that was a really hard thing for me to understand for his father or his brother to understand is what did that mean and what ability to Adam have to control this behavior.

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