Welcome to Rumbel Strip, America Heilman, and this is a Vermont public radio series I produced called They Are Us inside Vermont's mental health care system.

Today's show is called Parents. Welcome.

When he went to the hospital the first time and was having the evaluation, the medical evaluation, I was hoping it was a brain tumor.

Not that would kill him, but please don't let it be

schizophrenia. Don't let it be that. That's Connie Stabler.

Her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 19, just as he was becoming independent.

He didn't believe there was anything wrong with him. He did not want to seek treatment, and since he was legally an adult, his parents stood by and watched his life fall apart.

One in a hundred adults are diagnosed with schizophrenia and for most the onset is around this time in late adolescence.

Back in the days of the state psychiatric hospital people with schizophrenia who were in crisis would have been taken there, maybe lived there.

Today, psychiatric hospitals are meant to stabilize people in crisis, then send them back to their community. So parents often play a

critical role in their care. As caregivers, crisis responders, money lenders, and

often they end up having to figure out for themselves which services are available to them in the complex network of programs that make up the community mental health care system.

In this segment you'll hear from two parents, Connie and

Ron from two separate families. Both found support groups at the National

Alliance on Mental Illness or NAMI, which is where I found them. This is a story about what it's like day

to day, year to year, to be a parent of an adult child living with schizophrenia.

Again here's Connie. We, you know, we're very close and

a very loving family. He was remarkable and that he had a very bright mind, but, you know, struggled from the beginning with some distractibility.

When he graduated from high school, he moved out because we knew he was not going to be very motivated to get work if he just sat in this

house.

And so his dad helped him find an apartment and a job and he moved out.

And then one day I got a call from one of his friends who I'd never met.

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