The numbers say that people and families touched by mental illness aren’t alone. Yet, they often feel that way. Nearly 44 million American adults experience a mental illness — such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and anxiety — in any given year, according to calculations by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
That’s one in five people ages 18 and older.
And despite its prevalence, mental illness still, in the 21st century, can carry a stigma. Thus, monthly gatherings of the Terre Haute chapter of NAMI offer comfort and reassurance to those affected.
“We’re not trying to solve anyone’s problems. We’re just letting people know they’re not in this alone,” said Cathie Laska, a NAMI member.
Those meetings, which unfold on the third Thursday of every month at Memorial United Methodist Church on Terre Haute’s east side, helped Laska after a mental illness affected a loved one a decade ago. “I was so happy when I first came to NAMI,” the retired art teacher recalled last week, with a few tears. “I can find other people, and I can talk about it.”
Not surprisingly, members of the small support group are “thrilled” by the potential for greater public awareness, thanks to special events in May — National Mental Health Awareness Month and National Stroke Awareness Month.
Jill Bolte Taylor, a world renowned advocate for mental health research who grew up in Terre Haute, will speak in her hometown on May 9 to a small group of educators and mental health professionals. (Unfortunately, seating is limited, and that event isn’t open to the public.) That same day, her traveling exhibition of colorful human brain sculptures begins a one-month run at Indiana State University’s Pi Kappa Education Center, known as The Grounds.
Those larger-than-life fiberglass brains — 5 feet tall, 5 feet long and 4 feet wide, and decorated by Hoosier artists — previously were displayed in Bloomington, Indianapolis and Fishers. Their stay in Terre Haute lasts May 9 to June 7. The general public’s chance to tour the display comes June 6, from 1 to 7 p.m. NAMI is one of several community partners involved in the sculptures’ local visit.
Taylor well understands the value of NAMI, as did her late parents, the Rev. Hal Taylor and G.G. Taylor, who both died in 2015. Their participation dates back nearly 30 years. Jill and her mom served on the national NAMI board. Jill and her father both received national NAMI member of the year awards, 15 years apart. Hal founded the NAMI chapter in Bloomington, where he moved after he and G.G. divorced.
The Taylors’ involvement in NAMI continued through two separate ordeals. One ordeal came when Jill suffered a devastating stroke one morning in 1996.
It was a painfully ironic episode, considering that she’d been working as a neuroanatomist (a brain scientist) at Harvard University. Taylor’s eight-year-long recovery led to a 2006 New York Times bestseller book, “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey,” a landmark TED talk that went viral in 2008, and her inclusion on Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World also in 2008. She has no residual effects of the stroke, “which is unheard of,” and lectures around the globe, promoting brain donation for research.
Also during that era, the second ordeal involved Taylor and her parents’ navigating Jill’s brother’s schizophrenia. “We wanted to know, ‘How can we help?’” she recalled last week in a phone interview from her home in Bloomington.
Bold spirit of helping
Taylor’s scientific expertise and stroke experience provided multiple ways for her to advance mental health and brain research. She also had no inhibitions about helping people often overlooked and stigmatized, thanks to her upbringing.
Hal Taylor, a minister who earned a doctorate from ISU in counseling, devoted his life to caring for the homeless and incarcerated. He ministered to Vigo County jail inmates. Jill recalls newly released prisoners sleeping on the couch at the family’s Terre Haute home until they found a place to stay. “I grew up watching Dad and how he interacted with people,” Taylor said, calling him “a special guy.” Her parents didn’t shy away from stigmas. Hal hosted a public affairs TV show, “The Heritage,” in Terre Haute that dealt with controversial issues. G.G., a math professor at ISU, spoke to PTO groups around the Wabash Valley about touchy subjects like contraception.
“So picture that in the 1960s,” Jill said, with a chuckle.
That social activism influenced Jill. Lifelong friend Karen Goeller remembers long walks with Jill, her brother and family, and friends, and Jill candidly discussing their lives. “She’s very open to talk about problems and very comforting,” said Goeller, a fellow Girl Scout and school classmate with Taylor.
“You get used to people,” Taylor explained, “and you get used to people’s stories, and get used to helping human needs.” G.G. did precisely that for Jill in the days, months and years following her stroke, caused by a rare type of hemorrhage. It left the 37-year-old Jill like “an infant in a woman’s body.” G.G. moved from Terre Haute to her daughter’s home in Boston, where the younger Taylor had worked for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. G.G. basically raised Jill again. Her memory had to be rebuilt. Taylor’s own scientific brain knowledge helped, too.
The analytical left hemisphere of her brain had been impaired, and the thoughtful right hemisphere asserted itself. Taylor used her understanding of the organ’s functions to heal, while nurturing her compassion and leaving behind judgmental tendencies as her memory gradually returned.
Screenplay in works
Her remarkable transformation resulted in the book, an appearance on “Oprah” and the Time Magazine honor, but Taylor spent much of her time reaching out to everyday people and teaching at Indiana University. She toured the country as “The Singin’ Scientist,” toting a guitar and a jar full of preserved brains, speaking at schools, businesses and community centers. Her mission was to entice more people to sign up as brain donors, because so few cadaver brains were available to researchers trying to treat ailments and mental illnesses.
A shortage has long existed for donated brains of people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. So Taylor would sing an original brain jingle, standing alongside the jars of brains while initially squeamish audiences listened. Her open approach worked. Donations to Harvard’s Brain Tissue Resource Center jumped from a handful a year to nearly 30.
“It was beautiful. It was enormous, because that meant we could distribute that material to other researchers,” Taylor said. Today, the 58-year-old Taylor serves as the Harvard center’s national spokesperson for the mentally ill. She’s writing a follow-up book to “My Stroke of Insight,” focusing this time on humans’ two “emotional” minds — “the neuroanatomical foundation of our thinking and feeling,” as Taylor puts it. She’s been working with a writer from Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions on a potential feature film screenplay based on her life.
“So it’ll be Terre Haute,” Taylor said. The Taylors moved here in 1961, when Hal became rector at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church downtown. Jill was 2. She graduated from Terre Haute South Vigo High School in 1977, before pursuing degrees at IU and ISU, and starting her career.
Cathie Laska and the Terre Haute NAMI group members are anxious to meet Taylor at the May 9 opening for the “Big Brains” sculpture exhibition. “Jill is a very talented person,” Laska said.
Taylor’s family connections to NAMI are important, too. Her mother was active in the Terre Haute chapter for years, joining longtime members such as Sue Wynne and Betty Porter.
“The fact that [Jill] cares enough to bring [the exhibition] back to her hometown and be there and show support is such a wonderful thing,” Laska said.
A grassroots group of Taylor’s Terre Haute friends began working more than a year ago to arrange an appearance by Taylor and the brain sculptures. Sam Shanks and her niece saw the eye-catching sculptures on the Butler campus. That led to Shanks teaming with Goeller (the Vigo County School Corporation’s deputy superintendent) and VCSC educators Bob Fischer, Holly Pies and Katelynn Liebermann, and ISU Board of Trustees member Ed Pease organizing the sculptures events, which will go on through the one-month exhibition. The sculptures arrive in two moving trucks May 7, with exhibition sponsor Duke Energy covering the cost.
“Jill’s story is inspirational,” Goeller said, “and it promotes hope and comfort that a positive outcome is possible.”