Kenneth Helberg, 46, was placed in foster care for the first time at the age of 5, after he showed up to his kindergarten class in diapers, unable to tie his torn-up shoes and unbathed for weeks. He spent the next five years bouncing between foster care and psychiatric facilities or living with his abusive biological mother in Minnesota. At 10, he became a ward of the state and was placed with a permanent foster family. He dates his mental illness back to those childhood years. But he did not fully understand it for decades.
In 2016, now living in New Mexico, the dam broke. Helberg, 40, attempted to take his life by drinking and driving, and was admitted to an Albuquerque hospital. When he was discharged, the staff gave him a 30-day supply of medications and told him to book follow-up appointments with a psychiatrist and counselor. But when he called them, he was told there was a two-month waiting list.
What saved him was something unexpected: a phone call. Tucked in a thick packet of documents from the hospital — his patient plan — he found a phone number for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization. He decided to dial the number.
That one phone call turned his life around, Helberg said. NAMI connected him with peer-to-peer support groups and advocates who have served as a support system. He’s been clean and sober ever since and has become deeply involved in advocacy himself, to help people who would otherwise be neglected.
Mental health patients in New Mexico just get “sent out the door and wished good luck,” he said. In desperation, many people have gone to hospitals for psychiatric emergency services. “But all they did was either change their medications or send them on their way. And they weren’t getting their help.”
Searchlight New Mexico is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative and public service journalism in the interest of the people of New Mexico.
