Family struggles with proper treatment for mental illness
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RONAN — Susep Zimmerer seems like a normal 11-year-old. He’s polite and shakes hands when you meet him. He loves his mother, riding his bike and video games. His eyes are playful under an unruly shock of dark hair, but today, there’s a tinge of sadness underneath.
Dragging a suitcase much bigger than him, the boy walks slowly to the waiting minivan. He slings a backpack off his shoulder into the seat and wrestles the suitcase into the vehicle.
A quick dash back into the house for a forgotten video game, and it’s time to go. But no one’s excited about this trip.
Susep and his mom, April, are headed to Anaconda, where Susep will spend about a year in an Aware Therapeutic Group Home. It won’t be his first stay in a treatment center for troubled youth, but his mother hopes it will be his last. Life has never been easy for Susep, she says, but this fall, things got even more difficult.
Susep suffers from bipolar disorder, a mental illness that means he has episodes of severe mood swings between depression and mania, or excitability. He was diagnosed at age 6, and also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a host of issues such as trouble sleeping and processing senses properly. Over the past two years, Susep’s behavior has resulted in more than 10 misdemeanor charges of assault, disorderly conduct and criminal mischief. And in late September, things got even more serious.
After walking out of his classroom at school, Susep ran from the school resource officer, who according to April, “threw (Susep) to the ground,” and a struggle ensued. Susep kicked and hit the officer, leaving a bruise. The boy was charged with felony assault on a peace officer, and while his mother doesn’t approve of Susep’s actions, she believes the punishment — probation until age 18 and placement in a treatment center as sentenced by Lake County District Court — doesn’t fit the crime.
“I’m not saying what he did was right … (but) they’ve treated (Susep) like he attacked the man and really injured him, and he hadn’t,” she said. “You see people that sell drugs that don’t get the sentences my son got.”
After being charged with the felony, Susep was sent to a federal detention center for youth for an evaluation that was supposed to take three weeks, April said. At the Reintegrating Youthful Offenders facility, the 11-year-old spent his days surrounded by “15, 16-year-old criminals — kids that he never would have been allowed to be around if he was home,” April said.
The older kids made fun of Susep’s hair — he needed a haircut, April said — and told him that he was chubby and his mom was fat and old.
“He was pretty much tortured,” April said.
After six weeks at the RYO center, Susep was finally allowed to return home for a few weeks before leaving for Aware on Dec. 16. Upon arrival there, April was told Susep probably would be in treatment for a year — far longer than she had hoped. Besides being separated from her son, April faces paying child support to the state while he’s in treatment and driving three hours each way anytime visits are allowed. She wishes that somehow she could’ve come up with the money for Susep to go to a treatment center and learn to control his anger and his fear of inconsistency before his behavior got him in trouble. But in her job as a trust manager with CSKT vocational rehab, April makes too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to pay for treatment out-of-pocket.
“If I could quit my job and give up my home and give up my car, I could get on Medicaid and Susep could’ve gotten the help he needed,” she said.
April’s been through much of the same situation with Susep’s 23-year-old sister Courtney, who’s also bipolar and has been incarcerated in Montana Women’s Prison for about two years after being charged with felony assault on an attendant at Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs, where she was previously housed.
“It’s just not been an easy life for these two, and I’m hoping to keep (Susep) from going down the same path as Courtney,” April said. “Criminalizing them is not doing them any good. It’s not doing any good for my daughter; she’s still having suicide attempts in (prison).”
Having children with mental illness is especially hard because people just don’t understand, April explained. People are quick to have fundraisers to help others with physical illnesses, but the stigma of mental illness is hard to overcome. That’s why April is especially glad that an affiliate group of the National Alliance on Mental Illness is starting in Polson.
“I just want people to know that this does happen to people,” April said. “It’s just been a really hard struggle, and I know I’m not the only one. There are other families out there.”
NAMI is a nonprofit, grassroots organization of people who advocate for those with mental illnesses, and on Jan. 10, anyone interested in joining and forming a support group for families and those affected by people with mental illness is invited to a meeting at the Polson City Library. The meeting will be at 6:30 p.m. and will hash out what people’s needs are locally and how often the group will meet.
“Before, if you wanted any kind of support groups you had to go to Missoula,” April said.
