— forward, “Mental Health:A Report of the Surgeon General”

Sarah Boyd sat in her car at a busy intersection in Charleston, S.C., early one morning last July, the signal light cycling red to green to yellow, over and over.

A police officer tapped on her window, trying to bring Boyd back from oblivion. The officer called an ambulance.

The ambulance carried Boyd to a hospital. After a week’s stay, a doctor there told Boyd she had a mental illness, schizoaffective disorder.

If Boyd seemed more relieved than she should have with the diagnosis, she had good reason. After 30 years of symptoms and setbacks, her affliction finally had a name.

“It was a feeling of relief to finally know what was wrong with me,”Boyd said recently. “These things were happening to me, and I didn’t know why.”

Boyd doesn’t want that happening to anyone else. That’s why she’s been instrumental in forming a local chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

The Rowan chapter held its first meeting in September and holds monthly support sessions for people with mental illnesses and their families and educational meetings for the community.

The organization is also hosting a free 12-week program beginning in mid-February to educate family members of people with mental illnesses about some of those disorders.

“Caregivers need as much or more care on coping skills,”Boyd said. “I have to live with a mental illness. My family has to live with me.”

Fear, ignorance linger

Statistics, provided by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, say about one fourth of all families in the U.S. have a member with a mental illness, which is a disorder of the brain.

More common than cancer, diabetes or heart disease, mental illnesses account for more occupied hospital beds than any other disease.

And a World Health Organization study found that four of the 10 leading causes of disability for people 5 and older are mental illnesses.

The federal government took steps last year to pull mental illness out of society’s closet with the first-ever Surgeon General’s report on the subject.

In 1999, advocates also held the first White House Conference on Mental Health, in the decade declared by Congress the “Decade of the Brain.”

Still, few people arm themselves with information, and the fear and ignorance linger.

“There is somewhat of a lack of awareness and knowledge in the community about mental health,” said Dr. Esther Winters, a psychologist and director of Piedmont Behavioral Healthcare in Salisbury. “There is still a stigma associated with mental illness.”

That stigma causes people to think about mental illness after an act of violence or other tragedy, Winters said.

“Then it kind of gets dragged out and looked at,”she said. “But those are rare instances, not the everyday impacts mental illness has on everyday people.”

Decades of struggle

Boyd began her own everyday battle with mental illness before she knew she had a mental illness.

In 1968, her father died. That same year, she and her husband separated. Boyd took her three children and moved in with her mother.

After her divorce in 1970, Boyd says she “lost touch with reality”and had to be hospitalized for six weeks.

That’s when she and her family learned there was something wrong, when “it got real bad,”said Boyd’s mother, Stella Dobbins of Blowing Rock.

But that wasn’t when Boyd learned the exact nature of her mental illness, it was only the beginning of her confusion.

A doctor told Boyd she had a “chemical imbalance, which really didn’t mean anything to me,” she said. “I thought maybe it was a nutrition thing.”

Boyd said she guesses that her family was “embarrassed”by her illness, because they didn’t talk about it.

“Thirty years ago, you just didn’t talk about it,”she said. “If you knew about it, you kept quiet.”

The doctor referred Boyd to mental health counseling, which she couldn’t afford as a single mother and attended briefly.

In spite of that, she had no serious relapses in the 1970s, when she remarried and completed college. Her life was “going along pretty smooth,” she said.

But things began to get rocky again in the next decade, starting with a second divorce in 1980.

She moved to Salisbury in 1983 and took a job as director at an adult day care center. But stress forced her to resign in 1987.

She asked to be reinstated, but was not, she believes, because of her mental illness.

“Then, I began feeling a lot like I did back in 1970,” she said. “I was just out of touch with reality.”

A pattern

Boyd ended up out of reality in Orangeburg, S.C., where she wrecked her car.

She had driven for three days and nights after arguing with her daughter and leaving Orlando, Fla., stopping only for gasoline.

She had remarried. Her husband, Robin, and mother brought her back to Salisbury, then took her to a hospital in Winston-Salem.

Boyd stayed there for three weeks. A doctor told her she was not schizophrenic and gave her medicine that didn’t work.

In 1988, Boyd suffered another relapse and established a pattern. Each time, she felt alone in her suffering.

“Each time, I get in my car and start driving,” she said. “And I just drive until I’m exhausted.”

She crashed again, this time ramming into a wall on the Blue Ridge Parkway after driving to Cherokee.

She went to the same hospital. Again, she said, the doctor gave her medication without saying what he was really treating.

The medication didn’t work. Another relapse in 1989 didn’t end in an accident, but Boyd drove all the way to Hagerstown, Md.

After that, Boyd went for several years without a relapse. She began working again, in Kannapolis.

But in 1997, her sister died. In 1998, her mother fell and broke her hip. Boyd began driving the two hours to Blowing Rock every weekend to be with her mother.

The stress got to her. She lost touch with reality.

She drove away again.

“I begged her to stay and tried to make her stay, but I couldn’t,” Dobbins said.

Dobbins called police, but Boyd was gone.

“It worried me to death,” Dobbins said. “I couldn’t sleep from wondering and worrying where she was.”

Boyd was on her way to South Carolina again. This time, she drove all night, all the way to the coast, to that busy intersection in Charleston.

“I was just sitting there at the stop light,” she said.

Don’t suffer alone

After the doctor in Charleston diagnosed Boyd, she began getting the treatment, information and medication she needed.

And she realized that she was not suffering alone, that her family members were feeling the effects of her illness, and that other people had similar disorders.

She had discovered a chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill near her mother’s home in a western N.C. newspaper and began attending those meetings with her mother.

But when she returned to Salisbury, she found no similar support group for mentally ill people or their families in Rowan County. She decided no one here would slip through the cracks, if she could help it.

And though a support group can’t replace treatment, it helps members to seek effective treatment, said Winters, the psychologist.

“Knowing what you need to do and doing it are two different things,” she said. “A support group sometimes helps them find strength to do what they need to do.”

And, Boyd hopes, it will keep others from losing touch with reality by connecting them with real people.

“If I had the support I have received over the past year back in 1970,” she said, “my life would probably have gone in a totally different direction than it did.”