Communities: Back in the pool of life

LAKEWOOD -- On the good days, and there have been many in recent months, Charan Bird leaves her immaculate apartment to work hard, volunteer with the mentally ill, worship at her Episcopal church.

On the bad days, and there were many for a five-month stretch beginning last summer, Charan could barely leave home. Interacting with her friends, including best friend John Fisher, was a chore, a trial, sometimes close to torture. To say the future appeared bleak might sound charitable.


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	Friends Charan Bird, left, and John Fisher exercise together frequently. After living in the "darkness" for years Charan says she is "living in the light now."

But with the support of the Greater Lakes Mental Health Foundation and a grant from the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lily and Co., Charan, who lives with schizophrenia, is again stable these days.

And what she calls her awakening, her return to sanity and a productive life, continues unabated. She celebrated her 55th birthday Saturday with joy, optimism and a frozen daiquiri.

Last year, a chronicle of Charan's journey from a life of delusions and paranoia to independence and productivity, was shared with Seattle Post-Intelligencer readers.

It illustrates that although schizophrenia remains a devastating, lifelong brain illness for about 2 million Americans, increasingly it is a disease that can managed.

But that management relies on the careful balance of psychiatric medications, and several months after her story ran in the P-I, that balance was upset for Charan when the state, which underwrites her medications, forced her to switch to a generic version of the antidepressant Prozac.

For a small percentage of people, the generic version is not as effective, she said, and she was among that group.

At first, she didn't realize she was having problems. Then she began to be haunted by panic attacks, depression and other problems she faced before using Prozac.

But John Fisher realized Charan was breaking down.

"I knew it," he said, his blue eyes shining intensely behind glasses. "I knew what was going on."

The two, who refer to each other as recovery partners, are pledged to give one another straight talk.

They frequently exercise together and carefully plan their diets together.

Both serve as trained outreach volunteers for St. Luke's Memorial Episcopal Church in north Tacoma, bringing Communion to the elderly or disabled in nursing homes and group homes.

And so John broached the subject with her, gently but straightforwardly pointing out she was withdrawing from activities she loved, avoiding conversations, holing up in her apartment.

They stopped taking their long walks on the beach, stopped going out to listen to the jazz they loved.

"I knew I wasn't being spontaneous and being myself," Charan said. "I would wake up in the morning and negative self-talk would get me. It's hard to describe. ... When I'm in the throes of it (depression), I choose to isolate myself."

She tried not to let on to anyone she worked with.

"I'd get up every morning and put on my makeup," she said. "Nobody can tell what is inside you. Nobody can tell if you're broken."

As he watched his friend's deepening crisis, John struggled with how to best respect her privacy.

He finally approached their priest at St. Luke's, and officials who knew Charan at the Great Lakes Mental Health Foundation, where she works in the cafeteria and serves as a consumer representative on the board of directors.

"She was starting to isolate," John said. "She would talk and not make sense, she was starting to have paranoia. She just wasn't the same person."

Charan's caseworker at Great Lakes, where she also receives mental health services, tackled the problem, getting her into an Eli Lily program that got her back onto Prozac.

She began to recover.

"It was a gradual thing," Charan said. "It was like I had another awakening experience ... It was a definite storm I went through."

As the year progressed, she kept improving. She was honored by Greater Lakes at the organization's annual meeting in May for her courage in telling her story publicly, helping to erase the stigma of mental illness.

And last month, she was named mental health employee of the year at the Washington Behavioral Health Healthcare Conference in Yakima.

Her award reads in part: "Despite struggling with mental illness the majority of her life, Charan Bird continues to hold a part-time job ..., is an active board member at Greater Lakes, volunteers at a group home and is active in her church.

"Charan also shatters the old stereotypes of mental illness being a life sentence and illustrates the potential for recovery."

She tries not to dwell on the fact her sanity hangs on Eli Lily's generosity and on Greater Lakes handing out the medication she so needs.

"I have to take it on faith that God will provide for me," Charan said.

More headlines and info from Tacoma.