Eugene weekly., January 23, 2014, Page 13, Image 13

‘I don’t know what I have to do to drill into my head to stop the pattern.
I have to take it as a life-and-death disease, literally.’
— CELENE ECKER
leaving Earth. I was in control of that. I was an astronaut.
I was so delusional that I thought I heard trees speaking.
I thought I was supposed to be the next Madonna. That’s
funny,” she adds with a laugh.
I’ve known Celine Ecker the better part of a year, and
I’ve watched her slowly fall apart, as she’s gone from being
a sensitive, highly intelligent and fragile woman to being a
person at war with herself, off her meds and increasingly
erratic, struggling to maintain a tenuous hold on reality and
human relationships; it’s a terribly helpless thing to see, and
in my helplessness I’m one more person who failed her.
When Ecker went off her meds in October and disappeared,
having lost her housing, I prayed that she wouldn’t die. I
ran into her once in December, at the same place we had
coffee to talk about this article. It was absolutely freezing
outside then, and she was brutally underdressed. I bought
her a bagel and cup of coffee, and we talked. It was like
communicating with someone you know through a scrim
of fuzz in a nightmare where meaning becomes a louder
and then quieter echo: At one point, Ecker told me she’d
removed her ovaries the previous night, after she’d given
birth to three stillborn babies stored now in her backpack.
She scrawled me manic notes on free postcards she’d picked
up, fi lling up the space with subliminal advertisements for
her future self: “Coming to a theater near you for Christmas,
2017” and “Lunarstream Movie Productions presents the
fastest animae star on planet Earth” and “Keep your dreams
in your mind.”
And then I said goodbye, please take care, stay warm. I
did not, despite Ecker’s distressing condition and isolation
and confusion and the arctic cold outside, offer her the
shelter of my house. No — my failure is, in some essential
way, our failure. I’ll own that.
Though she is now staying in a shelter and under a six-
month commitment with the state of Oregon to continue
taking her medication and maintain counseling, Ecker says
she is worried that the cycle of mental dissolution and
homelessness in her life will continue. “I just get scared that
I’m going to repeat the pattern,” she says. “It’s happened
so many times. There’s only so many chances you get in
life. I’ve tried to commit suicide at least three or four times,
to the extremity of swimming out into the ocean.”
Being aware of the pattern, Ecker explains, doesn’t help.
Despite the fact that she can’t remember large chunks of the
past 20 years, she knows what happens when she crashes. “I
don’t take my medicine,” she says. “I just think I don’t need
it. Sometimes I forget to take it, and more and more I don’t
take it and end up on the streets again. It’s out of control. I
lose weight. I get sexually abused by men on the streets. I
get sleep deprived. I starve for a whole month. I don’t eat. I
don’t sleep. I walk around. I feel alienated. It’s like a Jekyll-
and-Hyde personality, one extreme to another,” Ecker says.
“I don’t know what I have to do to drill into my head to
stop the pattern,” she adds. “I have to take it as a life-and-
death disease, literally.”
At one point, I ask Ecker if she senses something is
wrong when she’s delusional. She asks me if I know when
something’s wrong in my head. It’s a chilling question.
Then I ask her if there’s anything I could have done
differently. “It’s really hard to talk to someone who is in
that state of mind, because you don’t know that you need
help,” Ecker explains. “I’m too out there, I don’t relate to
anybody. Once someone gets that far out, it’s hard to reel
them back in unless they give up.”
STRESS KILLS
Hard, but not necessarily impossible. Many people
suggest — including several homeless individuals I’ve
spoken with — that Eugene does a better job than most
cities in addressing the issues of homelessness and mental
illness. Funding and staffi ng and bureaucratic bloat aside,
we do possess a slew of advocates and organizations
focused on helping those in need, whether homeless
or experiencing mental issues or both: White Bird, St.
Vincent de Paul, SLEEPS, Laurel Hill Center, ShelterCare,
‘The mentally ill, they can’t help it. I feel they’re just kicked to the curb.’
— PAUL COOPER , WHOVILLE CAMPER AND LOCAL MUSICIAN
Buckley House, Looking Glass, Eugene Mission, Egan
Warming Center, to name a few.
The Johnson Unit is ground zero for many individuals,
like Ecker, who fi nd themselves undergoing severe
psychiatric crises. “It’s the isolation of either the mental
illness or the homelessness that drives people to the crisis,”
says Dale Smith, director of behavioral health services at
PeaceHealth, home to the Johnson Unit. “It’s a horribly
isolating experience. That is what leads to that desperation
and isolation. If you have any degree of paranoia or
psychosis, (being homeless) just fuels it like a hot fi re.”
“Your lifestyle will create mental illness,” I was told
by Mike, a 51-year-old man staying at the Whoville
encampment at the corner of Broadway and Hilyard. “The
stress. Stress kills. If you’re mentally ill already, the hoops
get harder to jump through. Once you’ve gotten down, it’s
hard to come back up. A lot of people don’t make it.”
Paul Cooper, another Whoville camper, says that
agencies that help the homeless and mentally ill are too
often ostracized. “The mentally ill, they can’t help it,” he
says. “I feel they’re just kicked to the curb.”
Whoville’s Mama Carrie says about “half of us out
here” suffer from mental illness. “Truthfully, people need
meds no matter what,” she says. “Whether it’s mental
illness or a physical ailment.”
Smith says the focus of the PeaceHealth transition team
is to create what’s called a continuum of services, including
intensive case management and a “hand-off of care” that
engages a patient’s life needs, such as stable housing. “That
becomes the focus of that team, establishing some kind
of housing,” Smith points out. “The bottom line is really
about that support system, that network, so people don’t
slip back into that situation. The problem is everybody sees
them as failing. They don’t fail. We fail.”
Regan, whose CDLC is currently seeking a court
mandate challenging the “criminalization of homelessness
in our communities that fail to offer an alternative to the
unhoused condition,” says she suspects that up to 90
percent of our homeless population have mental health
issues, and that many of these individuals “become
addicted to street drugs in an attempt to mask or manage
symptoms.” And, Regan adds, the stress and anxiety of
such an unstable condition is only exacerbated when a
person comes in contact with law enforcement offi cers
untrained in negotiating mental-health crises.
“If you truly want to decriminalize mental illness and
homelessness, it has to start with the cops,” Regan says.
As a freshman rep in the Oregon State Legislature,
current House Majority Leader Val Hoyle fought for the
creation of two new state mental facilities, including the one
slated to open in Junction City in 2015. Hoyle, whose own
brother has experienced mental-health issues, acknowledges
the controversy surrounding the building of the hospital,
which some see as one more “Cuckoo’s Nest” means
of institutionalizing and deadening patients with heavy
pharmaceuticals.
Hoyle insists, however, that hospitalization, while not
an end in itself, is a step above incarcerating the mentally
ill in jails. “We need to treat mental illness the same way
we treat physical illness,” she says, adding that stays should
be shorter and followed by strong community support,
including reliable housing and services.
“I really want people to get care at the community
level,” Hoyle says. “We don’t have enough places for
people to go ... It’s very clear that stress is a trigger for
people who are mentally ill. If you have someone who’s
mentally ill and they don’t have a stable place, then it’s
harder for them to manage their mental illness.”
WHERE THEY’RE AT
PAUL COOPER
Right now, in this city, in this nation, we all seem to
agree that something is broken. What we disagree upon is
eugeneweekly.com • January 23, 2014
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