Hayden was a popular three-sport athlete in high school whose life quickly derailed as a sophomore when he started hearing voices and feeling threatened.
Debbie remembers all too vividly the first morning he came up to her saying he couldn’t go to school. She later learned he had been consuming a lot of cannabis at the time and had dropped acid at a party.
“He told me that if he went to school, he wasn't going to make it out alive,” she said. “Obviously I'm freaking out as a parent. And he said he was hearing his friends tell him that if he went to school, he would not come out alive. I begged him to tell me who the friend was and when he gave me the name of his friend, who he was hearing it from, it was a friend who had taken his life the year prior.”
With her ex-husband, they decided to take him to the West Hills Behavioral Health Hospital, which is no longer around after shutting down in late 2021. There, Hayden did a three-day stint. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a chronic brain disorder which, when active, causes delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, trouble with thinking and a lack of motivation.
“That’s what they believed it was,” Debbie recalls. “So, that led us in the direction of trying to find help for him. At the beginning we weren't really sure because he was smoking a lot of weed. So we weren't really sure if if that was causing it or if it was truly that diagnosis. So we went through a year or so of therapy, family therapy, just trying to get to the bottom of that. And then also trying to find a psychiatrist and a psychologist who would see him At the time he was 15, 16.”
Debbie said it was “nearly impossible” to find anyone to see him. When they did, doctors didn’t take the time to get to know Hayden and “it was just kind of medicine pushing, you know, prescriptions. Just trying to find someone that would actually see him was really hard. Like any sort of psychiatrist out there, they're either booked or they're not taking new patients.”
A year or so later, they started getting help at the Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services, known by its acronym NNAMHS.
“They had started a wraparound program where, if you could get into it, it consisted of a psychiatrist, two case workers and there was another counselor. One case worker kind of did more public stuff and then one just kind of monitored the paperwork type of thing,” she remembers.
The program was great but there was such “a high turnover rate that it was really hard for him to really bond with anyone,” Debbie said. “It seemed like it was kind of a stopping place for new doctors to, I don't know, if they had to do a certain amount of time in a certain place and then they could move on. No one seemed to stick around very long.”
This is also where Debbie noticed the case workers who really cared about the kids were the ones who were let go or were moved because they didn't follow all the rules. One of them she remembers fondly would have Hayden journal and take him to CrossFit classes and local parks.
The program then abruptly disbanded, Debbie recalls. “So then we were kind of back on our own. And in the, meantime he was struggling. Like he was struggling hard. He had very distinct voices in his head and some were voices of friends of his. At one point it was my voice in his head and everything that he heard in his head was very negative … it was talking about killing himself. There were no positives. Even though sometimes he would giggle and laugh at the voices, the negative took over.”