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She Had It All
September 4, 2003
By Georgia Hillyer
Belleville News-Democrat
Shiloh parents deal with the angst of watching their talented daughter lose her battle with bipolar disorder.
She was beautiful, she was brilliant, she was personable, she was accomplished, and it seemed to most that she the world on a string.
But there was something unexpected and unfathomable deep in the gray convolutions of her mind waiting to take it all away. She fought against it with all the will and determination she could muster but in the end it won.
In a final heart wrenching end to her long struggle, Karla Smith committed suicide on January 13, 2003.
Karla’s struggle with mental illness is over. But her parents, Tom and Fran Smith of Shiloh and her twin brother Kevin of St. Louis, still struggle mightily with their grief.
The family’s feelings of helplessness and frustration in dealing with Karla’s illness has found solace in thinking about Karla as she was when she was well.
“Karla was always a very good student, both the twins were,” said Smith, Karla’s father who is the Diocese of Belleville’s director of pastoral services.
Her speech and drama talents won her numerous awards in high school, even at the national level.
After graduating from high school in 1995 in Oklahoma where the family was living, Karla enrolled in collage and everything seemed fine. As usual, she was involved in many activities. A talented writer, she wrote for a campus poetry magazine. She had big plans, including a Ph.D. in English literature, a job with the Peace Corps and backpacking through India.
But during sophomore year, Smith said, her phone calls home caused alarm. Karla didn’t sound like Karla. She was loosing interest in school. Sullen and withdrawn, she dropped out and came home.
“I was puzzled, frustrated and sometimes angry,” said Smith. “I loved her dearly and I couldn’t figure oiut why she wanted to stay in bed all the time. Her bed became her prison. She couldn’t think or put one foot in front of the other. She was in a deep depression. It was devastating.”
She attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills. A note was found written in lipstick. It said, “I am no longer a poet. I have lost all my words.”
After counseling and psychiatric help, Karla seemed to get better. The Smith’s still didn’t understand what was happening to their daughter. There was no diagnosis.
Over the next few years, she was institutionalized, several times and was in and out of school.
Then in the summer and fall of 1998, she suffered her first “big manic episode going days without sleep and suffering delusions and paranoia,” said Smith. In a trip west to see an aunt and uncle she ended up in a hospital in Las Vegas, N.M.
It was from there that the Smith’s learned the name of their daughter’s disease: bipolar disorder, a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in a person’s mood, energy, and ability to function. By the spring of 1999, Karla was stabilized. She was on a good combination of medications and was able to return to school.
But in July, 2002 Karla once again began to show signs of mania during a vacation cruise the Smith family took together. Smith still doesn’t understand what happened.
“I don’t have this all figured out yet. She must have stopped taking medication,” he said.
In August 2002 while staying with her parents in Shiloh, she had a major at attack of mania. Her counselors advised her to go back to Tulsa where her doctors were. Smith accompanied his daughter and spent “10 of the most difficult days of my life. But by the time I left there, everything seemed like it was OK.”
But it wasn’t. She was admitted into a hospital for several days and then released on Friday, Jan. 10 with instructions to attend an after care program which began the following Monday. The Smith’s had been in daily contact with their daughter and they didn’t think she was ready to be released from care.
That weekend she went to visit a friend, a good friend who was a positive influence in her life. She told him that she was going to take a nap at his apartment while he went to work. The friend owned a gun but had hidden it, knowing Karla’s condition.
“While he was gone, she found the gun and shot herself,” smith said.
She was 26.
Through tears, Smith said, all during Karla’s illness, “I felt helpless and powerless. I try to adjust to a new normal but there will never be a normal again.
“I go to her grave and say, ‘Karla, you didn’t have to do this.’ But on Jan. 13 fro her perspective, she did. She probably thought, ‘I have a life of misery ahead of me and I can’t live this way.’ She may have had this planned for some time.”
The Smith’s have had tremendous support from friends like Monsignor Bill Hitpas, pastor of St. Nicholas Church in O’Fallon and both Tom and Fran have very busy jobs. And Tom, a published author, is writing a book about his daughter. Fran is principal of Queen of Peace Elementary School in Belleville.
Kevin’s job as a technology consultant keeps him busy, too, and often on the road. He attends a bipolar support group and has created a loving tribute to his sister on an internet web site he created at www.inmemoryofkarlasmith.com
A seminar designed to help families who have children with mental illness will be held Sept. 12 and 13 at Four Points Hotel in Fairview Heights. Titled “Piecing It All Together: How Mental Health / Mental Illness
Affects Family, School, and Community,” keynote speakers include Dr. Richard Todd, M.D. of Washington University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, and Dr. Matthew O. Howard, Ph.D., associate professor with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University.
Mary Plocher, Family Facilitator for the Belleville Area Special Services Cooperative will give a presentation on easing the stigma of mental illness. She is also a licensed clinical social worker.
“Our goal is to empower parents to cope with and address the stigma in a productive way so families can feel supportive,” she said.
This is the first conference of its type in the Metro East. Plocher said parents currently don’t have the support they need to cope with a child’s mental illness. She hopes a local support group will result from the conference.
For other information about the conference call Irene Angelous at 463-215 or email.
Some people have told Smith tat Karla’s illness made her death inevitable. But he strongly disagrees with that.
“She demonstrated for three years that she could be stabilized. She could have gotten back to that and maintained it through the proper medication and therapy,” he said.
“Some still think that Karla could, if she wanted to, have pulled herself out of her depression and controlled her manic behavior…that she could have just decided to be well. But she couldn’t have,” said Smith, just as someone can’t cure himself from cancer by wishing it.
“I miss her deeply, still,” he said, “every day. She and I always had a special relationship. We had a lot of the same interests…theology, music, writing, world affairs. I still cry a lot. How does the body create so many tears? Don’t they run out at some point?” |
