Women and men with mental illness want to feel like part of a community and have a sense of meaning and purpose.
A Clubhouse is a place where individuals with mental illness can find that and more, and planning has been underway for over a year to bring a community mental health Clubhouse back to Kosciusko County.

At a “lunch and learn” event Wednesday, Chris Fancil, Community Assistance, Resources and Emergency Services director, explained that about 1-1/2 years ago, he and CARES Coordinator Mikaela Bixler went to Fort Wayne and took crisis intervention training. One of the things they got to do during that training was to tour The Carriage House in Fort Wayne. He had never known The Carriage House existed.

“However, once we got in there and we saw what the Clubhouse can do for people, the impact that it has on people’s lives … We heard stories — I think we had two or three speakers that were there that day that were talking to us about what Clubhouse meant to them and the impact it’s had on their lives,” Fancil said.

After hearing their stories and returning to this county, he said they decided a Clubhouse was needed here. They began pursuing the idea of bringing a Clubhouse to Warsaw for the whole county. They took a tour of The Carriage House, taking more people with them. When they got back, they all agreed that a Clubhouse was needed in Kosciusko County.

Mike Shorter, Clubhouse Indiana coordinator, said currently there’s 10 accredited Clubhouses in the coalition across Indiana, and three start-up groups, like Warsaw, mostly in the northern part of the state. Goshen, Elkhart and Kendallville all have Clubhouses. Warsaw previously had a Clubhouse but it no longer exists because Medicaid decisions made by the state in 2010 closed every Clubhouse in the state except The Carriage House.

The history of Clubhouses began in 1948 at Rockland State Hospital in New York City. A group of ex-patients were released because there was a push to get people out of institutions and into the community because medications were becoming more available to patients.

“But what they found out pretty quickly was, without support on the outside, folks kind of had a revolving door. They’d get out and maybe they’d be in the community for a few months, and then things would go sour for them and folks would come right back to the institutions,” Shorter said.

The institutions were as bad as the movies, television shows and documentaries describe them as, he said.
Some folks released from Rockland were successful in reintegrating into the community and saw the issues happening and wanted to do something about it. They created a club called We Are Not Alone. WANA helped people recently released from the hospital reintegrate back into society.

WANA grew steadily over a few years because it was addressing a real need in the New York community. They started meeting in the park, but eventually found a place in Hell’s Kitchen in New York and that became the first Clubhouse. The Clubhouse was operated by members and members are volunteers.

In the 1980s, there were enough mistakes, successes and experiences with different Clubhouses across the globe that “we were able to really say this is what our model is,” Shorter said. Out of that grew the International Center for Clubhouse Development, which is now known as Clubhouse International. That organization is responsible for training of members and staff of Clubhouses. “They are the keepers of our standards, our quality standards. There are 37 such standards. They put on conferences, and they coordinate a lot of the work that happens inside the Clubhouses, as well as the advocacy that happens at the national level, the state level and the local level.”

What was once one official Clubhouse in 1953 is now 360 Clubhouses all over the world.

“Our approach is very applicable to folks who are experiencing isolation through mental illness. It’s handcrafted to help folks who are struggling with depression, anxiety, psychosis of any kind, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders. How do we do that? We do that through the work from the relationships that come out of it. I know that when I walk into a Clubhouse, the members are needed just as much as the staff are. Regardless of what our diagnosis is, we all have something to contribute. We all need community. We all need that sense of meaning and purpose and the love that comes out of seeing other people for what they’re capable are of, as opposed to the things that they’ve done in the past or the things that they might be struggling with,” Shorter said.

The Carriage House members Matt Martino and Mary Rogers gave testimonials about how it’s changed their lives.
Martino, 64, has been a member the last 10 years and has done about everything at The Carriage House. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, but it wasn’t diagnosed until 1980 and that made life difficult for him. When he was young, he was taken advantage of by one of his brothers, who molested him for five years. Martino finally had the courage to say something to someone, but the damage was already done.

“Because of that, I’m bipolar, but I take medicine for it. I’ve gone through things that you wouldn’t want to know and you hope no one else would have to go through,” he said.

The people he’s met through the Clubhouse have helped him get through things, and now he sits on the board of directors for The Carriage House.

“But things have happened that I really wish didn’t happen. But guess what? Because of The Carriage House, I’ve got through them and it makes me feel very blessed I have friends like Mary and Mike and the rest of the staff,” he said.

Rogers said she has the symptoms of bipolar II disorder, PTSD, minor OCD, unidentified personality disorder and depression disorder.

“After I was finally diagnosed in 2016 at the age of 50, I realized that I had symptoms of depression and bipolar for as long as I could remember. It took me til 50 years of age to be diagnosed because of the stigma that surrounds mental illness,” she said.

People would tell her that she didn’t have mental illness because she never attempted suicide and she never got violent at any point in her life. Her illness led to her estrangement from most of her family and friends. She had difficulty getting and keeping employment.

After being diagnosed with mental illness, she was terrified of her life never being the same again. She thought her goals and dreams of being normal were not going to happen.

In January 2017, her friend Jessica took her to The Carriage House. She found out about the many opportunities offered to her and she felt like a human again. She became a member and found support from The Carriage House when her anxiety got bad.

“I felt like that I mattered to someone and it helped me climb out of my anxiety,” she said, and she returned to The Carriage House in 2018.

From then on, she became very involved in The Carriage House, including speaking at conferences across the U.S. She also eventually bought her first car and house.

“I honestly believe that The Carriage House saved my life, and I will always be grateful to them and the friends that I made while there,” she stated.

Fancil talked about what The Carriage House does for employment for people through its Transitional Employment Program.

“What The Carriage House will do is if they have a member who wants to work, wants to have a job, they will work with local employers to have jobs … that are actually held by The Carriage House. And those jobs, maybe for two or three days a week for three or four hours at a time, and they may be doing whatever … and those jobs will be a transitional job, meaning the person can get into that three- or four-hours-a-day job because if the person occasionally has a crisis or an issue and they can’t go to work, Carriage House actually will send someone else to do that job, so the employer still gets that job done. So they’re not out anything,” Fancil explained.

He said what they heard from several people was that having a job gave them a sense of purpose and belonging and gave them value.

The member eventually transitions to a full-time job if that’s what they want.

The Carriage House also provides tutoring and education assistance.

Fancil talked about what Live Well Kosciusko’s Well-Being Committee has done so far to bring a Clubhouse to this county, including touring The Carriage House. There was a community meeting. In December, and several people attended training on how to start a Clubhouse. They created an action plan, which was submitted to Clubhouse International, and they’ve been matched with a mentor.

“This is all about supporting a community. That’s all we’re trying to do. And the fact that this is not in Fort Wayne’s community has zero to do with the value of what they see in helping us do this. It’s supporting a community and just being good human beings to each other,” he said.

The next steps they need to do to get the Clubhouse off the ground is to create a board of directors and get the 501(c)3 set up. Fancil said the goal for this is for it to be its own entity and to be a countywide program. They will need to apply for start-up funding and hire a director. A local church has said some of their space could be used to help them get it started.
Hours of a Clubhouse are generally 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and it’s for adults.

For more information on Clubhouse Indiana, visit the website.

A fundraiser for The Carriage House, 3327 Lake Ave., Fort Wayne, is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 26. There will be tours at 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., and member testimonies at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Live entertainment will be provided throughout the day.