Weathering a daughter's mental illness and suicide

Connie Dale can't pinpoint precisely when or why mental illness took root in the mind of her daughter, Mya, and, 21 years after her birth, led her to suicide. The shifts in her psyche were subtle and, for a long time, indistinguishable from the emotional storms most teens ride out.

"Her mental illness crept up on me," Connie said. "I was working on her sense of abandonment; I didn't know anything about bipolar at the time, I didn't know anything about schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress." Mya's life began in 1990, 2,969 miles away from Anchorage, at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah. Connie was the only parent Mya knew for all but the final three years of her life. Being her daughter's sole source of support posed extreme complications for a single mother in uniform, whose job required her to work on "remote tours" far from home for months and, once, for a year. Work assignments in South Korea and Germany prompted Connie to place her toddler in the care of relatives in the U.S. Connie's family loved Mya and did their best to ease those transitions but the separations still stung-Connie returned from Germany to find her 4-year-old daughter had changed. She'd become highly sensitive, afraid she would be left behind yet again. "A counselor told me Mya felt she needed to be perfect because she thought she was a bad kid and that's why I left her," Connie said. "After Germany, I made sure I never went anywhere without her, I constantly reminded her what a good girl she is."

'It's a battle'

Connie tried to raise her daughter with a balance of love and carefully administered discipline. "Mya did her best, but she was emotionally sensitive," she said. "If you tried to reprimand her, she was truly heartbroken, injured, by what you'd say. All parents yell, but I needed to be cautious." Connie moved to Anchorage when Mya was 6. Her anxieties grew as the years passed but few besides her mother could see the anguish beneath Mya's quick wit and humor. "It wasn't until she was 13 and I found out she was cutting that I knew this was serious and I didn't know what the bottom of it was," Connie said. "She wasn't cutting herself with a knife; she was bruising herself with an eraser, rubbing her skin off with an eraser. She was beating her forehead against the wall. I didn't see her doing these things. There were bruises, but I thought it was sports, that she was angry when she didn't play a good game. But it was because she felt singled out, unloved, hated, despised. She felt self-loathing, but I didn't understand why." The bruising worried Connie. She took Mya to therapy, where the teen told a counselor she felt abandoned. The counselor saw no indication, then, that Connie needed to worry. "I asked if I had anything to worry about but the counselor attributed it to adolescence, emotional volatility, being an adolescent," Connie said. "I thought, 'Fine, I'll be more nurturing, we'll just remind her how much she's loved.'" Mya seemed to thrive. She cultivated a rich life at East High School, volunteered at the First CME Church, played soccer and basketball, breakdanced and sang, and acted in plays and musicals at school and for Anchorage Theatre of Youth. "She was a good kid, a good and responsible kid who always looked out for the underdog," Connie said. "Whenever she saw a kid who was in trouble or wasn't getting enough love or was getting picked on, that's who she gravitated toward." When Mya was 17, she shared a secret with her mother-she was gay. "I suspected it but she was so sensitive that I didn't want to make a statement about my observations," Connie said. "She internalizes these things, so I kept them to myself. Through the years I reminded her that being gay or being straight is not all of who a person is. You have other qualities and no one should judge you for who you are and who you like. You're a person who loves, and all love is good. I hugged her, cried with her, could feel her fear and self-loathing. I told her you are loved, you are perfect just the way you are. Nothing changes between us. Nothing changes that. You're my baby." Connie said she never saw the signs of mental illness-"you know, kids being loners. Well, she wasn't a loner. An inability to make friends? She had lots of friends. I'm still confused about it." Mya hid her problem for years, Connie said, leaving too little time to find a diagnosis for what was wrong once she experienced her first full-blown mental rupture-she died a year and six months after that. "She killed herself too soon," Connie said. "Awareness is a good thing, but people want a fast fix and that's not how mental illness works. It's a battle."

Weathering emotional tempests

At age 18, to Connie's surprise, Mya launched a relationship with a boy. Then, in 2009, right before her 19th birthday, Mya enrolled at UAA to study economics and political science and found a visible niche in Anchorage's LGBTQIA community and UAA's The Family. She reached out to disabled people through UAA's Disability Support Services, helped found the Black Student Union and participated on UAA's debate team, the National Coalition Building Institute, UAA Hip Hop Club and the UAA AHAINA program. She worked in the Dean of Students' office. Her life appeared full and vibrant, for a while. "She told me about the drag shows she would be in and promised to take me to see her," Connie said. "I wanted to see her. She enjoyed Mad Myrna's-that was her hangout. I would take her out to campaign, picket and petition against hate crimes and discrimination against gay people. It wasn't until after her 19th birthday that things fell apart. She began taking antidepressants." Mya, who had met her father through letters and phone calls as a teen, visited him in 2008 and in the following two years. Their last visit was difficult, with friction between them and between her and her half siblings. Suddenly, in January 2011, an emotional breakdown crashed down on her, carrying fear and suicidal thoughts. Mya spent three days recovering in a hospital psychiatric ward but couldn't complete the 10-day recovery program. Then, a few days later, her mother took Mya to Alaska Psychiatric Institute. "She said the pictures in the frames would talk to her and the TV would talk to her," Connie said.

No community, no belonging, no acceptance

Mya could no longer drive her own car. She had made the dean's list at school, but now no longer could attend classes. She couldn't go to work anymore. "She couldn't be at home alone," Connie said. "She couldn't go into the bathroom by herself. She would not go in there alone. Would not shower, eat or sleep alone. I had to put away anything sharp because I didn't want her to hurt herself." There was no place for Mya to go for the intense residential treatment she needed, so physicians kept trying different mixes of medications. Connie says she thought, then, that the drugs were causing the problems. Now, she thinks she refused to believe how serious her daughter's problems were. "I was in denial," Connie said. Mya's life seemed to be smoothing out in May 2011, when she met a person who captivated her. "She was still obviously in trouble but she was finding her way back," Connie said. "She fell head over heels in love with this girl. In August, they started dating and she gave up her boyfriend and went to the girlfriend." The imperfect romance lasted until the following May, when Mya's girlfriend moved out of state. Surprisingly, Mya seemed to weather the breakup well but again began feeling afraid, depressed, having nightmares. She didn't want to eat. "She was always considerate of other people but I think she was afraid all the time about growing up, about being left behind, about me dying and leaving her, about growing old, starting a new life, moving out of the house-she was afraid about everything," Connie said. Mya's girlfriend and former boyfriend knew some of the torment Mya experienced, though not the full depth of her problems. Connie thinks her daughter didn't share too much out of fear of pushing people away. "If you had a friend open up and share that things talk to them and you hear voices, wouldn't that make you feel uncomfortable and distance yourself?" she said. "You might think they would want to do you harm one day-because that's the taboo of mental illness, that everybody who hears voices wants to do harm. Mental illness doesn't mean you're going to go to a mall and kill anybody. It's different for every single person." There's not enough money spent on research, Connie said, to understand the roots of mental illness and how to do something effective about it. And medication is just that, medication. "There's no community for the mentally ill, there's no belonging for the mentally ill, there's no acceptance for the mentally ill," she said. Connie says she knew Mya felt suicidal at times. "But even knowing where her mind was, I didn't expect it," she said. "I'd asked her to let me know, to tell me when she was at that point so I could stop her. I wanted her to fight. I was prepared to be in the struggle for the rest of our lives."

'You're there at the bottom and you're drowning'

Mya died June 20, 2012, that year's summer solstice, after attending a meeting related to GLBT issues. Someone who saw her at the meeting said she seemed fine, and that the meeting was a good one. "My last conversation with her, she was happy," Connie said. "Mya said, 'Mom, I finally know what an amazing person I am.' She was happy I brought her a cheeseburger from Table 6. But mental illness comes on you like a wave, like a boulder, like a landslide. You're on top of the world and then, in a flash, you're there at the bottom and you're drowning. It was just that bad." Connie fell asleep and thought she heard Mya coming in around 10:30 p.m. "With this illness, you don't sleep hard, you don't sleep long," she said. "I was exhausted most of the time. I think I heard her come home, but I can't be sure. I was so tired. "I went to work the next morning not knowing what she had done and I didn't find her until I came home from work," she said. A crush of grief is all Connie remembers afterward. "I was like everyone else, I thought that she was selfish," she said. "Why would she do this to me? Why would she hurt me? Why would she make me endure her funeral? Did not she know how much I love her? Did not she know how much this would kill me? What would be my life? Then it occurred to me that it was me and mine I was thinking about, and not her. She suffered-and now she's not suffering. I am glad she no longer suffers. I could not stop her suffering. Now I can pray that her spirit is at peace, found the peace she could not find here in life." Two years and two months have passed since Mya died. At first, Connie thought her daughter committed suicide because she had lost control. Now, she thinks otherwise. "I think it was the one act that was in defiance of her mental illness," she said. "Mya knew she did not have control of her mental illness but she had control of her life and whether she would continue to endure her mental illness." Though Mya experienced sad days, and days of medicated haze and lethargy, sometimes the clouds parted and she was back, radiant and effervescent, the kind of girl unafraid of the challenge of taking the stage at the age of 16 to play a middle-aged Greek king, Creon, in a high school production of Antigone. "She auditioned for Antigone, but she was born to play Creon," Connie said. "She was a natural. She always got the lead roles. She asked me if I thought that political science or economics was something she should pursue for her life. She had a quick mind and could have done anything but I always thought her heart was in the performing arts. I always knew I'd see her in Hollywood someday, whether she was a producer or mogul. She had a very analytical mind but she was so creative and expressive, felt everything so deeply." Connie remembers the best of her daughter's life, now. "I remember her happy, I remember her joyful, I remember her laughing and playing, I remember the dynamic, energetic, enthusiastic, positive girl everybody remembers and that's what I choose to take with me and to recall when I miss her. I choose to remember those days because those were her, too. She wasn't just mental illness. She was Mya Michelle Dale. She was so much more than just gay or lesbian or transgender or mentally ill. She was more than that. Those are just things that happened in the course of a very short but beautiful life." Read this related story about the Mental Health First Aid program, which is run through UAA's Center for Human Development. Written by Tracy Kalytiak, UAA Office of University Advancement