Second in a six-part series
"My name is Jacob Short and I am 19 years old. I come from a great family with a mom, dad, three sisters, three brothers, two brothers-in-law, five nieces and a dog, Murfy. We are a close family and do a lot together. I love to travel, camp, boat, water ski, and play basketball and softball. I do everything all 19-year-olds do ... and I am bipolar."
Today it is hard to imagine the dark days Jake Short has seen. The sadness in which he spent much of his young life seems far behind him. He is bright-eyed and articulate. He is engaged in his work and hopeful about the future.
But examine his history of mental illness, his attempts at suicide, his family's frenzied search for the perfect blend of medications to stave off terror, and it becomes clear Jake Short is the poster child for mental health treatment.
He also represents hope for thousands of young men and women in Utah fighting depression and the urge to do themselves in.
It's been a decadelong process, says his mother, Vicki Short.
"It is a miracle. This is a boy who couldn't go to school, and when he did he would hide under his desk and staple his fingers together," she said. "He's come a million miles."
"As a little boy, I was anxious. Not wanting to be away from my family. I would get very scared and cry if I was away from them. When I was 3 years old, my mom went back to work part-time and left me with a neighbor who tended several other kids. She told my mom that I would never play with the other kids, and I would just stand at the window all day and either cry or look out the window."
Jake Short realized that horrible day that his brain wasn't wired like the next child's.
He remembers how scared he felt going to a baby-sitter that first time in his Sandy neighborhood. He didn't take off his coat. He didn't eat lunch. He didn't use the bathroom. He stood by the front window crying all day. Even as a toddler, he knew he was different.
At home, he did "weird" things, said his mother. He watched the same movie every day for a month. After watching "Back to the Future III," he dressed like a cowboy for days on end.
The youngest of six children at the time, Jake's behavior didn't raise any real concern for his parents. "We just thought he was the baby of the family," his mother said.
But in elementary school, his odd behavior intensified.
He hid under his desk. He bear-crawled around the classroom on his hands and feet. He froze when the teacher called on him. He sat alone on the grass at recess.
He says now his mind worked like the television section at Circuit City — a bunch of screens set on different channels, and all talking at once. He couldn't focus on one. He didn't hear strange voices but familiar ones. Sometimes his mom's words would rattle around in his head. Sometimes an innocuous phrase would get twisted into something bad.
"It was just major chaos," Jake Short said recently.
"One night I was working on my homework and trying to write sentences using my spelling words. I couldn't do it, no matter hard I tried. My mom was trying to help me as she always did. I would get upset, anxious and cry. That night I couldn't complete my work at all. . . . I cried and told my parents I was going to run away. It was a very cold, dark, snowy night. I put on only a coat; no hat, gloves or boots. I just started walking, not knowing where I was going."
Jake was 8.
A frantic search ensued, and the boy eventually showed up at home an hour later to find his entire family in tears and sick with worry.
Through her tears Vicki Short asked, "Jake, what would make you feel better?"
"Just to be dead," he said crying.
The Shorts set up an appointment with a psychologist the next day. They knew then something was wrong. Jake was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, depression, severe anxiety and social phobias.
Several years of therapy and multiple medications followed. But it was always one step forward, two steps back.
Jake poked holes in his fingers and watched the blood drip from his hands. He chased his siblings around with a knife. He tried to drown himself in the bathtub.
He was seeing things, hearing things. He tried to hang himself. He overdosed on his pills.
He knew something was frightfully wrong, but it seemed no one could help him. His parents were beside themselves, and a doctor kept jockeying his medication trying to find the perfect mix.
"It was like living in a horror movie for a while. We thought we had this perfect family — a mom, a dad and all these children. It turned into a nightmare," Vicki Short said.
Every day the Shorts got a telephone call from Jake's school about some behavior or incident.
Vicki Short says now it nearly put her over the edge too. "Every day for six years there was something," she said.
Homework was impossible. Jake cried and rolled around on the floor. He held his head and yelled, "That black thing is in me again."
"The summer before the seventh grade it got really bad. I tried to run in front of a car, to hang myself, and I overdosed on my meds. Then I started seventh grade. I couldn't handle it. All the kids in the halls and classes, all the noise, the class changes and the schoolwork. I just couldn't handle any of it. So once again, I overdosed on my meds. This time I took more of them and I had to go to the emergency room to have my stomach pumped. It was awful."
After that trip to the emergency room, the angry and desperate mother checked her son into Wasatch Canyons Center for Counseling. Jake, 12 at the time, went kicking and shrieking. It took four workers to carry him to a lock-down room. He screamed for an hour.
But the move was a good one. Child psychiatrist Richard Ferre determined Jake had been misdiagnosed. He actually suffered from bipolar disorder. Ferre tossed out his Zoloft and Ritalin and started him on new medication. Over the next two months of out-patient therapy, Jake started to feel better.
About a year later, Ferre asked Short to speak to Utah legislators considering a mental health bill. The young man was terrified but said he was "ready to start helping myself and others."
He testified, and later the bill passed. One of the lawmakers was a woman who had first positioned herself against the bill, then told Short she'd voted for it because of his story.
"At that point," Jake said, "I knew I had to speak out for myself and other people like me."
That decision, along with careful medical monitoring and family support, seems to have saved Jake's life. The last few years have marked major improvement.
He committed to a few speaking engagements for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), his behavior stabilized, his moods regulated.
There have been some rough moments along the way. His last suicide attempt came during his sophomore year at Brighton High School. But that was also the year he was named Bengal of the Month, which he calls the greatest day of his life.
Phone calls from school to the Shorts started slowing down in Jake's junior year. There were none his senior year, and he started to blossom.
Today Jake works for NAMI and also participates in training sessions for therapists and caseworkers in the Utah juvenile justice system. He is a member of Utah first lady Mary Kaye Huntsman's "Power in You" program, designed to help teenagers deal with turmoil in their lives by sending "ambassadors" to schools to talk about issues including mood disorders, suicide and substance abuse.
He worked hard on a KUED-TV documentary about adolescent suicide and spoke at the film's unveiling this winter.
Jake told his story recently at a local school and pointed out many famous people who fight the ups and downs of mood disorders.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin; storyteller Hans Christian Andersen; actor Jim Carrey; Winston Churchill, prime minister of England during World War II; former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln; golfer John Daly; country singer Dolly Parton . . . there is a long list of people who suffer depression and bipolar disorder, he told students.
"Do you make fun of these people? Do you call them names? Do you ridicule them for who they are and for what they have done? No. Look what these people have contributed to our world."
He concluded his comments:
"It has been a long, hard road, but with hard work and a lot of help from family, friends, doctors, therapists, I am standing here today . . . and I'm just like you."
The next year will be crucial for Jake, says his mom. There are decisions to make: whether to commit to a mission for the LDS Church, whether to go to college, whether to move out of his parents' home.
Jake takes one day at a time. This month brought a new challenge.
With the dawning of spring came Jake's birthday on April 4. Because he is now 19, his father's insurance company has tried to dump him. While the family fights the insurance company, Vicki Short worries. It is so important to keep Jake stable and to keep him moving forward, she says. His medications would cost about $1,500 a month without insurance, and she doesn't want that stress on her son.
"It is just outrageous," says Vicki Short. "We just get things stabilized and now this. Of all the things to have to worry about."
"My illness is no different from someone who has diabetes. My chemical imbalance is just in my head, and theirs is in their pancreas. We deserve the same health care and treatment as everyone else in the world with health problems. I have come so far and will continue to work very hard to help others come as far as I have."
E-mail: lucy@desnews.com; romboy@desnews.com