When Dallas Earnshaw was 17 years old, his grandpa, suffering from mental illness, died by suicide. At the funeral, someone walked up to Earnshaw and said, “How does it feel knowing your grandfather’s going to hell?”
That was in 1976.
“Back then, people were accused of being selfish or uncaring if they took their own life,” says Earnshaw. “It was actually against the law; when you did it you committed a crime — you committed suicide — and it was embarrassing and shameful to families. Nobody wanted to talk about it.”
He contrasts that to the present day.
“Now we realize suicide is often a very serious symptom of depression and mental illness,” he says. “Yes, there’s still stigma attached to mental illness; people who are diagnosed still feel somewhat uncomfortable talking about their journey in life. But understanding and compassion have improved greatly. We’ve come a very, very long way.”
No one knows that better than he does.
Earnshaw is superintendent at the Utah State Hospital in Provo — the state’s preeminent mental health hospital. For the past 42 years, he has made it his life’s work to care for and advocate on behalf of those suffering from mental illnesses.
It was in 1983, just a few years after his grandfather’s death, that Earnshaw, quite by happenstance, discovered the field he would dedicate his career to.
Armed with a registered nursing degree from Weber State, he was working on his nurse practitioner degree at BYU and needed a part-time job to pay the tuition. He rented an apartment on 900 East in Provo, practically in the state hospital’s front yard.
He walked up to the front entrance and applied for a job. They had one opening: the Saturday-Sunday shift, the one nobody else wanted. He took it. Made $8 an hour. He’s been there ever since.
“Coming here, working with patients, I fell in love with it,” he says. “I just really, truly loved working in such a caring field. I realized I didn’t want to do anything else.”
He started out as a staff nurse, then moved on to positions as a nursing supervisor, a program director, an assistant clinical director, and for the last 21 years, as superintendent.
The changes he’s seen have been nothing short of transformational.
In 1983, he remembers a hospital that was filled with patients who had been there for 20 or 30 years and more. They weren’t being treated as much as they were being isolated.
“It was a different patient population,” says Earnshaw. “We were pretty much their family. We’d go on camping trips and river runs and horseback rides. There wasn’t a lot of programming in the communities at that time.”
Contrast that to 2026, when “those types of individuals that were here before are now getting treatment in the community. The people we see are much more acute, much more ill.”
And much better taken care of.
Advancements in treatment, programming and, especially, medications “have just been tremendous,” says Earnshaw, who points in particular to “a big explosion of information and research in the 1990s — what was called the decade of the brain.
“We know what it is now, and we’re willing to actually talk about what’s going on in our communities and individuals that are dealing with very severe mental illnesses. A lot of our homeless population are people with mental illness. We’ve got a lot of people in our correctional settings and jails that have mental illness that we need to move into more appropriate settings to receive treatment. We’re understanding the need more, and we’re not just reacting, we’re being proactive at deciding what our community really does need.”
At the 300-acre state hospital campus, where Earnshaw supervises more than 900 employees and nearly 400 patients, he notes that each one of those patients, without exception, is checked on every 15 minutes around the clock. The monitoring is unobtrusive, but consistent. No one is left alone and unobserved. The preservation of life is priority one.
“I’ve never known anybody with a serious mental illness that has not been suicidal at some point in time,” observes Earnshaw.
Does he think his grandfather, who was released from the psychiatric ward at an Ogden hospital 12 days before he died by suicide 50 years ago, would have lived on in today’s world?
“I think things would have been very different with my grandfather,” Earnshaw says diplomatically. “Back then insurances didn’t cover much of inpatient costs and part of the reason he was discharged was because they didn’t have coverage. I know it took a long time for my mother to talk him into actually even seeing somebody for care, which may have been too late. I also think the family as a whole would have rallied around the situation, not being afraid to address it as they were back then.”
Viewed through today’s lens, “the important thing people would have seen,” Earnshaw stresses, “is that the outcome of his life was a result of his illness, not a result of his character.”
Mental illness wasn’t something Grandpa chose. No one would have said he was going to hell for that.