Esperanza Center reaches out to mentally ill
Roger Lezcano is thoughtful when he speaks. He leans on a dark
brown cane when he stands or walks. He has dark eyes, thick
eyebrows and a shock of graying hair. He smiles sheepishly when a
stranger asks him personal questions, but he is at home when
talking to the staff and clients at Esperanza Center on Fifth
Street in Hollister.
Esperanza Center reaches out to mentally ill
Roger Lezcano is thoughtful when he speaks. He leans on a dark brown cane when he stands or walks. He has dark eyes, thick eyebrows and a shock of graying hair. He smiles sheepishly when a stranger asks him personal questions, but he is at home when talking to the staff and clients at Esperanza Center on Fifth Street in Hollister.
Esperanza Center is a community center that caters to local residents with mental illness, especially the ones who are least likely to seek help such as homeless residents or teens 16 and up. The building, just half a block from City Hall, has the feel of a home inside with sea green walls in a common area and lemon yellow paint in the kitchen. It has a pool and ping-pong table, and a television. In the kitchen, shelves are stocked with dry and canned goods, and there is a washer and dryer just outside it.
The center opened more than a year ago with funds from the Mental Health Services Act, Proposition 63, passed in November 2003. The act imposed a 1 percent income tax on personal income over $1 million to offer prevention, early intervention and services for those living with mental illness.
Lezcano is a volunteer at Esperanza Center, but he is also a client.
He was diagnosed with schizophrenia 27 years ago.
“I was suicidal,” he said. “I was fearful, depressed.”
On a recent afternoon he spoke as part of a panel of clients who shared their own struggles with mental illness in hopes of encouraging others to get help. The event was part of an open house to let the community know about the program. Martha Hernandez and Jeremy Oliver spoke alongside Lezcano about their own illnesses.
Esperanza Center – literally “Hope Center” in Spanish – is the new wave in treating mental illness.
“We want to pull people in with a setting that is less clinical,” said Patricia Ayers, the assistant director of San Benito County’s Behavioral Health Department. “When they first come in, they can participate and after a few times, if they want to keep participating, they need to enroll.”
The center caters to a homeless population, that at this time of the year has no nightly shelter; teens 16 and up who are uncomfortable in a clinical setting; and people with language barriers. Staff members offer one-on-one counseling, peer groups and also have a telemetry program that provides Spanish-language therapists for clients through a television. For the population without steady shelter, that’s where the washer and dryer, as well as shower facilities come in.
“It hurts the self-esteem not to be able to clean and wash,” Ayers said. “And how can they go to job interviews?”
The kitchen offers a safe place for a meal, but it serves a dual purpose in that a staff can work with clients on nutrition since some have never lived alone, or don’t know how to handle weight gain caused by the medications they take.
For teens, it can be hard to get them to accept help, Ayers said.
“A lot of times parents, schools or probably someone is telling them they have to be here rather than because they want to be here,” Ayers said.
They treat people with a range of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Even now, the stigma about mental illness causes some to shun help.
“We are trying to help [people] understand this isn’t something the individual or the family created,” Ayers said. “It isn’t something they can just stop. They are not deficient. They just need to learn different coping skills, find resources.”
In a tan-colored shirt and jeans, Lezcano has come a long way in his recovery as he points to faded scars on his arms from failed attempts to take his own life.
Diagnosed in 1984, he said he had to be watched 24 hours a day.
“I would get up from a sound sleep and run out into traffic,” he said, of his time living in San Francisco. “At times, my family gave up on me only because they didn’t know how to control me.”
He was hospitalized from time to time.
“I was threatened to lose my freedom,” he said, of talks to put him in a permanent hospital facility.
He and his wife moved to Hollister in 1997. His wife, Maria, who suffers from depression, looked up the behavioral health department right away.
“I started receiving services from behavioral health and it has been positive for my family and myself,” he said. “It hasn’t been easy, but the doctors have been supportive.”
Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder that affects 1.1 percent of U.S. adults 18 or older, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. It is marked by episodes of hearing voices, believing others are broadcasting their thoughts to the world or believing others are plotting to harm them.
As with Lezcano, who was diagnosed around age 20, symptoms tend to develop in the late teens and early 20s for men; women typically develop symptoms in their 20s and 30s. Symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, movement disorders, flat affect, social withdrawal and cognitive deficits. There is no cure, but atypical antipsychotic drugs developed in the 1990s have had less serious side effects than early generations of medication, according to NIMH.
“They helped me to accept my illness, to learn and dream again, and live my life,” Lezcano said.
Now he is focused not just on his own recovery, but that of other clients at the center. He takes credit for the pool and ping-pong tables in the center, and says he has suggested the staff have volunteers teach dance classes, or put together programs for people in wheelchairs.
“I almost gave up on Roger,” his wife, Maria, said. “I always had faith that one day I would see Roger sitting in that chair giving out advice.”
They both said they wished there were a place such as Esperanza Center for them when they were at their low point, when they were homeless in San Francisco.
“We’re just like anybody else except we have an illness that deprives us of a lot of things,” Lezcano said. “We have to be medicated, but when we are out of control we might be looked at as strange. We are struggling to show we can be a part of the community.”
