Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
“Love and work, work and love, that’s all there is.”
—Sigmund Freud
We’re the second-largest clubhouse in the world,” out of just about 400, announces Independence Center member Steven Name. “The largest is Fountain House in New York City.”
He’s giving me a tour of the sunny, three-story building on Forest Park Avenue. “We don’t believe in the name-tag thing, so unless I point out who’s staff and who’s members, you’re not going to know.” He grins. “I always say, ‘I put my shirt on one arm at a time just like Mike Keller does.’”
Keller is the executive director of Independence Center, and thus also runs the “clubhouse”—a noun he loathes. “Some people think it sounds like St. Louis Country Club,” he says, “and I think it sounds like Little Rascals. I hate it! But as a concept, it’s very, very good.”
Like any clubhouse, this is at once a place, a program, and a group of people. It’s designed to open opportunities for people with severe, persistent mental illnesses by turning the focus away from their illness to their strengths and the ways they can do constructive and creative work. Some members have advanced degrees, but they’ve lost their nerve; their anxiety spikes at just the thought of entering a workplace. Others have always been told by parents or doctors, “You’ll never be able to work”—which they’ve translated as, “You’re useless.”
At Independence Center, there’s work for everyone, and those indistinguishable staffers and members explain, guide, support, encourage, and drain the anxiety out of new tasks, gently drawing people out of solitary hell and into community.
“John Beard started the first clubhouse in 1948,” Name says. “Folks had been in mental hospitals, and at the end of World War II, the hospitals were overflowing. A lot of patients ended up dying in the parks in New York City because they had nowhere to go. John Beard was a social worker. I love his work. He knew how to get to people’s hearts.
“There was this group called WANA, We Are Not Alone, and they were very particular about who they let in their club,” Name continues. “John pointed out to them that everybody who wanted to be in the club had a mental illness; they all had the same thing going on. So WANA ended up letting in anybody who wanted to be in the club. Then two ladies from Germany bought a house, and in the back was a fountain. They heard about John Beard, and they offered it to him. Before that, the WANA members would meet at the Chock full o’Nuts coffee shop—I love that!—and libraries and free places.”
The ladies offered their maids’ services, but Beard wanted the residents to do the housework themselves, so they’d learn how to do laundry, cook, and clean. “When the patients would go to sleep,” Name says, “he would go in their rooms, get a ladder, and paint a picture on the ceiling. He would put candy bars under their pillows. He took members to movies and dances and showed them how to spend their own money. He wanted them to be able to work and make their own money.”
Keller picks up the story later, telling me how a group of powerful, influential families in St. Louis heard about Beard’s Fountain House. Among them were John Maguire, then CFO of General Dynamics; Nick Franchot, CEO of Christy Refractories; Bryan Cave partner George Hecker and his wife, Susan; and Kellwood Company co-founder Bill Wenzel. “They all knew one another socially and through business, but they met in the day rooms of hospitals when they were seeing their kids,” he says. “A wave of deinstitutionalization was going on, and people were being turned out in the streets. Susan Hecker said to Bob Harvey, who worked with Beard, ‘I just don’t know where our children are going to put their heads at night.’
“He said, ‘Lady, you are asking the wrong question. Give them something to do with their days, and the nights will take care of themselves.’”
The St. Louis clubhouse opened in 1981. Thirty years later, “there are 4,248 members on the lifetime rolls, and they all have the right of return,” Name says. “We’re like Israel.”
Independence Center also provides housing and runs a day hospital with Washington University psychiatrists on staff. Group therapy’s always available there. But at the clubhouse, the emphasis is not on illness; it’s on work.
First, people acquire or refresh job skills by doing real work for Independence Center—clerical work or work at the “upscale resale” shop, the florist, or the Arch View Café. “That’s kind of how we break through with new members,” Name says, “by them being able to do things they’ve always been told they can’t do. It’s just a thrill to watch that happen.” He taught one man to answer the phones, and he loved it so much, it’s now his undisputed territory. “He’ll say, ‘How can I help you?’ and you can tell by the warmth in his voice that he really wants to know.” A young woman started out incredibly shy, but she’s now giving tours. “She’s blossomed,” Name says with satisfaction. “I said, ‘Just take your time. We never cover-coat anything. You be honest, and just tell them what a
clubhouse is.’”
He remembers how scared he was when he first came here. “May 7, 2007. I remember my starting date. I knew it was a safe place,” he adds quickly, “but just not knowing anybody…” Now he moves easily through the building, checking with staff and members on various projects as he passes by. He comes in almost every day; if he’s not scheduled at his part-time job, he’s here at 8 a.m., when the doors open.
His job’s at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, delivering patient trays and unloading carts in the dish room. It started as a “T”—transitional employment, in a job secured and closely supported by Independence Center. “Our staff learn the jobs first,” he explains. “Then they come back and find the right person, check on him, check with the employer. If he gets sick, the staffer goes in and works; we guarantee 100 percent full coverage.” The next level is supported employment, at companies that have a relationship with Independence Center. “You can have a competitive interview,” Name explains. “You are finding the job; it’s not a job the clubhouse owns.” Barnes-Jewish, for example, soon made Name’s job permanent and added 10 hours per week.
He leads me downstairs to see the center’s pioneering wellness area, with classes in “African dance, yoga, buttgusting.” Buttgusting? He chuckles. “It’s ‘Butts and Guts’! And it’s very important that we exercise and eat right, because our medication makes us gain weight. If we’re not doing that, we’re going to die 25 years earlier than the average person.”
Keller later recalls how shocked the rest of the clubhouse world was: “‘In the middle of the workday, you’re going to let your members go work out?’ Yes! The most progressive companies in the world are doing that now. And we have more
reason.”
Across from the exercise room is a locked area where members can make an appointment to review their own medical records. Name’s never done it. “I know what’s in there,” he says, his gesture weary. I ask how it felt to be so depressed that his life ground to a halt. “It made me feel like my manlihood was gone,” he says, “just knowing I wasn’t going to be able to do things I used to do. So to come to a place like this, and get the opportunity to do a T or volunteer in the unit… The more I did, the more—my mental illness will always be there, but I didn’t worry about my mental illness. If you’re at home not doing anything, you’re going to remain depressed.
“There are still days I’ll come in and not say a word, and staff will come up and say, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Something’s going on today,’ they’ll say, ‘You’re not talking!’ We have one gentleman who, if he hasn’t seen me in a day, he’s knocking on my door, and he won’t stop! We all try to engage everybody, because to isolate yourself, you are falling back into that pit.
“It takes a while for some people to get used to that care,” he adds. “A lot of our members grew up with people not caring. Back in the day, doctors were always saying, ‘Well, you can’t cure it.’ People got…put away.”
Name was born in West Germany in 1965. At 5, he was adopted by an American couple in the military. They brought him back to the States with their six biological children. “I don’t know if I’m German,” he says. “My parents who adopted me said my parents had left me with an aunt maybe, and they were in East Germany and tried to get back to West Germany and they were killed. All I know is, I can’t run for president of the United States!
“A lot of people say, ‘Why don’t you search for more information?’” he adds. “I kind of don’t want to know. My [adoptive] mom was very embarrassed that I had a mental illness.” He says she noticed signs a year after returning to the States, and a psychiatrist diagnosed both mental illness and a learning disability. “But I think I’ve outgrown the learning disability,” he says.
“My mother changed after that. She wasn’t the loving mother she was before she found out. I grew up being by myself, not really hanging around my brothers and sisters. It was a big stigma back then; people thought you could catch it.” His mother divorced and moved with her boyfriend to a trailer court in West Lafayette, Ind. Name got a job cleaning out trailers, and three months later, he handed his mother his first paycheck, a whopping $500. She took the other kids to town to buy clothes and school supplies. “There was only room for seven,” he says. “I said, ‘I’ll stay home,’ which was OK; I would have anyway.” But when they came back, he says, they hadn’t brought any supplies for him. “I said, ‘But I gave you $500!’ She said, ‘That’s your rent.’”
Seeing my expression, he shrugs and offers what might have been his mother’s perspective: “‘If I hit my biological children, I’ll be scarred. But if I hit you, my adopted child, it will be OK.’” He left home at 16, graduated high school, got married, and didn’t tell his wife that he had a mental illness. “In ’93, I was walking along a bridge, and I started hearing voices, and my mom saying, ‘You are worthless.’ I stepped over the wall and stood at the edge, must have been there a good two hours. When I turned around, police had blocked both ends of the bridge. The officer said, ‘Put your hand out.’ He never gave up. He said, ‘I’ll personally take you to the hospital. I want you to get the help you need.’”
Name divorced. In time, his health stabilized, and he stopped taking medicine. In 2005, his stepfather died, his boss wouldn’t give him leave to go to the funeral, and he had an argument with his girlfriend and put his fist through his car windshield. “So then my mental illness started coming alive again,” he says. “In 2006, my sister passed away, and it was like I had a nervous breakdown.” He was hospitalized twice, but none of the medication and electroconvulsive therapy could budge the massive depression now present alongside schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He wound up homeless. “In 2007, I started going to Independence Center, and that really helped,” he says. “Every day, I get up and come here. I have a job to do. I don’t call this my clubhouse; I call it my office. And my family.
“If I could win the Powerball and give the clubhouse $7 million, that would not pay for what the clubhouse has done for me.”
