Texas Tribune
Clubhouse programs aid Texans with mental health issues
by By Stephen Simpson, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-05 05:00:00
SUMMARY: Jonathan Denhart, a 60-year-old Austin resident battling bipolar and substance use disorders, found salvation in Austin Clubhouse after being discharged from a mental health hospital. Austin Clubhouse, part of Clubhouse International, provides community and vocational support for individuals with mental health issues. Denhart attributes his year-long sobriety and renewed purpose to this supportive environment. Although Texas has state-run step-down programs, these are insufficient to meet demand, especially in rural areas. Austin Clubhouse helps members like Abdul Majid Badini regain stability and purpose, highlighting the effectiveness of supportive communities in mental health recovery.
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When Jonathan Denhart was discharged from the psych ward at Austin Oaks Hospital last year, he was prepared to be back very soon.
For more than 40 years, Denhart has cycled through rehabs, sober housing, mental health hospitals, and 12-step programs to treat his bipolar and substance use disorders, but nothing worked.
The 60-year-old Austin resident couldn't find or keep a job, and he knew once he left the hospital, the temptations of the outside world would be too much again.
As Denhart was about to walk out the door a hospital staff member stopped him and suggested he stop by a place called Austin Clubhouse to try a vocational rehabilitation program.
“I had never heard about this, but they told me they might give me the structure and purpose I needed once I left,” he said. “I had to give it a shot.”
When Denhart walked into the small facility in Central Austin, he said he felt an immediate sense of acceptance. He looked around the rented space owned by Hyde Park Christian Church and met other people dealing with their own mental illness or substance abuse problems. He had finally found a community for people like him.
The Austin Clubhouse provides services to help people once they leave state mental health hospitals.
Credit:
Montinique Monroe for The Texas Tribune
Austin Clubhouse members wash dishes at the facility.
Credit:
Montinique Monroe for the Texas Tribune
Today, Denhart has been sober for more than a year and works in the snack bar for around six hours a day at Austin Clubhouse, passing out coffee and snacks. He said the work has given him a renewed sense of purpose in life that had been missing.
“I like what I see when I look in the mirror now,” he said. “Instead of self-doubt and hatred, I feel happiness. It's not easy, and I still have days that are hard, but I am happy now.”
Denhart is one of over 100,000 people who are discharged from mental health hospitals every year in Texas, according to a 2019 study, and face multiple barriers to successfully transitioning back into the community. The biggest challenges are a lack of suitable housing, limited financial resources, issues with daily living skills, involvement with the criminal justice system and a lack of confidence or sense of purpose. Those are amplified in rural and remote regions where services, support, and housing are even more difficult to find.
The state responded in 2021 when lawmakers directed Texas Health and Human Services to produce a study on step-down services that can be used to help people once they leave state mental health hospitals. The result was the Texas State Hospital Step-Down program, which provides pre- and post-transition services, including short-term residential placements, to support individuals with severe mental illness.
The program is expected to add approximately 65 beds, bringing the total to 80 beds, by the end of August. Even with the additional beds, the program is nowhere close to addressing the demand for services for a state with more than 30 million residents, where 98% of the 254 counties are designated as Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas — where there's only one mental health clinician for every 30,000 residents. The state's behavioral health worker shortage is expected to grow.
During the fiscal year that ended in August 2023, the program had only facilitated the transition of 23 people from state hospitals, most of them people waiting to have their competency restored to stand trial in a criminal case.
Meanwhile, privately-run step-down programs like Austin Clubhouse — which is part of Clubhouse International, a global nonprofit organization — have been doing similar work for decades, working to prevent people from returning to a hospital after they are discharged by helping them make new friends, get jobs, enroll in school, and live healthier lifestyles via a multitude of different programs.
The state has contracts with seven clubhouse programs located in Richmond, Austin, Plano, Dallas-Fort Worth, Richardson, Houston, and San Antonio. Depending on membership, they can help nearly 2,000 people a year. .
“I think the main problem we deal with is that most people don't know we are even here,” said Jennifer Cardenas, executive director of Austin Clubhouse, which helps around 1,300 people per year. “We are here to show people that you don't have just to sit at home once you are released from the hospital, you don't have to just sit at home and do nothing. You can have a life again.”
A second chance
Abdul Majid Badini looks back on his life, regretting the first time he picked up drinking alcohol.
Badini, a 58-year-old from Balochistan, a region divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. He said he fled his home after being arrested for belonging to a political organization in Pakistan called the Balochistan Student Organization. He said he witnessed a friend being hanged by the Pakistani government for belonging to the organization and decided to head to Russia to study medicine.
“I came from an Islamic, fundamentalist, tribalistic society to a socialist, free society. I finally had freedom,” he said. “I was able to drink and have friendships with women. I gained freedom and forgot my aim of struggling for my nation.”
Austin Clubhouse member Abdul Majid Badini at the Austin Clubhouse, which rents space from Hyde Park Christian Church.
Credit:
Montinique Monroe for the Texas Tribune
His newfound freedom and the allure of Russian clubs, eventually turned him into an alcoholic. He dropped out of medical school, and said his girlfriend left him due to his drinking. By the time he migrated to the United States in 2011, settling in Texas, he was dealing with depression and anxiety due to his addiction.
“I started to hallucinate and was paranoid. I thought I was being controlled by the KGB. I was mentally sick, and when I wasn't drinking, I felt pain all over my body,” Badini said.
Badini spent several decades in Russia and America trapped on the vicious merry-go-round of addiction and mental illness. In his home country, he was a writer for a local newspaper and an aspiring medical professional, but in America, he was a homeless alcoholic dealing with depression who felt like he was a burden on society.
“I felt like a parasite,” Badini said. “Alcohol took my abilities. I didn't want to look at myself anymore.”
Cardenas, the Austin Clubhouse director, said the feeling of being a burden is common among people with mental illness, and those who are hospitalized often have trouble integrating back into society. She said this leaves a lot of people with severe mental illness relying on disability or Supplemental Security Income to survive.
“A lot of people, once they are released from the hospital, don't trust themselves to go back to work or too ashamed to be with friends or family,” she said. “This leads to isolation and oftentimes just makes things worse.”
Patients created their own program
Step-down programs became popular in the early 1990s when states transitioned from housing people in state hospitals to offering services in community-based mental health centers. But the idea of a club for people with mental illness goes back to the late 1940s, when seven patients at Rockland Psychiatric Center in New York formed a self-help group that met in a hospital club room.
Soon after leaving the hospital, they began meeting on the steps of the New York City Public Library to recreate the “club room” experience, believing that it would sustain their recovery and provide a mutual support system. This eventually led to them purchasing their own building, the Fountain House, which was initially staffed and operated solely by ex-psychiatric patients and volunteers.
This was an unconventional idea in the medical world at the time, but as the years went on, the movement grew into a worldwide network after receiving a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1977 to establish a training program that others could adopt to create their own clubhouse facilities. Today there are more than 350 clubhouse programs in 32 countries, with 186 in the United States.
For someone like Rebekah Johnson-Carson, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the eighth grade, the clubhouse model provides a community for those who often feel ostracized by the general public.
“In high school, I often ate lunch in the special education classroom instead of the cafeteria because a lot of the regular students didn't understand what I was going through or thought I was faking,” she said.
Then, one day last summer, Johnson-Carson toured Austin Clubhouse and found the community she had been looking for all this time.
Rebekah Johnson-Carson outside the Austin Clubhouse.
Credit:
Montinique Monroe for the Texas Tribune
“The clubhouse gives people a chance to connect and learn how to socialize and feel love and support,” she said.
People at the Austin Clubhouse are referred to as “members” instead of clients or patients because the organization chooses not to focus on mental illness but instead on their strengths.
Membership is open to anyone over 18 who has a mental health diagnosis and is following a treatment plan with a clinician. The services are free, voluntary, and lifelong, paid for through public and private grants, corporate donors and a state contract.
The Austin Clubhouse offers programs in employment, education, housing, and health and wellness. It doesn't offer mental health treatment because they are an add-on to clinical assistance, not a replacement.
Johnson-Carson credits the clubhouse program with helping her graduate last year from Austin Community College with a recreational therapy degree. She is ready to help others, but said her attachment to the clubhouse will never fade.
“Sometimes, when you are going through a hard time when you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, all you need is someone to get you through the tunnel, not point out the light,” she said. “That is what this program provides.”
“I am grateful to be alive”
Those who choose to join one of the programs work side-by-side with staff by volunteering their time gardening, working phone lines, helping people at the front desk, cooking, or other tasks. The goal is to allow those who have undergone treatment for a severe mental illness to develop a sense of purpose and re-enter the community and the workforce.
Badini decided to participate in one of the programs at Austin Clubhouse on the recommendation of his doctor. When he first arrived a couple of years ago, the clubhouse helped him get a job at a small business in Austin doing tasks like keeping the shelves stocked, but this was a responsibility he said he wasn't ready for yet.
Abdul Majid Badini and fellow Clubhouse member John Woods shop for groceries in H-E-B in Austin on May 29, 2024.
Credit:
Montinique Monroe for the Texas Tribune
“I was still dealing with my addiction, and I missed my job and was fired. I was doing bad. I couldn't move or even get myself to the restroom. I had thoughts of suicide,” Badini said.
Badini said when he started going to the clubhouse daily late last year, he began to notice a difference within himself as his confidence grew.
“I began to take care of myself, making sure to eat and sleep enough and save money. I stopped listening to the voices, and my depression and anxiety seemed to go away,” he said.
The man from Balochistan now works at an Austin Goodwill and has been sober for almost 100 days. He said he has been able to send money back to his family, who still live in the Balochistan region. He is also looking to become a translator and get back into writing.
“I want to be a productive member of society for myself and for my family,” Badini said. “I lost so much time, but I am grateful to be alive. I thought I had wasted 35 years of my life, but I can still help my country and my father. I appreciate the time I still have left now.”
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Texas to double state fund aimed at expanding power grid
by By Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune – 2024-07-01 17:05:54
SUMMARY: The state of Texas plans to double the Texas Energy Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion to expand the power grid as electricity demand is expected to nearly double by 2030. This follows a forecast by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which estimated the state's main grid would need to supply nearly twice its current power. The fund, approved by voters in November 2023, offers low-interest loans for new gas-fueled power plants. The state's grid has faced scrutiny since a 2021 winter storm caused extensive outages. Companies must apply for loans by July 27.
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The state of Texas plans to double a state fund aimed at expanding the power grid as demand for electricity is expected to nearly double over the next six years.
The state will look to boost the Texas Energy Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced on Monday. The fund was approved by voters in November 2023 to offer low-interest loans to incentivize development of new gas-fueled power plants.
The announcement comes soon after a new prediction by the state's main grid operator that said electricity needs will surge in the coming years. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas estimated that the state's main power grid would have to provide nearly double the amount of power it currently supplies by 2030.
The numbers in the new forecast, Abbott and Patrick said in a press release, “call for an immediate review of all policies concerning the grid.”
The state's grid came under intense public and legislative scrutiny after a winter storm in 2021 knocked out its operations, causing dayslong power outages across the state in freezing temperatures that left millions of Texans without lights or heat. Hundreds died.
The Texas Energy Fund set aside $5 billion to fund 3% interest loans to help construct new gas-fueled power plants that are not dependent on the weather and that could power 20,000 homes or more.
The fund was also designed to pay out bonuses to companies that connect new gas-fueled plants to the main grid by June 2029, and to offer grants for modernizing, weatherizing and managing vegetation growth around electricity infrastructure in Texas outside the main electricity market, which meets around 90% of the state's power needs.
The state received notices of intent to apply for $39 billion in loans — almost eight times more than what was initially set aside, Abbott and Patrick said. They added that the average plant will take three to four years to complete, and new transmission lines will take three to six years to complete.
Companies have until July 27 to apply for a loan.
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Texas Tribune
Commanding officer confirms Troy Nehls has two Bronze Stars
by By Isaac Yu, The Texas Tribune – 2024-07-01 13:02:57
SUMMARY: The Texas Tribune reports that the military record of Rep. Troy Nehls has come under scrutiny. A CBS investigation revealed discrepancies in Nehls' service decorations, including claims of a second Bronze Star and a Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB), which the Pentagon has not corroborated. Nehls' former commanding officer, Jason Burke, affirmed awarding him a second Bronze Star in 2008. Despite the Pentagon's records indicating only one Bronze Star and no CIB, Nehls insists on social media that he earned both awards. Nehls, facing criticism, has stopped wearing the CIB, which was revoked in 2023 due to service in a non-combat role.
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WASHINGTON — The commanding officer of a 2008 tour in Afghanistan that included then-U.S. Army Major Troy Nehls told The Texas Tribune that he recalls awarding the now-congressman his second Bronze Star award.
That award — which recognizes service members who show heroism in the field — has been called into question after a CBS investigation reported Nehls had been touting military decorations that did not match his service record provided by the Pentagon. In campaign ads and in his House biography, Nehls, R-Richmond, has posted pictures wearing an Army uniform and two Bronze Star medals. He has also worn the Combat Infantryman Badge lapel pin, awarded to soldiers for service in combat.
The investigation found that the Pentagon reported Nehls received only one Bronze star and that the Combat Infantryman Badge was awarded in error and rescinded in 2023. Nehls, who has been publicly criticized by members of his own party amid the claims of stolen valor, said on social media that he did have two Bronze Stars. But he has since stopped wearing the CIB.
But Jason Burke, the Navy captain who led the 130-person joint task force Nehls served on during his tour, recalled awarding the medal to Nehls. Nehls received the medal at a ceremony with several other officers in the fall of 2008, shortly before Nehls finished his tour and returned to Texas, Burke told the Tribune.
“You're getting that award if you've done a good job and met the criteria,” said the now-retired Burke, who is listed on the award certificate as Nehls' commanding officer. “He earned it, and received it.”
Nehls, who represents a swath of Houston suburbs, served as Burke's second-in-command under a joint effort called Task Force Currahee. Their unit, which included both Army and Navy officers, worked on provincial reconstruction, building roads, clinics and schools in eastern Afghanistan's Ghazni Province. Burke said the team's convoys regularly came under Taliban ambushes and guerrilla attacks.
The Bronze Star award must be recommended by a commander, and any service member in any branch of the military working an operation involving a conflict with an opposing force is eligible. The CIB, by contrast, is only given to those in combat roles.
It was relatively standard during the U.S.'s war on terrorism, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, for officers of certain ranks to receive a some kind of award upon completing a tour, often a Bronze Star. Nehls' first star was awarded for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004, where he trained 13 staff members of an Iraqi government office to perform financial assessments, according to the certificate.
A spokesperson for Nehls declined to comment on this story, pointing to a post on X Nehls made last month defending his record and posting photos of the certificates of his two Bronze Stars, and his copy of the underlying nomination forms. Burke's sign-off can be seen on the 2008 documentation, known as a Form 638, along with signatures from two higher-level officials.
CBS reported the Pentagon would conduct another review of Nehls' record. The most recent summary of his service and awards, provided to the Tribune by a Pentagon spokesperson on Friday, lists only one Bronze Star and no CIB.
The systems for keeping records for military awards can be difficult to navigate. A soldier often becomes responsible for making sure awards paperwork is turned over to a personnel officer.
That means documentation for awards sometimes slips through the cracks, according to retired Army sergeant Anthony Anderson, who has investigated numerous instances of stolen valor.
“I wouldn't say it's common, but it does happen,” Anderson said.
Anderson said he had previously spoken with Nehls' chief of staff, encouraging them to submit documentation of the second Bronze Star to the Pentagon to be added to Nehls record.
He said he would be surprised if an officer in Nehls' position hadn't received a Bronze Star.
Nehls' military record has become a thorn for him in recent months. He announced that he would stop wearing the Combat Infantryman Badge last week in response to reports that the badge had been revoked in 2023.
Nehls was found to be ineligible for that badge because he had served in Afghanistan in a civil role, not as a combatant infantryman. Nehls did serve as an infantryman during his time with the Wisconsin National Guard in the 1990s, completing a tour in Bosnia.
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Texas Tribune
Robert Robertson execution day set in Texas shaken baby case
by By Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune – 2024-07-01 11:33:10
SUMMARY: A Texas court has scheduled Robert Roberson's execution for October 17. Roberson, sentenced to death in 2003 for his 2-year-old daughter's death, has consistently challenged the conviction, claiming it was based on questionable science. Despite halting his execution in 2016 due to doubts about shaken baby syndrome, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his death sentence in 2023. Roberson's attorneys argue new evidence shows his daughter died of natural causes, not head trauma, and question the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis. The execution date triggers deadlines for last-minute legal and clemency filings.
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A Texas court on Monday set an execution date for Robert Roberson, who was sentenced to death in 2003 for killing his 2-year-old daughter but has consistently challenged the conviction on the claim that it was based on questionable science.
Roberson has maintained his innocence while being held on death row for more than 20 years. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals previously halted his execution in 2016. But in 2023, the state's highest criminal court decided that doubt over the cause of his daughter's death was not enough to overturn his death sentence.
His new execution date is set for Oct. 17.
Roberson's attorneys objected to the scheduling of an execution after Anderson County prosecutors requested on June 17 that a date be set. His attorneys said they have new evidence to bolster their case and that they planned to file a new request to overturn his conviction.
As a result, his attorneys argued, setting an execution date would be “premature and unjust.”
Roberson was convicted of killing his sickly 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, after he rushed her blue, limp body to the hospital. He said that Nikki fell from the bed while they were sleeping in their home in the East Texas town of Palestine and that he awoke to find her unresponsive. But doctors and nurses, who were unable to revive her, did not believe such a low fall could have caused the fatal injuries and suspected child abuse.
At trial, doctors testified that Nikki's death was consistent with shaken baby syndrome — in which an infant is severely injured from being shaken violently back and forth — and a jury convicted Roberson.
The Court of Criminal Appeals in 2016 stopped his execution and sent the case back to the trial court after the scientific consensus around shaken baby syndrome diagnoses came into question. Many doctors believe the condition is used as an explanation for an infant's death too often in criminal cases, without considering other possibilities and the baby's medical history.
The Court of Criminal Appeals' decision was largely a product of a 2013 state law, dubbed the “junk science law,” which allows Texas courts to overturn a conviction when the scientific evidence used to reach a verdict has since changed or been discredited. Lawmakers, in passing the law, highlighted cases of infant trauma that used faulty science to convict defendants as examples of the cases the legislation was meant to target.
Roberson's attorneys, in their opposition to setting an execution date, cited “overwhelming new evidence” that Nikki died of “natural and accidental causes” — not due to head trauma.
They wrote that Nikki had “severe, undiagnosed” pneumonia that caused her to stop breathing, collapse and turn blue before she was discovered. Then, instead of identifying her pneumonia, doctors prescribed her Phenergan and codeine, drugs that are no longer given to children her age, further suppressing her breathing, they argued.
“It is irrefutable that Nikki's medical records show that she was severely ill during the last week of her life,” Roberson's attorneys wrote, noting that in the week before her death, Roberson had taken Nikki to the emergency room because she had been coughing, wheezing and struggling with diarrhea for several days, and to her pediatrician's office, where her temperature came in at 104.5 degrees.
“There was a tragic, untimely death of a sick child whose impaired, impoverished father did not know how to explain what has confounded the medical community for decades,” Roberson's attorneys wrote.
They have also argued that new scientific evidence suggests that it is impossible to shake a toddler to death without causing serious neck injuries, which Nikki did not have.
And they cited developments in a similar case in Dallas County, in which a man was convicted of injuring a child. His conviction was based in part on now partially recanted testimony from a child abuse expert who provided similar testimony on shaken baby syndrome in Roberson's case. Prosecutors in Dallas County have said the defendant should get a new trial.
In 2023, when the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Roberson a new trial, prosecutors argued that the evidence supporting Roberson's conviction was still “clear and convincing” and that the science around shaken baby syndrome had not changed as much as his defense attorneys claimed. Witnesses also testified at trial that Roberson had a bad temper and would shake and spank Nikki when she would not stop crying.
The scheduling of Roberson's execution triggers a series of deadlines for any last filings in state and federal court to seek relief and begin a request for clemency.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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