By Debra Jasper
and Spencer Hunt
Enquirer Columbus Bureau

Steve Wertepny hugs his daughter Bradley, 15, in a treatment center in College Hill. There are too few such centers in the region. (Michael E. Keating photo)

By the time Bradley Wertepny turned 14, she believed trees and bushes could talk, cartoons were real and worms crawled through her cereal bowl each morning.

"We had a kid who had developed full-blown schizophrenia," says her mom, Pat Wertepny. "It was like watching someone spiral down a deep, black hole."

Just a few years earlier, Bradley had made As and Bs in her fifth-grade class and loved to read Harry Potter. But her growing mental illness took all that away. It was as if someone had erased the little girl she once had been.

"Watching her come so far and then disintegrate was heartbreaking," says Wertepny, her voice filled with emotion. "At one point, she even looked at me and asked who I was."

Wertepny and her husband, Steve, knew they had to find help. But they had no idea it would take years to maneuver through a complex mental health bureaucracy where waiting lists are long, staff shortages are common and children often go without.

"It's a terrible system, and what we went through was horrible," Wertepny says. "But as bad as it's been, we were some of the lucky ones, and that's what's so scary."

The Wertepnys were more fortunate than most because Steve's insurance through his management job at Procter and Gamble covered 100 percent of Bradley's treatment costs. Insurance companies typically limit mental health coverage to 20 to 30 days of treatment and require co-pays.

But even with excellent benefits, the family struggled to find medical specialists and a treatment center in Greater Cincinnati. The shortage of child psychiatrists in the area means families routinely wait three months or longer just for an office visit. Children often wait even longer, sometimes years, to get into a treatment center that offers long-term care.

The Wertepnys' search for a center began in 2000 when Bradley's psychiatrist recommended that she be sent to a facility in Tennessee. The specialist said it was the closest one equipped to deal with children as ill as Bradley, who at 11 was disoriented, had bipolar disorder, psychotic seizures and epilepsy.

"She would seem fine for a while and then she'd go ballistic for no reason," Wertepny recalls. "She'd have screaming fits and go into a fantasy world. "

The couple balked at sending their daughter out of state, but they had few options closer to home.

At the time, 19 other children waited for psychiatric beds at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The couple searched for openings at other Ohio facilities and finally found one in Dayton.

"There were two dozen parents like us hanging on by our fingernails, waiting," Wertepny recalls. "But our insurance is incredible, and it's been a lifesaver."

The center treated Bradley and sent her back home a few weeks later more sedated but far from well. By then, Wertepny, who has a degree in mechanical engineering and also worked at Procter and Gamble, decided to quit to stay home with her daughter and advocate to get her help.

She spent days at a time rocking the little girl in her arms. Sometimes Bradley responded. Other times she was unmoved.

"It was overwhelmingly depressing," Wertepny says.

All told, Bradley was hospitalized five times and placed on 11 different medications at one time. But instead of getting better, she grew more violent and started having "rage attacks."

"At dinner, she'd see things crawling in her food and think her brother put them there," Steve Wertepny explains. "She was completely irrational. She'd start screaming for no reason."

The Wertepnys worried about the impact of her behavior on their other two children, now 16 and 12. The intense stress also took its toll on their marriage.

For years, they had taught weekend courses on how to have a healthy marriage. Suddenly, they needed every ounce of advice they had ever given. "If you have a child that is mentally ill, the first thing that usually falls apart is the marriage," Pat Wertepny says. "If you haven't lived it, you don't have a clue how hard it can be. I look back and think, 'How did we survive?' "

The stress continued to build until last March, when the College Hill Campus of Children's Hospital, opened. The day Bradley moved into the new psychiatric facility, everything changed for the Wertepnys. Their children could eat dinner without being attacked. They could take them out to a restaurant, or to a museum or concert.

And Bradley can now read again, with new anti-psychotic drugs and nearly a year of intense therapy behind her. She wins spelling bees, does sixth- to eighth-grade schoolwork and loves to draw.

Even Bradley recognizes she has traveled a long, harrowing road. She recently told her doctor she feels like she's been in another dimension, where she couldn't grow up.

"She is coming out of her psychosis," her mom says, cautiously.

The couple credits Bradley's improvement to the year of in-depth attention at College Hill. In early February, they brought her home - where she is doing well and attending a special education class at Liberty Junior High School.

"Mental illness isn't a dirty little secret, it's a treatable illness," Wertepny says. "But a lot of children never get the help they need to get better."