By Debra Jasper
and Spencer Hunt
Enquirer Columbus Bureau

Jim and Carol Stansbury gave up daughter Laura (in senior picture) to get her mental help. Only as an adult did she get the right help. (Michael E. Keating photo)

At 13, Laura Wissler was so mentally ill that a heavy pounding in her head drowned out everything else.

"It was like this tremendous waterfall rushing around you, just a whirling of thoughts that you couldn't stop," she says. "It was so loud it was deafening."

Overwhelmed and depressed, Wissler did the only thing she could think of to make the noise go away: She got drunk, downed part of a bottle of Pine-Sol and prepared to die.

"I thought it would suffocate me," Wissler says. "But instead they pumped my stomach and put me in a psych ward, where a guy told me I smelled so bad they could use my blood to wash the walls."

Wissler followed her first suicide attempt with another, and then another. Finally, police advised Laura's parents to turn custody of their daughter over to Stark County so officials would pay to put her in a home for troubled teens.

The Wisslers reluctantly told Laura they were taking her shopping, but instead took her to the Jackson Township police station, where she was handcuffed and led away.

"When they put those handcuffs on her, she looked at me and said, 'Mom, you betrayed me,' " Carol Stansbury remembers. "I felt like I'd just taken an innocent puppy to the pound to be put to sleep. It was just awful, but we didn't know what else to do."

Today, Wissler is 38 years old and works in Akron as an advocate for parents of mentally ill children - many who face the same choice her parents did all those years ago.

"It's been 25 years since my parents had to give up custody of me to find help, and things aren't changing," Wissler says. "In fact, I think they're getting worse."

She is appalled that 38 counties in Ohio still force parents to give up custody of their children before officials will pay for their treatment. "It's barbaric," Wissler says. "The fact that this is done today is just demeaning to humanity."

The problems that led Wissler's parents to give her up started in second grade, when Wissler first started getting painful migraines. By the time she turned 13, her moods would swing between deep depression and unexplained rage.

Wissler says she didn't feel like she belonged at home and was "a misfit in cheap clothes" at her exclusive junior high school. Eventually, she started smoking pot, doing drugs, and wondering how to kill herself. "I was scared to die for religious reasons but scared to live because of how I felt," Wissler says.

She says her problems deepened the day her parents gave her up because she believed they just didn't want her anymore. "I remember screaming at them, 'Why did you do this to me?' "she says. "I didn't understand how the system worked at all."

Wissler spent her first two years in county custody living in a Toledo group home for troubled girls. "That was a hell of a boarding school," she recalls. "The place got closed down later because it was so abusive."

By the time she turned 18, she'd lived in two different group homes, gone through five different high schools, and was struggling with a bipolar disorder she didn't know she had. In 1984 she tried her final suicide attempt - drinking so much alcohol that her blood alcohol level tested at 0.28. A driver would be legally drunk today in Ohio at 0.08.

"We kept thinking, 'What is wrong with her? Why is she doing this?' " says her mom, Stansbury. "We were going through so much, I finally looked at Laura and said, 'If you die, I will grieve. I'll grieve terribly, and it would be really awful. But by damn, I'll live.' "

Wissler survived, and spent most of the next decade moving from state to state and job to job, selling cable TV, working as a carhop, grooming dogs. She eventually got married and in 1993 gave birth to her son, Jason.

Two years later, the boy was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and at 4 with bipolar disorder. He slept just three hours a night, and constantly threw fits and broke things.

Medications didn't help, and Wissler, who by then was divorced and raising Jason alone, says his problems got so severe she finally called her county children services agency. "I said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to hurt my son, and I need help,' " she recalls. "I had already spanked him so hard he almost bled. I was sincerely looking for help, and I'd gotten to the point where I was just immobilized."

Wissler says social workers took her pleas seriously and hospitalized her immediately. "They could see it in my eyes," she says, simply. "They just knew."

And it was then - after decades of struggling - that a doctor told Wissler she also had bipolar disorder. At 28, she started taking the medication that changed her entire life.

"It was like a light suddenly came on. Within days I felt better than I've ever felt," she says, smiling. "I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I can think clearly.' "

A year later, Wissler remarried. When Jason turned 8, he was also diagnosed with autism and a developmental disability.

As she learned how to cope with his illness, Wissler got involved with the Mental Health Association of Summit County in 1999 to develop a program to help parents find care for their mentally ill children.

"Before the medication, I'd had 40 different jobs and couldn't keep one of them," she says. "Now, I teach parents about the laws, how juvenile justice works, how to talk to doctors and social workers about your case. In this system, you have to learn how to be a lawyer, a secretary and a bookkeeper to get any help."

Wissler has worked with the Ohio Department of Mental Health, advocacy groups across the state and also testified about her experiences before Ohio lawmakers. "I wanted to know, 'Why is this system so difficult?' and nobody has an answer," she says. "It's scary. Everybody wants to have their own piece of power, and we're stuck in a fragmented cesspool."

Her parents are amazed that she can now speak so eloquently about the problems in the mental health system. They also are grateful she didn't die in the painful years before she got the right diagnosis.

Her dad, Jim Wissler, says she is a glowing example of what can happen when people with mental illness get the proper treatment.

"When they brought her into court all those years ago, she was in handcuffs. Now she's been down to talk to the governor and lawmakers," he says. "I once thought the only public official she'd ever meet was a warden, and look how far she's come.' "