IOWA
Des Moines Register
Lee Rood, lrood@dmreg.com May 7, 2016
First of two parts
SPENCER, Ia. — Alex Jacobsen felt anxious and mentally exhausted. Sweat flushed his face.
The thin 26-year-old hadn’t slept well for days. He wanted to rest and get away from the handful of other participants in the faith-based treatment program.
Jacobsen tried to relax on a couch on the third floor of the Dream Center in downtown Spencer. But the feelings of agitation and hopelessness persisted. He got up and wandered into a hallway, where he spotted a box cutter sitting on a cart.
At first, Jacobsen drew the blade across his neck, careful not to break the skin. But then, he told The Des Moines Register during an interview last month, he began to press harder — slicing his neck and throat again and again.
Minutes later, a Dream Center pastor found Jacobsen lying on the floor of a nearby men’s restroom. He pressed a towel to the young man’s throat to slow the bleeding until paramedics arrived. They got there just in time: Five minutes more and he would have died, they said.
This is the story of a troubled and suicidal young man who agreed 10 days earlier, over his family’s objections, to abruptly stop taking the medications his doctors prescribed and skip an evaluation for outpatient treatment at University of Iowa Hospitals. At the urging of his pastors, he says, he would entrust his recovery to them and to God.
It also is a story about Iowa’s scattershot mental health system, and whether those who offer faith-based treatment programs should be subject to state standards and oversight if they are enrolling people such as Jacobsen and others with mental illnesses.
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