Erica Williams-Clark remembers Jan. 17, 2017 vividly. That’s the day she found out her cousin, Na'imah, had died by suicide.
"How could my 13-year-old cousin, beautiful, beautiful cousin ever want to harm herself?" she recounted earlier this month at a town hall at the Milwaukee Public Library's Centennial Hall.
"What was going on?" Williams-Clark asked. "And the scariest thing was that she disguised all this pain and hurt from us."
She shook her head, looking at a picture of her cousin projected on the wall. Na’imah had a basketball under one arm, a trophy in the other.
The town hall was part of USA TODAY Network-Wisconsin's "Kids in Crisis" series, one of several events in the past year centered on giving young people the chance to share their stories as part of a larger conversation about mental health.
"They are the people who are going through this, and so when we’re trying to figure out how best to address youth mental health challenges, I think it makes the most sense to ask young people themselves," said Rory Linnane, a reporter with USA TODAY Network-Wisconsin and one of the organizers of the event.
"And I think we often don’t give them enough credit for how much they understand what’s going on inside them, and how much commitment they have to making sure that other people don’t have to suffer the ways that they have."
Williams-Clark, a senior at Milwaukee High School of the Arts, said she didn’t know anything about mental illness until it affected her family. Now, she’s taking an Advanced Placement psychology class, and plans to attend college for behavioral psychology next year.
Linnane said event organizers found that students were hungry to share their stories, and community members were eager to hear them. But they still made sure it would be a positive experience for everyone, running workshops with the young people beforehand so they could talk with a mental health professional before getting in front of the microphone.
Wisconsin lawmakers in 2013 created the Office of Children's Mental Health. But as Linnane reported last month, it's still not known how well efforts in the state are working.
Yearly surveys to parents of students with severe emotional disabilities who receive some state-funded services yield little response. But the responses that do come in don’t paint a positive picture.
"From 2006 to 2016, in every year, less than half of parents said they were seeing positive results from the services they were receiving," Linnane said. "And specifically for African-American parents, the number was 29 percent, which is a lot lower than the national average of 66 percent satisfaction with the services."
Elizabeth Hudson, Wisconsin's director of the Office of Children's Mental Health, told USA TODAY Network-Wisconsin that authorities still don’t have a good method for knowing how kids are doing and how effective treatments are.
"It’s hard to compare apples to apples when you look at other states, because every state does their survey differently," Linnane said. "But we do fall toward the bottom. And when you look over time we haven’t seen improvement in Wisconsin."
With "Kids in Crisis," a series now in its third year, USA TODAY Network-Wisconsin put together mental health professionals, lawmakers and young people to drive a conversation about where things stand. Linnane said she’s seen a change.
"At our event in Madison, we had a lawmaker up there talking about how he went to therapy," she said. "So I think people at all levels are becoming more comfortable sharing their own experiences.
Wisconsin has a number of mental health resources at the state, county and city level, as well as within schools.
That includes Hopeline, a free text-in 24-hour emotional support line. Text in to 741741.
Or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).