Reprinted from the Health District's quarterly publication mailed to district residents (Fall 2006)

Twelve years ago when Patti Marqui-Hilker couldn’t find help for a family member struggling with mental illness, she vowed to become that help. Now, as the consumer advocate for the Connections mental health and substance abuse resource center, she fulfills that promise every day.

“When my family member was diagnosed, I thought it was hopeless,” she says. “But now I know there is help out there and I can give hope to other families going through what I did.”

The consumer advocate position was created four years ago to help families and individuals dealing with substance abuse and/or mental health issues connect with and use all the community resources available to them. Connections is a partnership of the Health District and the Larimer Center for Mental Health.

When Marqui-Hilker was downsized from her corporate job, she jumped at the chance to fill the consumer advocate position. She continues to be active in the Colorado chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) by working with state and local legislators to improve mental healthcare policy.

“Families really appreciate having someone to talk to who has ‘been there and done that,’ ” she says. “I can tell them from my own experience how to find the difficult balance between supporting a family member and enabling them.”

Marqui-Hilker also can give family members practical information on how to negotiate the paperwork to get the help their loved one needs. After the diagnosis of her own family member with schizo-affective disorder, she navigated “every service out there” to find out what resources were available.

“People have to have their basic needs of food, shelter and clothing covered before they can move forward with recovery,” she says. “So I’ll do whatever I can to help them get those needs covered first, from helping them get food stamps to finding their birth certificate so that they can apply for Social Security disability.”

Often Marqui-Hilker’s most important task is simply caring about a person’s well-being. Not long after she took the position, she was contacted by the family of a young man whose bipolar disorder had left him severely disabled.

“He wasn’t taking his medication, he was holed up in his home, he was very sick,” she says. “They asked me if there was anything I could do for him.”

Marqui-Hilker began calling the young man several times a week and offering the only help he would accept: a sympathetic ear.

“Something clicked somewhere because when he ended up in jail, he had the staff there contact me and I was able to get him the help he needed,” she says. “He had told the people at the jail I was his ‘special advocate’ and, to me, that was the greatest compliment I could get.”

Patti Marqui-Hilker can be reached by phone at 494-4368 or by e-mail at pmarquihilker@healthdistrict.org.