Help Elijah overcome mental illness and Recover

It is with gratitude and humility that we write this. Gratitude, for the life we've been given, especially the gift of family and friends.Humility, because we are having to reach out for financial help. My brother needs specialized mental health and trauma treatment and the cost of his treatment is beyond the funds that we have. The stigma of mental illness can be as debilitating as the illness itself. Eli has been struggling off and on with mental health issues for the last two years, it has been a rollercoaster of emotions for him his entire family and his friends.

After high school, Eli was a competitive professional bicyclist, and a world traveler; he spent a year in Panama straight out of high school and a year in Spain with his wife after they got married. He has a Master’s degree in teaching and a bachelor’s in Sociology. Eli and his wife had three amazing children while she was in medical school. He quit his job at Danner boots and sold his house in Portland to support his wife while she was doing her residencies for her medical program. Eli essentially raised their three small children single-handedly when their family moved first to Hawaii, then to Connecticut for his wife’s residencies. He was a stay-at-home dad, all alone, separated from his family and his exercise for four years, and yet he made it work. When he returned to La Grande in 2019 he spent 100s of hours improving biking trails at the Mount Emily Recreation Area (MERA), put in a petition to create a dirt track bike park in La Grande, and had plans to start a youth biking club. He was peaceful, productive, intelligent, compassionate, and self-motivated. He was a wonderful father, husband, brother, son and friend. All that he ever talked about was wanting to make the world a better place and it was hard to imagine that he would ever need help. Everything changed in the summer of 2020. I watched my brother slowly turn into something else. I no longer knew him and hardly recognized him. It started with him saying random off-the-wall stuff and getting so intense with conversations about random things at the time, we would just laugh about it, and not think too much about it. Over the next few months, it got worse and worse! He had extreme highs and lows, and the things he said and obsessed about were getting darker and more senseless. I wish we all would’ve seen where the situation was headed, and how much he was struggling or how depressed he was.

ELi had always been the rock in our family, he kind of took on the father role for my sister and me after our dad passed away and spent a lot of time worrying about us.

The person my brother is today isn’t Elijah Romer. He thinks he is God sometimes, and talks nonsense about ‘Krishna. My gentle, soft-spoken brother yells; he sometimes runs around naked, and rarely wears shoes. Eli of late angers easily, and he thinks he has superpowers; in angry outrages, he destroys things; he makes no sense most of the time. The teenager voted “Most Loveable” by his entire senior class now frightens people. He is a man struggling with mental illness, struggling with depression, and struggling to make sense of why he’s here. The sacrifices have been great! It’s cost him his wife and children, his friends, his home, and his ability to make the future a better place. He is struggling to accept things that have happened to him in his past and he desperately needs help working through these traumas and mental illness. I don’t understand mental illness and never realized how it could rob a family of a loved one; what it was like to mourn somebody that is still on earth. The person I admired, grew up with, and loved has been gone for the last two years. We cannot rewrite the beginning of his story, but we have a chance to fix the ending. My brother was arrested twice in a week while having a mental breakdown in public he has never been to jail before this but a positive thing has come from his arrest and his being in jail without any substances Eli has finally agreed to enter a treatment facility in Denver that specialized in trauma and mental illness this is a 60-day inpatient facility. The cost of treatment is expensive but it is the only way my brother can get the help he needs. Please help us in raising the money to get Eli into treatment and raise awareness of mental health/illness.