Family of Man Who Died in Psychosis Couldn’t Get Any Help

On Aug. 23, 2016, sitting in their son Nigel's bedroom, Mark Youngberg and his wife Sharon recount the events in their Emmett, Idaho home that lead to the 30-year-old's death last spring. The room has gone unchanged since April when Nigel's bouts with schizophrenia and paranoia became critical and he jumped out of a second story window wearing only a robe, light jacket and sneakers. He was confronted by Gem County sheriff's deputies but fled farther into the mountains in the dark of night. His body was found 11 miles away near Montour 16 days later. Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman via AP

BOISE, Idaho—Nigel Youngberg was in the upstairs bathroom for seven hours straight the weekend he went missing. A late-night shower always made him feel better. His mother thought of it like the hug machine invented by Temple Grandin to soothe herself when autism made life too stressful. Nigel would hug himself with the warm water when his schizophrenia became too painful.

But this was an unusually long shower, reported the Idaho Statesman.

Nigel’s father, Mark Youngberg, woke at 9 a.m. that Saturday to find water coming through the kitchen ceiling. The deluge stopped when Mark turned off the water to the whole house. By then, Nigel had barricaded himself in the bathroom.

He left the water running because—he later told his mother—he thought it would clean up the germs. He could tell his parents were upset about the water, so he hid in the bathroom. Then he ran. He climbed out the window and grabbed a bicycle with two flat tires from the shed of the family home, just outside Emmett’s city limits. He took off down the road.

When he returned later that day, he was drenched and covered in sand. His temper was flaring.

Sharon thought, as she often did, “If a police officer would come and just see how he was acting, they would know he wasn’t well.”

Mark and Sharon Youngberg knew their 30-year-old son’s patterns by that April day, 15 years after he was first diagnosed with a severe mental illness.

For a while, his bipolar and schizoaffective disorders responded to medications. He excelled in school and took a shine to physics. He attended Boise State University for two years and had a 3.9 grade point average, according to his obituary. He got back the gleaming eyes of his childhood, when his favorite things included video games and Lagoon, an amusement park near Salt Lake City.

Nigel had shelter, a close family and health insurance coverage from his mother’s job, as well as from Medicaid and Medicare. He had access to prescriptions, which many Idahoans with mental illness do not. He was religious—a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and found solace in prayer, his mother said. His family said he never drank or turned to drugs.