Mentally Ill Find Health in Flowers : Therapy: A Chula Vista shop employs patients, who work their way back into the mainstream.

Schizophrenics, manic depressives and others with similar mental disorders are often thought of as hopelessly beyond help.

They are seen in movies and television programs shuffling down hospital corridors, unable to perform the most menial tasks.

But a Chula Vista program called Thanks-A-Bunch is attempting to fight back, to show that many of the mentally ill, with proper treatment and guidance, can reverse their condition and get back into the mainstream work force.

At the core of the program is a flower shop, which for 11 years has served as a rehabilitation center where five to six mentally ill patients perform all the functions any flower shop in San Diego County would need to succeed, said Nina Garcia, Thanks-A-Bunch program director.

Flower shop workers wrap and design more than three dozen floral arrangements in ornate and colorful styles, then deliver them by truck to their clients. “Thanks-A-Bunch is a place where they can get vocational training in a safe environment and won’t get fired if they screw up,” Garcia said.

Along with their rehabilitation, the patients get paid, albeit at minimum wage, and work at their own pace. No one is forced to do what he or she cannot perform, Garcia said.

Thanks-A-Bunch was initiated by Kinesis South, a private, nonprofit health group that helps rehabilitate the mentally ill and helps their families understand their problems--and is partially funded by San Diego County Mental Health Services, Garcia said.

Arvell Cortez, chief of vocational rehabilitation for San Diego County Mental Health Services, said the Thanks-A-Bunch program was the forerunner for other vocational programs that now exist throughout the county, such as Project Enable in Southeast San Diego, which teaches how to serve food and cater to customers in breakfast cafes.

“There are other similar programs where furniture, baked goods, and ceramics are made and sold to clients,” Cortez said. “However, the Thanks-A-Bunch program was the first and has been around since 1981.”

Collins Munns, the regional director for county Mental Health Services, said the Thanks-A-Bunch is constantly in danger of being cut and is always close to being ignored during budget talks, despite the obvious benefits to those participating.

“You know how it goes with state budgets or county budgets, there is a constant sword over the program’s head,” Munns said. “It’s a remarkable program, and there need to be more like it.”

The patients are picked according to their diagnosis, Garcia said. If they are mentally ill because of an accident, or if they are born with a severely low I.Q., they are not considered for the program.

Only day-treatment patients “who have a chemical imbalance in their brain which causes them to hear voices,” are selected, Garcia explained. “But they are treated with drugs, which enables them to function normally, but sometimes the difficult part is finding a drug which is effective.”

Although hundreds of mental illnesses are treated without drugs, many are treated with psychotropic drugs that keep them from hallucinating or hearing voices.

Rebecca, a 42-year-old patient who works for Thanks-A-Bunch, was formerly a nurse at a local hospital who worked under tremendous stress. While seeing a therapist with her husband for marriage counseling, she was told by the physician to consider seeing someone by herself because she had been in a state of depression for more than a year.

“I was continually crying, and I couldn’t stop,” said Rebecca (not her real name). “I didn’t want to do anything but sleep the day away.”

Rebecca said the hardest thing for her is dealing with stress from work, and just the thought of going back gives her an uncomfortable feeling.

“My husband is pushing me to go back to work, he tells me to just make myself get well,” Rebecca said. “I tell him that’s like telling a diabetic to fix himself without taking any drugs, or like someone telling their pancreas to make more insulin.” Another patient who works for Thanks-A-Bunch, James Johnson, 27, his real name, said his illness has caused him to lose some friends “because they didn’t understand. Lots of people don’t understand mental illness.”

Johnson, who was a furniture mover before he was afflicted, said he “was scared to death” about going to a mental institution.

“I was afraid of what all the movies and television had said about mentally ill people,” Johnson said. “But the mentally ill are simply people who have something biologically wrong with them. A chemical is missing.”

Both Johnson and Rebecca said they, too, had harbored misconceptions about the mentally ill and are well aware of the problems they will face once they return to the work force.

“People think that we are dangerous and should be feared,” Rebecca said. “They don’t realize they could be in my position just as easily. I never thought I would be in this position.

“When I first started nursing, and we toured the mental ward, I was afraid they were going to jump me,” she said. “But now I know.”

Many of Thanks-A-Bunch’s clients are Chula Vista businesses. Thanks-A-Bunch is eager to to expand its territory and provide more patients a steppingstone to the work force, Garcia said.

In the program’s decade-long existence, it has trained more than 400 employees who are now in the work force.

“It’s not to make money, but to allow a place for the mentally ill to work,” Garcia said. “The hardest thing to shake is the stigma they have been diagnosed as mentally ill.”

Rebecca is well aware that, once employers find out you were mentally ill, they will not give you a chance to work. She remembers her own days as a nurse and what she and other nurses thought of the ment ward.

“When I used to pass it by, I never in a million years thought I would be one of them, and now I am,” Rebecca said. “And now I’m trying to get ready to go back and work again.”