Trauma-informed care is the new standard for treatment in child welfare, mental health and correctional settings, and 20-year old Elijah Hamlin could be the poster child for why it's needed.

A member of the Eastern Pequot Tribe, he was 7 when his father, Anthony Hamlin, was beaten to death, stripped of his clothing and left in a field in Ledyard. Family members recall young Elijah saying at the funeral, "I never knew my father, and now I'm never going to know him."

Hamlin says after his father's death, he started feeling like he had "a different side" than anybody else. He felt a knot in his neck, a hole in his stomach and refused to talk to anybody.

His home life was chaotic. He said a stepfather beat him and his mother "had her head in the clouds." When he was 10, he said he went home from school looking for his dog, Bully, only to be told the beloved pet had been run over by a car.

Then living in New London, Hamlin said he started fighting with kids at Calkins Park in bouts arranged by his brother. He fought every day after school and never got caught.

At age 12, three juveniles held him captive at gunpoint in a home on Shaw Street.  They taunted him, locked him in a closet and made him swear "on his father" that he wouldn't tell.

Days later, he confided the incident to a math teacher, who called police. His tormentors, who had videotaped the incident, were referred to juvenile court but they, and Hamlin, returned to school days later. He said he ran from the school, but was met outside by a police officer, who told him he had to go back in.

There were too many negative incidents to report, and it's hard to tell what hurt Hamlin the most.

According to the Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut, traumatic stress compromises a child's growth and brain development. If left untreated, it is associated with poorer lifelong outcomes, including chronic health and mental health problems, impaired academic performance and involvement with juvenile justice and adult criminal justice systems.

Hamlin has been involved with the state "system" for years: The Department of Children and Families, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, the Judicial Branch and Department of Correction.

He's collected a number of mental illness diagnoses, including bipolar disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, attention hyperactivity deficit disorder and adjustment disorder. He is considered disabled by the Social Security Administration.

Today, each child who enters into DCF care is screened for trauma, according to Kristina A. Stevens, a DCF deputy commissioner who oversees community-based behavioral health services.

Treatment is geared toward helping children develop resiliency, and staff members now are trained to ask, "What happened to you?" rather than "What's wrong with you?" School staff also are being taught to look for signs of trauma.

The focus on trauma started in 2007 but only coalesced in Connecticut in the years after the Sandy Hook school shooting, when DCF received a $3.2 million grant to fully implement practices that helped sufferers confront their trauma and become more resilient. Hamlin already was deeply involved in the "system" by then. He was too volatile to live at home and while in DCF care was shuffled around from placement to placement and, he felt at times, alone in the world.

A lot happened to Elijah Hamlin, but those who know him, and those who treat him, say he could go on to lead a normal life.

Messing with people's minds

Hamlin craves independence but it eludes him as he approaches his 21st birthday later this month.

He says he would like to be out of "the system" for good, but as The Day followed his progress over the past seven months, there was no indication that would happen soon.

He authorized access to his treatment records through the Department of Mental Health and Addiction services, allowed a reporter to speak with his attorney and social worker and granted several interviews.

Hamlin has trouble listing all the places he's resided but they include foster homes, group homes, schools for kids with behavioral problems, motels, boarding houses and psychiatric hospitals. He's gone to the homeless shelter in New London and done stints in juvenile and adult jails.

Hamlin has taken medications he said made him feel "not like my full me," or made him sleepy, suicidal or obese. He's currently taking shots of Abilify, an antipsychotic medication he says calms him down, and Benadryl to help him sleep. He likes the way weed makes him feel and is working on getting a medical marijuana card.

He has told his life story repeatedly in individual and group therapy and sometimes feels like it's a waste of time.

"The system is messing with people's minds," Hamlin said one evening by phone. "They want to have people inside the system."

He's a sweet man with a dimpled, magnetic smile and big brown eyes — funny and easy to be around until he feels threatened or frustrated.

"Elijah lacks coping skills, and when emotionally triggered, he has a tendency to react aggressively," social worker Jozlyn Hall, wrote in a report last month.

When that happens, said family friend Dana Johnson, who took Hamlin into his home for several months about six years ago, it's almost not safe to be around him. If it was just him, Johnson said, he would have kept Hamlin, who liked to work out his aggression in Johnson's basement gym. But he had to consider the rest of the family.

Imprisoned from March to early June of this year after being charged with violating a protective order that prohibited him from having contact with his mother and brother, Hamlin said he'd spent a couple weeks in "the box," or segregation, after getting into fights. The protective order subsequently has been vacated.

He has no felony convictions, but is at risk of rearrest for violating the one-year term of probation he received on June 11.

Released from prison on June 11, Hamlin moved in to the Bent Crandall group home in Groton and returned to the Young Adult Services program at Sound Community Services. Having been in both the group home and YAS program before, he said he felt like he was going backward. He went missing on the ninth day, spending the night with a girl he arranged to have picked up from a group home in another town.

This past weekend, Hamlin was discharged from Bent Crandall because he didn't want to live there anymore.

He's living with his mother and younger siblings in Norwich, but staying in the family home usually doesn't work out for him and is considered temporary.

Conflicted relationships

His mother, Vanessa White, said Elijah fell down a flight of stairs as a toddler after standing on the tips of his toes in a walker and prying open a basement door. She thinks her son may have incurred a damaging brain injury that never was properly tested.

White has suffered from her own mental and physical health issues and, despite being Hamlin's strongest supporter and unwavering advocate, has not been able to keep him at home for any length of time.

One of six children, Hamlin "has a conflicted relationship with everyone in the house and a long history of aggressive behavior leading to police involvement," according to an April 2017 report by a DMHAS case worker.

It was his mother who called The Day last fall to say the system was not paying attention to her son's needs, and that only a few of the people in it seemed to care. 

"It's a constant resistance to his treatment when things are not in the order they should be," his mother said. "That's when he becomes resistant, because he feels threatened and he feels the world is on his shoulders. He needs compassion. He needs people who are really going to build him up and not tear him down."

One afternoon, she shared a video of her son talking over the phone to a caseworker at the Southeastern Mental Health Authority. The woman peppered Hamlin with questions about appointments and medication. He tried to keep up, but after a while, he told her he couldn't deal with it and ended the conversation.

Life skills lacking

On Feb. 8, Hamlin was released from Lawrence + Memorial Hospital after spending a week in the inpatient psychiatric unit. He said he told himself to go to the hospital "instead of seeing me in the newspaper for doing something bad."

He walked out of the Pond House without his bag of clothing. A staff member delivered it to him along with a goodbye hug. Hamlin, drowsy from the shot of Abilify he had received prior to discharge, said the staff was nice but there was nothing to do there but watch television.

His mother picked him up and drove him to his latest home, a room in a boarding house at 150 Ocean Ave. in New London. It was a shaky start to his return to the community. He was locked out of the boarding house, and his case manager didn't answer the phone. Finally, somebody let him in to the stuffy, narrow room facing the street. Hamlin said he didn't feel safe there. Being in New London is a "trigger" for him, according to his mother.

Hamlin has had successes, such as graduating from high school when nobody thought he would do it. He loves carpentry and architecture and would one day like to attend college and build homes.

Hamlin has had jobs, most recently working at Dunkin' Donuts in Groton, but hasn't kept one for long. He moves and can't find transportation, his therapy appointments conflict with his work schedule, or he simply can't hold it together. In one case, Hamlin said, he woke up and thought he didn't have his work uniform, so he didn't go to work. 

Competent but confused

It was almost inevitable he would end up in prison.

That's where people who suffer from mental illness end up with more frequency since all but one of the state psychiatric hospitals closed in the 1990s and treatment shifted to community-based programs. It's a national trend that's well documented.

The number of inmates who receive mental health services within Connecticut's Department of Correction has increased in the past 15 years, even as the general population has gone down. About 3,100 of the state's 18,500 inmates received treatment in 2004. Today, 3,500 of the approximately 13,000 receive behavioral health services.

Dr. Thomas S. Kocienda, director of behavioral health for DOC, said inmates are assessed when they arrive and can receive a range of services. He said when he worked at the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, which is geared toward treating some of the most seriously ill inmates, family members would sometimes be reluctant for the loved ones' sentences to end.

"They were stabilized and getting medication and were doing better incarcerated than in the community," Kocienda said.

But the vast majority of inmates are returned to the community, like Hamlin.

His family and treatment providers say he can function at a high level if the right balance of treatment, structure and independence can be achieved.

His court-appointed attorney, Ted Koch, is experienced with mentally ill clients and takes a compassionate approach. Speaking to Hamlin's mother and a reporter in the courthouse hallway this spring, Koch said he was advocating for Hamlin as if he were Koch's own son.

To learn more about Hamlin's history, Koch asked the court to order a competency evaluation to determine whether Hamlin could understand the court proceedings and help in his defense. The DMHAS evaluation team found Hamlin competent.

Koch enlisted Hall, a forensic social worker, to create a discharge plan that would enable Hamlin to avoid a felony conviction and have structure as he attempted to get his life together.

Hall delved into Hamlin's records, wrote a report and came up with a plan that connected Hamlin with housing at Bent Crandall, a therapist, primary care doctor and re-entry into the Young Adult Services Program.

When the plan failed, Hall called Hamlin back into her office so she could devise a new strategy.  

Housing remains one of the biggest challenges. Koch was horrified to learn that last fall, the Southeastern Mental Health Authority had placed Hamlin at the Oakdell Motel on Route 85 in Waterford. While he was staying there, he befriended an older man who ended up committing suicide. His mother said there was a problem with the lease at another placement, on Oak Street in Norwich, and Hamlin was evicted.

Southeastern Mental Health Authority, the regional branch of the DMHAS, manages Hamlin's $800-a-month Social Security disability check, paying for his housing and giving him a small amount of spending money, most of which he uses for cigarettes and sweets. He also gets food stamps.

Gino DeMaio, executive director of Sound Community Services, where Hamlin has received treatment, said the 18- to 25-year-old population is challenging and their treatment needs unique. But he said it wasn't unusual for clients to relapse, drop out and return to treatment several times.

Like the others, he spoke of the ability for mentally ill people, and those who have been damaged by trauma, to heal and live better lives.

k.florin@theday.com 

This version corrects the name of the Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut.