Robin Miller, 28, said she was in college several years ago and “everything was going great,” but then she began hearing voices from another room, or through the ceiling, when she was playing the violin, critiquing her performance.

She started having psychic thoughts, believing that she could predict local events. She had hallucinations: “I saw people turning into witches; people turning into aliens.

“My friends told me I needed help,” Miller said, but she resisted. “One of the symptoms is you don’t believe you have a problem. It’s very interesting how the brain can cause you to believe things that aren’t real.”

Finally, her psychosis got so bad that she was refusing to eat or drink, believing it would poison her, and she ended up in the hospital.

Miller began to regain her life after she enrolled in an early intervention research project through PeaceHealth in Eugene. It is part of the broader statewide Early Assessment and Support Alliance, or EASA, program to help young adults who are experiencing psychosis for the first time. It is a relatively new program that is now expanding, with the help of state grants, to serve more young people.

Psychosis is common and treatable. It affects 3 out of 100 people, and usually strikes for the first time between ages 15 and 30. Symptoms include confused thinking or speech, delusions, and seeing or hearing things that other people don’t.

If left untreated, psychotic episodes can become more severe, increasing the likelihood of hospitalization or involvement with the criminal justice system, said David Neale, a therapist with PeaceHealth’s EASA program.

By trying to reach patients within three months of their first psychotic episode, “we can be quite influential over the trajectory of the illness, reducing hospitalization and hopefully changing outcomes and quality of life for individuals,” Neale said.

Through PeaceHealth’s program, Miller received two years of intensive services tailored to her needs, including counseling, medication, education help and family support. She learned how to manage her symptoms and resume her goals, instead of having her life derailed by a potentially debilitating illness.

“I got coping skills,” she said. “It teaches you to be resilient.”

Miller graduated from the program two years ago and is a student at Lane Community College, working toward a career in psychology. She said she wants to help people who face the same kinds of struggles that she did.

By getting the right services at the right time, Miller and hundreds of other young Oregonians and their families, have been able to find hope in what had seemed a hopeless situation.

EASA programs across Oregon serve about 400 young adults each year, said Tamara Sale, who directs the EASA program statewide.

She has been involved with EASA, which was modeled after an Australian program, since 2001, when it launched in five Oregon counties, not including Lane County.

Sale said she had a personal interest in finding better treatment for people experiencing psychosis because her brother developed the illness in the late ’70s when they were both teenagers growing up in Colorado.

“He didn’t experience a lot of things that I take for granted in my life,” Sale said. “He’s never held a job. He’s never had the kinds of relationships and the independence I would have wanted for him. He’s a brilliant person — an inventor and incredibly talented. He was motivated to work, but there was nothing to support him in doing that. The care he got was involuntary, and he had terrible early experiences with medicine side effects and no one paid attention to that.

“I can see how easy it is to spend millions of dollars on one person with poor outcomes if you don’t do it right,” Sale said. “We spend huge amounts of money just to warehouse people basically. It’s a tragedy because the people who I know who experience psychosis are generally extremely intelligent and have a lot to contribute.”

EASA has opened up opportunities for hundreds of young Oregonians.

“EASA did quite a bit to help me and my family get my life back on track,” said Michael Haines, a graduate of the EASA program in Clatsop County and now a peer support specialist with the program in Eugene. “Without EASA I wouldn’t be where I’m at today.”

Now with a fresh infusion of funding, PeaceHealth is expanding the local EASA program to reach more young people.

PeaceHealth received a $475,000 state grant to serve up to 75 patients — more than double the number it had been serving for the past several years, said Carla Gerber, head of the local EASA program and PeaceHealth’s manager of outpatient behavioral health.

“The numbers don’t sound huge,” said Dr. Robert Brasted, PeaceHealth’s associate medical director of behavioral health. But “these are people with psychotic behavior … that can be devastating to people and a burden on the health care system,” he said. “If we can care for these people better and more comprehensively and earlier, their lives will improve. We’ll see them less in the hospital.”

PeaceHealth also got $445,000 from the Oregon Health Authority to set up a Youth Hub, which offers similar early intervention services to young people who don’t qualify for the EASA program.

They might be young adults who’ve had psychosis for a longer period of time, who have mental health issues and no way to get services, or whose symptoms prevent them from going to an office, Gerber said.

PeaceHealth’s behavioral health services department in downtown Eugene is one of four Youth Hub demonstration sites across the state.

“The hope is if it works well, it would be spread to other parts of the state,” Gerber said.

PeaceHealth’s Youth Hub is on the fifth floor of the building at 1200 Hilyard St., across from Sacred Heart Medical Center, University District. The hub began taking patients in July and can serve about 50 young adults — 35 covered by the state grant and the rest by billing traditional insurance plans, Gerber said.

Anyone can make referrals: emergency rooms, Lane County Mental Health, primary care doctors, family members, school counselors, or community programs such as Looking Glass Youth & Family Services.

The Youth Hub doesn’t look like a typical doctor’s office. At the center of the remodeled waiting room is a semi-circular couch, with a coffee table in front and a high countertop lining the back, ringed by barstools. A flat screen TV soon will replace a framed nature scene on the wall.

Young people coming into the hub can be screened for mental health issues. Those showing signs of psychosis would be eligible for Youth Hub services, such as talking with Haines, the peer support specialist; seeing a therapist or psychiatrist for mental health issues; receiving job or education support; or seeing family nurse practitioner Kathy Kernan for physical health issues.

Primary care services are provided in the same clinic as mental health services. That’s a new idea, known in the health care industry as “integration.” The Youth Hub is one of eight local clinics that received one-year integration grants from Trillium, the Coordinated Care Organization in Lane County that manages services for nearly 90,000 Lane County members of the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s version of Medicaid.

For Youth Hub patients, the clinic will be their “medical home,” where primary care clinicians coordinate their overall health care, and refer them to specialists or support services. The idea is that having a medical home will improve patients’ health and lower costs because patients will know where to go when they have a medical issue; problems will be caught earlier; and patients will get ongoing support for chronic conditions, instead of ending up in the emergency room or being hospitalized.

A Young Adult Advisory Council, made up of about 10 participants or graduates of the early intervention program, including Miller and Haines, are adding some special touches to make the hub more appealing to their peers.

They recently moved games, books and a guitar to the hub. Haines has filled a closet with T-shirts and jeans, backpacks and purses for any clients who might need them. Bean bag chairs will be coming soon.

Peer support is a key component in the EASA program, said Sale, the program’s statewide director.

“That is an important part of helping people find a sense of hope in the process because it’s overwhelming and frightening to people,” she said. “Being able to meet other individuals who can relate to what they’re experiencing and provide tangible (proof that) here’s a person who’s gotten through what I’m going through and is doing well, is a very powerful thing,” she said.

Jon Busby, another member of the local Young Adult Advisory Council, said he wanted to serve because “peer counseling made a huge difference in my own life. If I have the ability to make that difference in someone else’s life, that’s a great accomplishment and a responsibility.”

He said he hopes the Youth Hub will help young people learn to cope better and offer “encouragement for people going through hard times.”

Busby, 25, said he was diagnosed with mental illness five or six years ago.

“I’ve had numerous hospitalizations, and none approached that concept (of peer support),” he said.

After his most recent hospitalization early this year, he had the opportunity to work with a peer counselor.

“I think the concept of peer support is brilliant — people who have experienced and coped with what you’re going through,” Busby said.

“It’s an eye-opening experience to see people give their life to saying ‘We’ve experienced this too and you’re going to be OK.’?

“It made a huge difference in my life to accept my diagnosis and work with it, instead of viewing it as something that’s degrading me.”

Busby earned a GED last year and is registered at Lane Community College. He said he’s interested in studying technology or maybe psychology, given “my recent discovery of people being personable in the mental health system.”

Follow Sherri on Twitter @sburimcdonald . Email sherri@registerguard.com .