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A historical photo of the Utah State Hospital is displayed at the hospital in Provo on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. The Utah State Hospital was called the Territorial Insane Asylum in 1885. | Laura Seitz, Deseret News <\/p>\nWhen Dallas Earnshaw was 17 years old, his grandpa, suffering from mental illness, died by suicide. At the funeral, someone walked up to Earnshaw and said, \u201cHow does it feel knowing your grandfather\u2019s going to hell?\u201d<\/p>\n
That was in 1976.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack then, people were accused of being selfish or uncaring if they took their own life,\u201d says Earnshaw. \u201cIt was actually against the law; when you did it you committed a crime \u2014 you committed suicide \u2014 and it was embarrassing and shameful to families. Nobody wanted to talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He contrasts that to the present day.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we realize suicide is often a very serious symptom of depression and mental illness,\u201d he says. \u201cYes, there\u2019s still stigma attached to mental illness; people who are diagnosed still feel somewhat uncomfortable talking about their journey in life. But understanding and compassion have improved greatly. We\u2019ve come a very, very long way.\u201d<\/p>\n
No one knows that better than he does.<\/p>\n
Earnshaw is superintendent at the Utah State Hospital in Provo \u2014 the state\u2019s preeminent mental health hospital. For the past 42 years, he has made it his life\u2019s work to care for and advocate on behalf of those suffering from mental illnesses.<\/p>\n
A historical photo of the Utah State Hospital is displayed at the hospital in Provo on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. The Utah State Hospital was called the Territorial Insane Asylum in 1885. | Laura Seitz, Deseret News <\/p>\n
It was in 1983, just a few years after his grandfather\u2019s death, that Earnshaw, quite by happenstance, discovered the field he would dedicate his career to.<\/p>\n
Armed with a registered nursing degree from Weber State, he was working on his nurse practitioner degree at BYU and needed a part-time job to pay the tuition. He rented an apartment on 900 East in Provo, practically in the state hospital\u2019s front yard.<\/p>\n
He walked up to the front entrance and applied for a job. They had one opening: the Saturday-Sunday shift, the one nobody else wanted. He took it. Made $8 an hour. He\u2019s been there ever since.<\/p>\n
\u201cComing here, working with patients, I fell in love with it,\u201d he says. \u201cI just really, truly loved working in such a caring field. I realized I didn\u2019t want to do anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
He started out as a staff nurse, then moved on to positions as a nursing supervisor, a program director, an assistant clinical director, and for the last 21 years, as superintendent.<\/p>\n
The changes he\u2019s seen have been nothing short of transformational.<\/p>\n
In 1983, he remembers a hospital that was filled with patients who had been there for 20 or 30 years and more. They weren\u2019t being treated as much as they were being isolated.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a different patient population,\u201d says Earnshaw. \u201cWe were pretty much their family. We\u2019d go on camping trips and river runs and horseback rides. There wasn\u2019t a lot of programming in the communities at that time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contrast that to 2026, when \u201cthose types of individuals that were here before are now getting treatment in the community. The people we see are much more acute, much more ill.\u201d<\/p>\n
And much better taken care of.<\/p>\n
Advancements in treatment, programming and, especially, medications \u201chave just been tremendous,\u201d says Earnshaw, who points in particular to \u201ca big explosion of information and research in the 1990s \u2014 what was called the decade of the brain. <\/p>\n
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The entrance to the Utah State Hospital in Provo is pictured on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. | Laura Seitz, Deseret News <\/p>\n
\u201cWe know what it is now, and we\u2019re willing to actually talk about what\u2019s going on in our communities and individuals that are dealing with very severe mental illnesses. A lot of our homeless population are people with mental illness. We\u2019ve got a lot of people in our correctional settings and jails that have mental illness that we need to move into more appropriate settings to receive treatment. We\u2019re understanding the need more, and we\u2019re not just reacting, we\u2019re being proactive at deciding what our community really does need.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the 300-acre state hospital campus, where Earnshaw supervises more than 900 employees and nearly 400 patients, he notes that each one of those patients, without exception, is checked on every 15 minutes around the clock. The monitoring is unobtrusive, but consistent. No one is left alone and unobserved. The preservation of life is priority one.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never known anybody with a serious mental illness that has not been suicidal at some point in time,\u201d observes Earnshaw.<\/p>\n
Does he think his grandfather, who was released from the psychiatric ward at an Ogden hospital 12 days before he died by suicide 50 years ago, would have lived on in today\u2019s world?<\/p>\n
\u201cI think things would have been very different with my grandfather,\u201d Earnshaw says diplomatically. \u201cBack then insurances didn\u2019t cover much of inpatient costs and part of the reason he was discharged was because they didn\u2019t have coverage. I know it took a long time for my mother to talk him into actually even seeing somebody for care, which may have been too late. I also think the family as a whole would have rallied around the situation, not being afraid to address it as they were back then.\u201d<\/p>\n
Viewed through today\u2019s lens, \u201cthe important thing people would have seen,\u201d Earnshaw stresses, \u201cis that the outcome of his life was a result of his illness, not a result of his character.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mental illness wasn\u2019t something Grandpa chose. No one would have said he was going to hell for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Dallas Earnshaw was 17 years old, his grandpa, suffering from mental illness, died by suicide. At the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394,13552,3166],"class_list":{"0":"post-509146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth","13":"tag-news-division","14":"tag-news-feed-local"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}