CHARLOTTE — In 2024, the Brydon family lost their daughter, Kate, at 31 years old, to suicide.
“She was energetic, she was creative, she was smart, and I think she was pretty,” Tom Brydon said of his daughter. “You know, there isn’t a day, and usually for me, it’s about 2 a.m. where I wake up and think, ‘Gosh, why did that happen? What could we have done different?’ You know, we’re trying not to do that.”
She had struggled with mental illness since her late teens. She was 18 when they noticed serious changes in her behavior and sought help.
“That was really a lot harder than I thought, mostly because you don’t want to be telling her story to people,” he told Channel 9’s Elsa Gillis. “We went through three of them, and all three missed the diagnosis to the point where they were giving her medicine that caused it to swing even more, you know, with more episodes — psychotic episodes.”
Kate eventually got the clear, crushing diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. That let to a treatment facility, a therapist who was a good fit, and medicine that helped.
“The medicine allowed her to go back to school,” Tom Brydon said. “She got a medical assistantship. She got certified in Florida, which wasn’t a trivial thing. She got a job.”
Eventually, Kate wanted to go off her medication because of the side effects. Tom says she never went back on them. She attempted suicide and survived. They got her into treatment once again, but shortly after she left treatment, she lost her battle with mental illness.
“We kind of came to the conclusion that, you know, months later, how do we make this more positive?” he said. “I think Kate would have wanted that.”
Tom, along with some friends, got to work alongside the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Charlotte.
This past June, they helped launch the new NAMI Navigator Charlotte — a comprehensive website, call line, and in-person resource center — to help people navigate the complexities of mental health care.
The website launched on Kate’s birthday, June 2. The call line opened Sept. 2, as did the Spanish version of the website.
“It’s hard to know where to start,” the NAMI Navigator program manager, Andrea Towner, said. “Part of the goal is really trying to knock down all the barriers that keep people from getting those appointments or getting connected to the resources they need, so the directory not only has treatment providers, mental health clinics and hospitals, therapists, it’s also got supportive services.”
Tom spoke of some of the challenges his family faced getting good care for Kate, especially early on.
“It took us a long time even to find an appointment, then you have a hard time getting the right psychiatrist as well,” he said.
As the Brydon family works through their own loss, Tom is hopeful the navigator will be a game changer for the community.
“It’s not something that we did, it’s not something that Kate did to us,” Tom said. “I think Kate would really like the fact that, you know, we’re doing something that will make a difference.”
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