I hope that your children or grandchildren never need the emotional support that the Clubhouse about to open on Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick can provide for persons with a serious mental illness. But they might. A very small percent of college students develop psychiatric illnesses severe enough to require not only medication and psychotherapy but in-patient treatment in the UMDNJ Mental Health Center or the Carrier Clinic.

Although no one knows exactly why these illnesses strike some people and not others, the experts who study mental illness say that they are mostly due to a biological predisposition and partly to situational stress. Although they are called mental illnesses, they have physical components and, like other diseases, often respond quickly to medications in their acute phase. But they have a chronic phase also, just as diabetes and heart disease have chronic phases. And they leave somatic changes that are not usually reversible.

Furthermore, in their chronic phase medication and individual or group psychotherapy may not be enough to achieve recovered functioning.

That is where Clubhouses come in. Clubhouses can give people with serious mental illness something that even the most sympathetic relative or health professional cannot give them: the understanding of a peer group consisting of people who have been through similar frightening experiences. Most of us who are working to start Laurel House have had close relatives -- in my case, a daughter -- who can or could have benefited from belonging to a Clubhouse.

Clubhouses for people with serious mental illness are not new. The first Clubhouse, Fountain House, on West 47th Street in New York City, began in 1948 as a self-help group of people with serious mental illness released from a psychiatric hospital. Since then, Fountain House has helped more than 16,000 men and woman members with serious mental illness live with their illnesses more comfortably than they would without peer support.

The International Center for Clubhouse Development recognizes more than 370 clubhouses worldwide in 28 countries, including Russia, China, Albania, Egypt, Estonia, South Korea, Western European countries, and North American countries. The states in our country vary in the number of Clubhouses they have. Massachusetts has 34 Clubhouses. Unfortunately, New Jersey has none; ours will be the first.

Let me get back to my starting point: why you should know that Laurel House is opening soon -- even though it is very unlikely that your college-age children or grandchildren will become sick enough to need the peer group support it can provide. Some college students in the past have gone into a tailspin when they find that they have contracted a bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. They act as though they had fallen off a steep cliff -- and afterwards spend years in front of television sets or otherwise vegetating. It doesn't have to be that way.

Chronic mental illnesses are great burdens, but their lives do not have to stop because they have been struck by mental illness. If they join a Clubhouse, they can benefit from peer encouragement in finishing their educations and getting jobs. Supported work and supported education are two of the main emphases of Clubhouses. They may not win a Nobel Prize, as schizophrenia-sufferer John Nash did, but neither do they have to experience the social isolation that he did because there was no Clubhouse to join in New Jersey when he became ill. 

Clubhouses are not a magic bullet that can cure serious mental illnesses. They can only help in the slow process of putting one's life back together with peer support. Not everyone who comes down with a mental illness will want to join a Clubhouse because, unfortunately, many fear the stigma of being labeled mentally ill more than they fear suffering alone. But you should know about Laurel House in case one of your relatives needs it.

Laurel House is still in the process of formation, and it will take time and the effort of its early members -- and its very limited staff -- for it to become able to provide enough educational support and job support that Fountain House, the gold standard of Clubhouses, does provide already.

Should you know of a student -- perhaps at Rutgers -- who feels that becoming a member of Laurel House could help him or her cope, we are holding the fourth meeting of prospective members on Saturday, Sept. 6, in the Highland Park Library Conference Room from 3 to 4:30 p.m.; the Highland Park Library is on North Fifth Avenue, a short distance from Raritan Avenue and diagonally across the street from Highland Park High School.

To learn more, check the Laurel House web site: http://www.laurelhousemiddlesex.org.