PROVO — Treating a person with a mental illness, experts say, is not like treating an infection. One cannot simply isolate the source of the problem and focus all efforts right there.

"Recovery is a commitment and a belief in treating the whole person, not just treating the symptoms of mental illness," said Rick Hendy, program administrator for the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health.

It is important, Hendy said, to teach people suffering from mental illness to reconnect with themselves, their friends and family and, in an element often overlooked by traditional treatment methods, their faith.

"Spirituality has got to be an integral part of recovery," he said Friday at the dedication of a new unit at the Utah State Hospital that will bring a spiritual component to patients' treatment plans.

Additional funding from the Utah Legislature this year allowed the hospital to open up an additional 30 beds, which will be used to handle overflow from local mental-health centers.

"This is the end of the continuum for those clients to get care," said Mark Payne, director of the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health. "These are folks who have severe depression, severe mental illness, some are schizophrenic, they might be bipolar."

A holistic approach to recovery, Hendy said, seeks to "instill hope in people who may be without hope . . . (and) help people find meaning and purpose in their lives."

All patients admitted into the 15-bed Intensive Treatment Center will undergo a spiritual assessment and have some spiritual elements built into their individual treatment plans, said the hospital's full-time chaplain, Michael Benedict.

"It's a real struggle for the patient to be able to rediscover themselves, and that has to start from within," said Benedict, who serves patients of all religious affiliations.

The hospital's commitment to spirituality can be seen on a mural painted on the wall of the intensive-treatment unit.

The mural, painted in September 2005 by a Navajo man from New Mexico, represents classic themes, said Cecil American Horse, a Lakota Sioux invited to perform a traditional spiritual blessing of the new unit. A cornstalk represents the six cycles of life, from fetus to old age, various colors pay tribute to the different worlds created and destroyed by spirit beings, and men pray while the women are likely in a nearby structure, the female "hogan."

Harmony is reached when all four elements of the "circle of life" — spiritual, mental, emotional and social — are in balance, American Horse said.

"The best thing you can do is find out which one of these (the patient) is lacking," American Horse said. "In our circle of life, they're not separate. All of these things happen together."

Dressed in full regalia, American Horse began his presentation Friday by lighting a piece of Indian sweetgrass to cleanse the room, and he closed with a prayer of hope in his native language.

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E-mail: awelling@desnews.com