Adam Samec was a creative, sensitive and gentle child.

As a young man, he loved to paint and write music, songs and poetry. He taught himself to play guitar and dreamed of becoming an anthropologist.

He was 20 when he killed himself.

Adam left behind a devastated family, along with more than 30 journals, songs, drawings and paintings that reveal the inner turmoil, struggle and pain of his illness, offering insight into the thought processes of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenic affective disorder / depressed type.

"Looking at all of it, I think he left behind something very special that could help professionals in the mental health field and help parents who find themselves dealing with a child's mental illness," says Adam's mother, Vicky Reicks of Cresco. "I can't pack them all away. It's a gift he left behind, and within his writings, he left behind messages to me. He knew his mom would read these journals."

Adam shot himself on April 11, 2001.

Vicky couldn't bear to look at the journals until last winter, and what she read on page after tightly written page were not ramblings, but a kind of poetry, vivid word portraits tracing the chronology of her son's illness, the medications, the voices he heard in his head, the angels and demons who sat on the edge of his bed or hovered near the ceiling regaling him with tales, his intense loneliness and isolation, and eventually, his flirtation with suicide.

"I had grown ill over time, though I took my pills as a good boy should. I was fretting now terribly, unable to think, rest, my moody temperament coming forth. More pills, more days, it would all be better. Found little rest in my routine, knowing that my purpose was also to the point of breaking. ... Dosage after dosage of medication would not be allowed to take hold, for I was on the outside, severely incapable of change. ... The doctors had seen nothing but my dismal face and thus subscribed me to a long list of takers of a specific drug meant to target symptoms which I had, though the disease was all around a different story."

The notebooks, computer print-outs and loose-leaf binders are scattered across the dinner table. Passages are marked with yellow Post-it notes, where Vicky has made notations. This passage, she points out, is about practicing suicide, and this entry was written when Adam was hospitalized., and here is a direct appeal to his mother to forgive him.

"He was so lonely. Everyone went their own way in the end. He lost his friends, he lost himself and he didn't know what to do," Vicky says. "There is so much here, I think there's enough material for a book. I'd like to tell Adam's story in some way, to help other people because there is so much stigma attached to mental illness."

Adam was first hospitalized in 1999. The high school student had become increasingly withdrawn and his personality changed. With a mother's instinct, Vicky knew something was wrong. Although she respected his privacy, she sneaked a peek at his writings and was disturbed by what she read. A crisis was brewing, she felt it in her bones.

Vicky sought advice and intervention from doctors and guidance counselors. Adam's behavior was dismissed as a teen-age phase. He was going to school, had a girlfriend, held down a part-time job. She worried too much, and perhaps should seek counseling herself. Adam refused to see a doctor despite his mother's entreaties.

Then she received a phone call from his girlfriend's parents. Adam was having an anxiety attack and needed medical help.

"He was committed to Allen Hospital on Aug. 28, 1, and that was the beginning of a long, painful and rough journey," says Vicky. He was hospitalized for 19 days and received electroshock therapy treatments for depression. In late 1, he was finally diagnosed with schizophrenic affective disorder/depressed type.

"It makes you feel desperate as a parent. I hoped it would be psychotic depression. Isn't that something for a mother to hope for? Something that could be successfully treated? The diagnosis was difficult to accept because schizophrenia was something that wasn't going to go away," she recalls.

In the United States, three-quarters of people with schizophrenia are diagnosed between the ages of 17 and 25. Approximately 2.2 million American adults ages 18 and older are affected by the brain disorder, according to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.