Belen Curran’s favorite place in the world is a horse rescue in rural Clackamas County. She rushes out of school to be there each Wednesday, on weekends and nearly every warm summer day.
James, a towering Belgian draft horse, feels emotions deeply, just like her. She loves to bend her head down to rest on his.
The 2,500-pound chestnut brown boy – his nudges, his attitude, his demand for treats – is her tranquility.
“He is my horse and I am his person, we both help each other,” the 17-year-old said. “I can’t imagine where I would be without James and all the things he has done for me.”
When the youth behavioral health system failed the Happy Valley teen, her mother, Sue Curran, stitched together a quilt of resources to keep her daughter healthy. One of the first was a recovery-centered high school, Harmony Academy in Lake Oswego, which Belen began attending almost two years ago.
The school, where she is known as Bea, played a pivotal role in her return to health. But her mom knew that wasn’t enough.
Curran needed to wrap her daughter in hope and joy and a belief in the future. After several tries, she found a therapist who Belen felt safe with. And Curran leaned into her daughter’s passions and found two volunteer farms that helped her imagine a new, long, meaningful life.
Many Oregon families with a child overcome by depression, anxiety or substance use disorder find themselves bereft, with no place to turn given the state’s extreme lack of treatment options. But Curran and her husband went to all ends and, against the odds, created a cocoon that has helped their daughter thrive.
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On a Wednesday last March, Belen took a day off from school to travel to Salem with her school principal.
She sat in front of the House Committee on Education, testifying on a bill that would pave the way for more recovery high schools like hers.
Belen told legislators that when she was still in the throes of her substance use disorder, she “struggled to understand myself and my brain.” She told them of the spiraling thoughts she held inside, wondering, “Why won’t I go to sleep? What’s all this noise going on inside my head? … Wishing it will be OK.”
She looked up to see multiple members of the committee with tears in their eyes. Her day at the Capitol happened to be her 90th day sober. She was healthy, she felt powerful and she wanted other teens to have the same support she did.
Lawmakers eventually passed the bill. And Gov. Tina Kotek signed it.
Looking back on that moment, Belen is proud.
“It definitely feels cool to say I went to speak to the Legislature and made them cry,” she said.
When Belen was 18 months old, her parents adopted her from Guatemala. She was a dark-haired, olive-skinned girl with white parents and a white older brother growing up in suburban Portland. As a family, they took frequent trips to Central America. But Belen said she struggled to feel she belonged in either place.
“I think for a really long time, I looked at it like, my biological mom who was supposed to love me no matter what gave up on me,” she said. “That set me up for a lot of abandonment, trust and rejection issues. Like there is something wrong with me.”
“It took me a long time to realize that actually, maybe she put me up for adoption because she loved me so much that she wanted me to have an opportunity at life … And my parents now, they actually chose me and my biological mom chose them.”
But the feeling of rejection still nestled in her bones at a young age.
In fourth grade, Belen struggled to feel comfortable in her peer group and began feeling depressed. By sixth grade, she made her first suicide attempt. She harmed herself to cope with her depression and insecurities, she said. By the summer before eighth grade, she began using cannabis, which eventually led to her using pills. Her habits provided “artificial happiness” and a temporary distraction from her hurting heart, she said.
“Slowly, that really destroyed me,” Belen said. “I’d look in the mirror and hate who I saw.”
Curran felt devastated by what her daughter was going through. She lunged from one potential fix to another, hoping the next school, the next program or the next therapist would be the thing that worked.
During one therapy session while Belen was in ninth grade, the therapist told Curran she needed to take her daughter directly to the emergency room due to her suicidal urges.
“That was the beginning of a long journey,” Curran said.
Belen’s first emergency room visit was in November 2021 when she was 14. Another ER visit soon after that stretched to five days as she and her parents waited for a bed in the hospital’s adolescent psychiatric unit to open.
“We were told that to get admitted to certain programs you had to be admitted right from the ER,” Curran said. “We stayed in the ER for five days waiting because we didn’t want to be discharged and lose our spot. But then we were told it was estimated to be another seven days, so we went home.”
Belen was discharged without a referral to the inpatient care she needed because nothing was available.
In January 2022, she returned to the ER, but this time an adolescent bed was available at Unity Center for Behavioral Health in Portland. Breaking normal operating rules, the staff allowed her to stay at Unity nearly 21 days until she could transfer to a youth mental health treatment center near Seattle, Newport Academy, where she stayed for about three months.
Newport discharged her with a plan for her to begin outpatient care near Portland. But due to an overwhelming demand for those services, she never made it off the waitlist.
After she relapsed later that year, she underwent treatment at Madrona Recovery, a small independent teen treatment center in Tigard, for three weeks.
Outside of clinical care, Curran searched for other ways to support her daughter. Belen tried Clackamas High, Milwaukie School of Arts Academy and even toured a military academy in Bend. And then, finally, Curran heard from a friend about Harmony Academy.
“We were just trying to throw a wide net,” Curran said. “I don’t know where we would be if we had not found Harmony.”
Belen said Harmony made her fall in love with being in class again. Still, Curran knew the school wouldn’t be enough.
Through a friend of a friend, Curran learned about R&R New Options Equine just outside Sandy. The ranch is not certified as an equine therapy or recovery center, but it has functioned as a supportive recovery community for Belen.
The ranch is run largely by volunteers who help take care of the horses and maintain the facilities. In exchange for their volunteer hours, they receive riding lessons.
“I started doing equine therapy when I was as Newport (Academy) and then I started seeing James (the horse) and slowly but surely I found coping skills I could use that actually worked,” Belen said. “I have this feeling of a natural high when I am with James and riding.”
The equine rescue has about 12 male horses on one side of its acreage and 10 female horses on the other. Each group can wander the sprawling pasture. In between, visiting and resident dogs wander the grounds, chickens and turkeys watch who arrives and leaves and a pony and a donkey can always be found glued to each other’s sides.
Leslie Roach, 68, who runs the rescue, said she understands the importance of filling your world with people who model what recovery can look like. For Roach, it was her husband and her best friend who pushed her and held her accountable. For Belen, one of those people is “Aunt Les,” as the youth ranch hands lovingly call her.
“Someone in recovery can tell you about the failures they’ve had to where they are now,” said Roach, who is 30 years sober. “It is helpful for them to see it. It made a difference for me and helps me tell others, ‘I can be better than that.’”
The equine rescue isn’t focused on youth in recovery, but it is a space that has attracted youth of all fabrics – those with special needs, those who have been bullied, those who are bullies and those who have fears and anxieties about life. Roach has seen many young people come out of their shells and gain newfound confidence by working with the horses.
On a recent Friday, Roach’s voice carries across the ranch as she reminds a group of young volunteers to close the door to a shed because there’s a new cat getting acclimated inside. Posted on the shed door is a laminated list of 21 rules, including: “Aunt Les is ALWAYS right,” “Be kind, be respectful, help each other learn and work together,” “no foul language,” and “HAVE FUN!”
That day, Belen worked to complete chores with a few other young volunteers. She fed James, brushed him, cleaned the stables and cleaned his hooves.
Roach pushes some of her young volunteers out of their comfort zones, but she also knows when to pull back. Her voice will become soothing as she says, “Honey, just breathe, you’re fine.”
She says it so much, the motto is printed on the backs of the volunteers’ sweatshirts. When she notices someone having a bad day, she’ll tell them to take a break from their chores and take their favorite horse for a ride.
“Les tells always tells us, ‘The barn saves the horses and the horses save us and we save the barn,’” Belen said.
Roach specifically picked James for Belen, and she said she admires the strong bond the two have. Belen agrees the match is magical.
“Sometimes at night I’ll just be thinking, ‘I wonder what James is doing, he must be done eating by now’,” she said.
Belen also volunteers at Zenger Farm in Portland, a nonprofit that provides healthy food and environmental justice education. On the farm’s sprawling 54 acres, a big cedar tree bends towards the nearest body of water. It was planted by Indigenous people who formerly lived on the land and purposefully directed its growth.
“It is very special and where I do meditation,” Belen said. “I dig my hands in the dirt and smell rosemary in my hand and I feel in tune with the earth.”
She works in the vegetable gardens, cooks in the kitchen with other BIPOC women and engages with kids who take part in Zenger’s summer camp programs, even pulling her guitar out to play for the young campers.
It’s another chance for her to find community. A woman in her early 20s who works as a camp coordinator at the farm is from El Salvador, which neighbors Belen’s birth country.
“We talk about being from that part of Central America and we speak Spanish with each other and overall, the farm is just a very diverse and accepting place,” she said.
As she walks around her neighborhood these days, Belen loves encountering depression-soothing lemon balm or anxiety-calming rosemary sprouting from neighbors’ yards. She picks a sprig or a few leaves to rub between her fingers and breathe in the aroma.
For Curran, too, the past few years have brought significant change.
Speaking of her daughter, she says, “She is looking to go to college, and if you asked me two years ago, I wouldn’t even know if she’d be alive. And now she is looking forward to a future.”
Belen thinks she might want to become an equine therapist or work at a nonprofit that addresses food insecurity or maybe even go to the University of Iowa, like her parents did, to pursue writing.
She has also learned coping mechanisms for overpowering feelings like anger or acute anxiety, such as pounding a punching bag in her garage or taking a cold shower. She also writes haiku poems for emotional release.
But she still has critiques of the youth mental health system. The 988 suicide crisis text line felt too robotic, she said. But she appreciated the crisis numbers that connected her to a real person.
Once, during the middle of the night, she talked for nearly an hour to someone who helped her find a safer space in her mind. Belen also refers her friends to text the teen-specific crisis line, 741741, to reach someone at any hour, though she said to expect a five- to seven-minute wait between each text.
What she yearned for most was therapy tailored to youth that would really teach her how to navigate life sober.
“I have to learn to live with the discomfort and be able to battle present reality without drugs or an escape,” she said. “My addiction numbed the pain … I was suppressing my emotions for so long, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I admire myself so much more now.”
She now spends time giving back to the community and daydreaming for her future.
“I like to think about being a 60-year-old grandma with long grey hair,” she said, “writing my memoir and being with my horses.”
Nicole Hayden reports on mental health and homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com.
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