Luke Bell’s Inspiring, And Devastating, Story Part Of Wyoming PBS Series

The song “Where Ya Been,” written by country musician Luke Bell in 2016, is one of his bigger hits but hard for his family to hear. He struggled with severe mental health challenges for several years before his death in 2022, and his family believes that’s what the song is about. 

Where ya been?

Hey, mister, in the mirror, where's my friend?

I went out on the town

And I ain't seen him since

Hey-ey, where ya been?

“I can’t hear that song without crying because I know Luke knew he was losing his mind when he wrote that song,” said his mom, Carol Bell. “In my mind that’s the last song Luke recorded.” 

Carol shares Luke’s journey in a recent episode of the Wyoming PBS series “A State of Mind: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis.” It explores the mental health crisis in Wyoming by tracing patient journeys, and weaving expert interviews and man on the street commentary to examine solutions to Wyoming's mental health crisis. 

“They're using their series ‘A State of Mind’ to destigmatize mental health,” Carol said. “We have one of the highest suicide rates in the nation, and talking about our mental health is something we're not very good at in Wyoming, so I think the PBS series is opening communication lines around the subject of mental health.” 

Pull Yourself Up By The Bootstraps

Carol grew up on a ranch in Shell. Her parents Stan and Mary Flitner were the third generation to run the operation.

“We were taught to be tough, mentally and physically,” she said. “But when you look at the world, none of us have that outlook anymore.”

She married David Bell and had Luke and Jane, who joined David’s daughter Sarah. Luke grew up in Cody and took to ranch life, spending summers helping at his grandparent’s ranch growing up. He enjoyed old-time cowboy music and the cowboy lifestyle, his family said in the “A State of Mind” episode. 

It was halfway through his junior year of college that he decided he wanted to quit school and move to Austin to become a musician. His parents thought it was a terrible idea. At the time he had passable guitar skills but was not a singer. 

Luke moved to Austin in 2012 and honed his skills, eventually producing his first self-titled album using funds from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. His career took off and was on the rise over the next few years. He opened for a handful of country stars including Willie Nelson and Dwight Yoakum.

In 2015, his father David died of pancreatic cancer. Having embraced the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality, Luke didn’t talk about it, but Carol noticed he began drinking heavily. Luke was 25 at the time, a common age for young men to be diagnosed with lifetime mental health disorders according to the National Institutes of Health. 

“It might have happened no matter what, but it sure felt like maybe if his dad had still been alive and Luke hadn't been hurting so much from losing his dad, we could have gotten to the bottom of it before he got so sick,” Carol said. “I noticed the drinking, but I wasn't really familiar with signs of mental illness. You know, the way he was starting to withdraw, and his anger are some of the early signs of severe mental illness. I just thought he was sad and mad.”

Luke continued working and released his second self-titled and final studio album in 2016. The album was a mix of songs from his previous album and new songs including “Where Ya Been.”

“I don't know exactly when he wrote it, but the video was filmed at a hospital fundraiser at the Pitchfork Ranch in the summer of 2016,” Carol said of the song. “I didn’t know he was mentally ill yet, but I knew something was going on. He did not seem like himself that weekend when he was in Cody.”

It wasn’t until she got a call in the fall of 2016 that she realized how bad things were. Luke was in a holding cell in Nashville after having a psychotic breakdown. Carol felt a mixture of emotions after taking the call, one of which was relief.

“At the time, I thought, ‘OK, now he's going to get help. Now we're going to figure out what's going on because this is really serious,’” she said. “But our culture doesn't really take it seriously. He was in the psychiatric hospital for three days. They sedated him and he was heavily medicated, and then they released him.”

When the medications they gave him started to wear off, Carol said it was clear he was still paranoid, scared and “also more determined than ever to hide what was going on, because now he felt like he could be arrested for it.”

Years-Long Battle

Luke would be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar II with psychotic episodes. Schizoaffective disorder is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression and mania, according to the Mayo Clinic. Schizophrenia affects a person's ability to think, perceive reality and interact with others, while bipolar II disorder is a psychiatric condition that involves alternating between depressive and hypomanic episodes. 

Luke also had a genetic liver disorder and failed to process toxins properly, which made his drinking a trigger for psychosis.

“After my son started showing signs of severe mental illness, one of the things that was the most frustrating and disheartening for me was the fact that he was so ashamed of his mental illness that he didn't want to admit he was struggling with it, which meant that he didn't ask for help,” Carol said. “He tried to hide it.”

Over the next few years Luke would be hospitalized in Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida and Denver. He worked with a psychiatrist in North Carolina, but Bell said it seemed like none of the medications he took worked that well. 

“They couldn't really ever keep him long enough to get him stable enough so that he could keep track of his meds and take them regularly,” she said.  

And because Luke never qualified as someone who was a danger to himself or others he couldn’t remain hospitalized to get the help he really needed. 

“It’s a strange thing, this idea of someone being a danger to themselves and others, because, of course he was a danger to himself,” she said. “He couldn't make good decisions, he was hopping trains and doing things that are really dangerous, including self-medicating, but I guess unless you are holding a gun to your head, you're not considered a danger to yourself.”

A few times Luke went to a hospital because he was having a psychotic episode and they wouldn’t admit him for various reasons. So he would punch a security guard or pick and fight and get arrested. 

“It was a pretty awful cycle,” his mom said. “The sicker he got, the harder it was for him not to be hospitalized.”

Luke was homeless off and on, but would still check in with Carol to let her know he was safe. Often she didn’t know where he was calling from.

“There’s just a sense of frustration, helplessness and despair because the more time went on, it just seemed like the end was inevitable,” she said. “I mean, his lifestyle was so dangerous and our culture doesn't have a place for people like that.”

When Luke came back to Cody in the summer of 2022 for his sister Jane’s wedding, his family described him as very reclusive. When he said goodbye, they had a sense it was the last time they’d ever see him. 

“I hate to say I knew, but it just felt like he'd come home to say goodbye,” Bell said.

Not long after, Luke disappeared on Aug. 20, 2022, while in Tucson, Arizona. Days later his mom received a call from an Arizona number. She assumed it was Luke checking in because they had an agreement that she wouldn’t report him missing or try to track him down if he kept her posted and let her know he was OK.

^“When I answered the phone and the voice said, ‘Is this Mrs. Bell?’ I said yes and she said ‘Do you have a son named Luke Bell?’ I said ‘He’s dead isn’t he?’” Bell said. “My daughters and I had talked more than once about the likelihood that at some point he was going to do something reckless, because he just could not make very good decisions when he was sick and paranoid thinking people were after him.”

Luke was found dead nine days after he went missing, not far from where he disappeared. He died of a fentanyl overdose at the age of 32. 

“It just makes me really sad that people tend to write people with mental illness off as if they are their mental illness,” Carol said. “I think that's one of the biggest tragedies of our culture's way of thinking about mental illness, because we don't think a diabetic person is diabetes, and we don't think an arthritic person is arthritis, but we think a mentally ill person is mental illness. Luke was also a brilliant artist. He was funny. He was kind. But I think when people have severe mental illness, people can't see anything except the mental illness.”

Making A Difference

It was during the midst of Luke’s struggles that Bell decided to go back to school in 2019 and got her master’s degree in counseling. It was an idea she’d been toying with for about 10 years. 

“I was 56 and I was just feeling like I needed something meaningful to do that would help me through a hard and scary time,” she said. 

It also allowed her to better understand what Luke was going through and that it wasn’t his fault. She had more compassion for her son as she learned about mental illness and how little power people have over it.

“Our culture loves to say, ‘Well, if he wouldn't have drank too much …’ And one time when he was arrested, a cop suggested to me that maybe Luke had taken a bad meth trip,” she said. “People just really want to believe that they're safe because somehow he did this to himself, which really adds to the stigma about mental health.”

Therapy helped Carol through her husband’s death and Luke’s illness. Now she uses her experiences to benefit others.

Since Luke’s death, Carol and her family have been mental health advocates. Her father organized a mental health awareness gathering in Shell last year. One hundred and twenty-five people attended the event in the town with a population of 50. Since then Flitner and his friends have organized events in Cowley and Worland.

“Just like all of us will have the flu or some kind of illness in our lifetime, mental illness is also something that many of us, if not all of us, will experience in our lifetime,” Carol said. “A deep bout of depression or severe grief after a loss that feels debilitating. My dad's group was just making an effort to encourage people to ask for help when they need it, instead of pretending they’re fine because they're embarrassed to admit that they're struggling.”

Frontier State: The Story of Luke Bell aired on Wyoming PBS on Nov. 15 but is available online. Bell hopes the episode helps people to examine and rethink the way that they think about mental illness, and that they will be more loving and accepting of people who struggle with it.  

"It's so hard to watch someone you love suffer and to feel powerless to help them heal – I hope my family's choice to be open about Luke's illness will help somebody out there feel less alone,” Carol said. “Now that Luke is gone, almost weekly, someone I know tells me they have a family member struggling with severe mental illness. I think we would all be better off if we could talk to each other about how sad we are and how helpless we feel – we'd still be sad but at least we wouldn't be sad alone."

To honor his memory, his family also started the Luke Bell Memorial Affordable Counseling Program, which believes everyone deserves access to professional counseling, regardless of their financial situation. The program is designed to support Bighorn Basin residents by providing vouchers for up to ten sessions with the therapist of the individual’s choice. 

“We've been up and running since March and have about 40 clients right now,” she said. “It's really exciting to see how many people are making use of it. The difference it’s making is great.”

The Luke Bell Memorial Affordable Counseling Program is for clients in need who can't afford the market rates for counseling. People must be over the age of 18 and have an income less than $65,000 annually.