My grandmother, too, was mentally ill.
My mother would say of my grandmother, I don’t think she liked children. I think she only had all those kids because she felt it was her godly duty. You know when your poor auntie was born, your grandmother had the baby blues. She went mad and chopped off her own toes with an axe and they had to send her to the loonie bin.
Later, while I held my own infant daughter, I asked one of my aunts about my grandmother's postpartum depression. My grandmother had confessed to my aunt that after one of her eight pregnancies she’d begun to have thoughts compelling her to hurt someone. It was either her or the baby, she’d said.
She had chosen to hurt herself.
I thought about my own postpartum depression. How I’d been certain the baby I held somehow wasn’t my own, and how frighteningly close I’d come to hurting myself. I wonder how long my grandmother had struggled with those dark thoughts before finally giving in.
I felt a pang of sympathy for this woman who hadn’t really liked children but had sacrificed part of herself to protect her child. During those early weeks with my second daughter, I came very close to ending my own life. Afterwards, when I was well enough again, I would talk about how close I’d come to the edge. Friends and family would say things like they would have helped, if only they had known.
Why didn’t I just ask?
Thinking back, I had practically screamed for help. It was just that no one had listened. Or those that had, hadn’t offered any tangible support beyond platitudes.
I had already learned through years of navigating my father’s mental illness, and then my own too, (my first hospitalization was at 13 after swallowing a bottle of Tylenol. I’d later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder) that when people tell you to ask for help, what they really mean is that you should ask someone else for help. Someone like a doctor, or a therapist. People are much too busy trying to keep their own lives together. No matter that therapists are out of reach financially for many—and their helpfulness is debatable—and doctors are often unable to do anything beyond provide a prescription for psych meds.
Moms are told to ask for help if they experience postpartum depression. What they don’t tell new mothers is that the help that’s available will be woefully inadequate and consist of mostly pharmacological treatment. Which for many isn’t at all the type of support they need.
Even if there was a chance the drugs would help me—which based on my experience with a long list of pharmaceuticals, including antidepressants, mood stabilizers, sleeping pills, and antipsychotics, I highly doubted—I wasn’t willing to expose my baby to all those chemicals through my breast milk. Hospital stays require compulsory medication, prescribed by a doctor who spends a total of a half hour assessing a patient before pasting a diagnosis and prescribing a list of pills on their chart. I wasn’t willing to once again submit myself to the indignity. Besides, my husband couldn’t afford the time off work. If I went to a psychiatric ward, who would care for my baby and for my toddler?
Truthfully, I’d just needed a little help—the occasional few hours of relief and maybe a week or two of unbroken sleep—but none of what I needed was available to me. The only way to get those things was to confess to my horrid thoughts, abdicate my right to autonomy, and allow someone else to take away my freedom and assume control over my life, children, and health.
The choices mothers with mental illness face are grim, and the supports are almost nonexistent. It’s no wonder some choose to suffer in silence until it's too late.
My last hospitalization was in my mid-twenties for a severe manic depression episode.
The restaurant I co-owned with my boyfriend at the time was doing poorly. The restaurant itself was great, everything I’d dreamed when we’d first found the space, but our timing was bad. We’d opened just a year before the Great Recession hit in a small mountain town entirely dependent on tourism. We enjoyed a short boom that first year, then the economic crisis hit, and we watched our business halve, then quarter, as the local tourism slowed to a crawl. We stuck it out as long as we could but were eventually forced to close our doors and cut our losses.
During this time, I became severely depressed.
I was hearing voices, seeing strange things, and could hardly get up from bed. The voices in my head told me I was worthless. I should drown myself in the nearby river. I went to the doctor, desperate for help. I just needed to be able to function normally again. I was prescribed an SSRI. This was despite my telling the doctor that I had never tolerated them well.
The drug triggered a severe manic episode.
After two weeks of no sleep, I became so paranoid I couldn’t be around people without freaking out. I was being stalked by phantom shadows. Everywhere I went I would hear strangers whispering and laughing about me. I believed everyone could read my thoughts and knew how crazy I was. I stopped eating. I couldn’t think straight and couldn’t sit down. I’d play loud music to drown out the noise in my head while I paced incessantly, wearing down the floorboards of our hallway. At night, after everyone had gone to bed, I’d walk the streets of our little town for hours in a state of delirium. I carried a knife in my pocket for protection, or maybe to slit my wrists—I couldn’t quite make up my mind if I was terrified that I was going to be attacked, or if I wanted to end the chaos that had hijacked my brain.
I quit the shitty job I’d been working. I simply couldn’t function. Despite my vehement protests, my boyfriend insisted I check into a psychiatric ward.
I’d gotten a job cleaning rooms at a filthy motel, right after the restaurant closed, at the height of my illness (the only job posted in the entire town that month. Piece work, they weren’t even paying me minimum wage). He was mad that I was holed up having a mental breakdown instead of pounding the pavement looking for work, but refused to sell our house and move to a place where I could actually find a real job.
The deal had been that I would run the day-to-day restaurant operations, he would handle the bookkeeping and would keep his well-paying 9-5. He made more than enough to manage the house and bills for us both. His job also allowed him to work remotely from anywhere. There was no reason we couldn’t move, he simply didn’t want to. He made it clear he wasn’t going to pack up his comfortable life so I could find better work, and that he viewed my mental lapse as a bout of self-indulgent laziness, and he wasn’t about to live with a freeloader. I would have to figure out how to take care of my end of things within the parameters that he had decided worked best for him.
His disdain was palpable.
We’d been together nearly five years. Renovated a condo and bought a restaurant and house together. He’d seen me work double shifts at previous jobs and regular sixty-hour weeks at the restaurant but was worried that I’d suddenly become a lazy freeloader. No matter that I was so mentally ill I couldn’t even function.
I’d always had swings, highs and lows (you don’t decide to buy a restaurant without at least a little manic energy), but this one was different. I could see the wheels turning in his brain, calculating just what type of a mess he’d gotten himself into. I wasn’t just quirky, as he’d once thought. I was all out fucking crazy, and he wanted me to be someone else’s problem.
There’s nothing quite so gut wrenching as learning that someone doesn’t really love you, only the highly productive and self-sufficient person they thought you were, the idealized version of you. That they don’t care enough to be inconvenienced when you really, truly need their help.
Hospitalization was a nightmare.
I was fed cocktails of drugs that I didn’t want but couldn’t refuse. Drugs that made me feel ill and needed endless tweaking. They did little for my mental state besides tranquilize me into a stupor so that I spent most of my day drifting in and out of consciousness. Which was maybe for the best, since I was placed in a room with a poor woman who paced the linoleum tiles in her hard soled slippers, moaning and howling all night long like the ghost of some forlorn Victorian wraith. Being absolutely zonked on neuroleptics was the only way to get even a moment’s rest.
Despite struggling to keep my eyes open and being woken all night by my roommate’s operatics, I was required to participate in the regimented ward schedule. This included pointless and ridiculous group therapy exercises hosted by patronizing counsellors who spoke to us like children. I wasn’t allowed to remain in my room during the day and was refused time to myself to sleep and recuperate. I found group activities genuinely distressing in my now exhausted and still very paranoid mental state, but was warned that if I didn’t participate, I would be written up as noncompliant. This would affect my privileges (which consisted mostly of an allowance to take periodic cigarette breaks in a fenced-in compound) and, I was warned, potentially even my ability to get discharged. I was a prisoner, a captive, and I had somehow willingly signed away my autonomy.
It finally occurred to me to ask if they had any grounds to hold me. I had committed myself voluntarily. Surely, I could sign myself out. They skirted the question and insisted staying was in my best interest. Being nothing if not tenacious, I continued to press the issue. They finally relented, admitting with much reluctance that they couldn’t hold me. I immediately requested to be discharged.
My boyfriend seemed confused that I hadn’t gotten any better. I was now both incredibly mentally ill and so exhausted from the medication I was on that I couldn’t even get out of bed. He demanded to know how I planned to find the nonexistent job in the town that had all but shut down, but that he still insisted was waiting for me if I would just stop being so lazy.
I finally left him. Packed a single suitcase and flew home to stay with my mom and stepdad and never looked back.
One of the medications I was sent home with caused a severe reaction. A blistering rash over my face and neck the doctor called Steven Johnson Syndrome. If not caught early, the condition typically results in sepsis and is often fatal.
I watched horrified as my epidermis began to blister and canker, then separate like the decaying flesh of an overripe fruit. I wasn’t even warned of this potential deadly side effect when prescribed the drug, just as I hadn’t been warned that SSRIs were known to trigger mania. Since I had moved, I no longer had a doctor but by some grace was fortunate enough to happen upon a walk-in clinic doctor who took my medication history and recognized the condition.
It was caught early enough that I wouldn’t have major complications. I healed quickly once I discontinued the drug, but it was the final insult for me. That day I went home and threw all my prescriptions in the garbage.
A few weeks of actual rest in my mom’s spare room, and I was finally able to function again. I found a job in a local restaurant and within just a few months was promoted to general manager. To this day I’m not sure if I would still be alive if I hadn’t had that bit of family support and the ability to just rest.
I’ve spent the better part of my life navigating a dysfunctional, Kafkaesque system that seems designed more to break the spirit than lift it.
I can’t help but feel that the mental healthcare system does not adequately serve the needs of the individuals, families, and communities who rely on it. The failures have been catastrophic.
For myself, I no longer expect to find outside help when in crisis. I’m not sure if I’ll always be able to manage my illness, or what I’ll do if I become so ill my few support people decide they no longer want to deal with me, but one thing I’m certain of is that I’ve persisted this long in spite of the system, not because of it.
