Aleathia says:
The last month or so has been a whirlwind journey with every possible emotion felt at one time or another. My entire world was turned upside down in the end of February. I got a call from my child as she sat in the guidance office sobbing and telling me she needed me to come to school immediately.
Panic. Shut up mom heart, this is a job for ER nurse. Okay….but it’s my baby. Don’t worry, we got this.
I arrive and sit in a really welcoming office where my child proceeds to tell me that over the last few months, she has overdosed on her Prozac at least 7 times. Every day spent pretending to take this medication, to act like everything is okay while in her room she is trying to find ways to die. I was blindsided. She had seem more sullen, but it was the dead of winter in New York. Everything was grey and cold and unforgiving. Looking back there were neon signs that I didn’t see. She had told no one, not even her best friend and in my healthcare experience it is the ones who have action without words that eventually succeed.
I asked my daughter if I could write about this because struggling with mental health carries a stigma in this world, one that makes it really hard for people to get help. I wanted her permission to share her story because it is personal. I didn’t want whomever might read this to think she was in the dark about it.
The process of getting help for mental health issues is arduous. You go to the ER and very few ER’s are equipped with behavioral health units and the options in New York state are so far and few between anymore with the state cutting back funding many years ago. The mental health problem is a real one. 1 in 5 adults in the US have mental illness...that is over 43 million people with nearly 10 million of them having mental illness so bad that they cannot function properly in everyday living. These are the numbers of the diagnosed. This says nothing for the people who never seek help, yet the services and care for individuals with mental illness dwindles every year.
In New York state between 2009 and 2011 they cut $132 million dollars from the mental health budget, closed major inpatient behavioral hospitals, and local behavioral units in hospitals. In our local area we had to fight to keep our long term center open which housed people who had not been out in the world in years due to the severity of their mental health, because we would have been putting them out in the community to fail with no supportive mental health care.
Numbers aside, as a nurse in my local ER I know all too well the process. The patient comes in with great distress, we strip them of everything that makes them an individual, we take everything out of the room, and they get a sitter at arms length for their entire stay. We have had patients sit over a week in our ER waiting for a mental health bed to open up. In our case, we waited almost three days for a bed. When they finally found one it was over 2 hours away in central Pennsylvania which meant I couldn’t visit every day. We were lucky if we had 5 minutes on the phone each day. It was a nightmare, but I had to hope that I had done the right thing; that we would come out on the other side.
My daughter did not like the place, but it isn’t supposed to be a place you want to return. She and I both feel that if she had stayed there any longer there would have been a serious resentment towards me and her father. But I think she needed the reset. She needed to have someone insist she communicate her feelings. She had therapy everyday so when she came back to us she wasn’t afraid of therapy like she was before.
The discharge process at this facility was poor and no one sat down with us to explain her diagnosis and what we were supposed to do. We signed papers, collected her things, and were out the door. The whole process in general was disheartening and that is coming from very involved parents who care and were there every step of the way. My daughter said there were many kids in there whose parents dumped them off at places like this because they don’t want to deal with them. It was heartbreaking.
This event was one more thing to grieve on top of all the deaths I had not allowed myself to grieve, the failed relationship, and feeling of being utterly alone. It is amazing the strength you find when the thought of losing your only child is dangled in front of your face. Here are all the things I learned:
There is no greater pain in the world than the thought of losing a child. Hands down: worse feeling ever.
This event made me speak to her father...to him, not at him about not only our daughter, but why our marriage failed. It failed because we didn’t talk to each other honestly and openly. There were things that each of us didn’t know about the other that would have changed our actions.
You have to ask the hard questions without fear. Ask them again and again until you understand what the other person is saying. Be honest with your answers. Communicate!
Healing is a journey that has both forward steps and backward steps. It is akin to ugly crying and laughing so hard your stomach hurts.
My daughter doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Her pain is my pain and in all honesty we are going through the same motions at the same time. We are learning to communicate, to open up, to let free the demons that bind us. We are helping each other.
Art is part of the master plan. Art is the only thing that lets me empty my mind. Art is what my daughter is good at and she needs more of it in her life.
Despite all the hard work and effort by her father and I, we could not shield our child from the genetic strains of mental illness in our families. It is long on both sides and even though we gave her the best divorced parents lifestyle we could, she still fell prey to her genetics.
I have undiagnosed mental illness. I’m sure of it.
No one has to do it alone.
Being a teenager in this time is more brutal than my time. The internet and social media make it a tough world to live in where kids can taunt each other without repercussion and without being brave enough to do it to their face and risk their own ridicule for being mean. Even good students and good kids suffer things parents can’t imagine. This suffering is what hurts me the most. It pains me to think my girl suffered like this since the 6th grade until she couldn’t take it anymore. All the while putting on a good face to keep everyone else’s feelings intact. She suffered alone.
Be responsible. Talk to your kids even if they roll their eyes or say they don’t want to talk. They need someone they can trust, someone that loves them. Don’t give up on them. Don’t write their behavior off as teenage angst. Sometimes, it is deeper than you think.
Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255
Thank you for reading.
Aleathia
