Commitment

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This is Polarized Lens with Jennifer Merchan.

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Polarized Lens is a podcast that examines life through the filter of bipolar disorder.

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Created and hosted by a person living with bipolar disorder,

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Polarized Lens aims to explore the challenges of that mode of life in this neurotypical world,

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raise awareness, and help those who want to understand more about bipolar disorder.

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Content note.

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There is discussion of cutting and suicide.

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Also, my then-husband's name was not really Bob.

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Episode 4. Commitment.

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Nearly 20 years ago, I checked myself into a mental hospital.

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I had quit my job as a high school teacher because of the stress.

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I was clearly in crisis and calling out for help.

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My then-husband, Bob, responded by dropping me off with one hastily packed small orange suitcase at my parents' house.

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My parents lived in a tiny rural town in an adjoining state.

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There, I alternated between lying on the sofa, paralyzed with despair, and frantically pacing in circles with my brain on fire.

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My gun-loving parents locked away all their weapons, knowing that suicide runs in the family.

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It still took me a week to convince my mother to bring me back to the city so that I could get the mental health care that I needed.

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Evidently, she thought it was just a ploy to see Bob.

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Finally convinced, my 65-year-old mother had me load her walker into her car.

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She would drive her 30-year-old adult child five and a half hours across the state line and into a major metropolitan area to be voluntarily committed to a private mental health facility.

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I had missed so many red flags with Bob, which isn't terribly surprising.

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I had been melting down over the course of several months, probably since the beginning of the school year in August.

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At various points that semester, there had been clear indicators that I had reached my limit.

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I had broken down in tears on the phone with the student's parent.

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I had broken down in tears in front of the principal.

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I had tried to get reasonable accommodation when the administration took away one of the two teacher preparation periods for the next semester.

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I had started seeing a therapist at the end of October.

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With my golden luck, I managed to find a therapist who didn't believe in mental illness that needed to be treated with medicine.

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He thought that these behaviors and feelings were just personal faults that could be remedied through therapy.

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I was painfully slow to catch on to this.

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My general practitioner had referred me to him.

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This was the therapist who mocked me about my stressful high school teaching job, who wanted me in a 12-step program for taking medicines as prescribed,

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and who dismissed my suicidal ideations completely.

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But I stuck with the terrible therapist.

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My GP had given him a stellar recommendation and assured me he was a great fit.

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Why did I not question this?

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Because I was so far gone mentally and had no local support system.

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There was no one nearby looking out for me.

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Also, I had no idea who else to go to.

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I was having panic attacks pretty much every other day at this point.

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I had been struggling with the school administrators for weeks.

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I depended upon that therapist.

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He was my lifeline, and he calmly watched me drown while at the same time helping Bob to leave me.

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Yes, Bob was seeing him too.

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Back to those red flags.

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A few months before my hospitalization, Bob had convinced me to send off my car to my parents' house out of state.

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We had two cars, but Bob and I both worked in the same school district and drove to work together every day.

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And, at that point, I had ceded most of the driving to him because of my anxiety and panic attacks.

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We'll give it to your sister, he assured me.

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She needs a car.

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She also didn't know how to drive.

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But he was persuasive.

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His arguments seemed to make some amount of sense to me at the time.

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My sister now tells me that he had her making payments on the car as it sat at my parents' house.

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This I had not previously known, and I only vaguely remember the rest of it.

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I do remember that Bob had been encouraging me to apply for admission to a graduate program in comparative literature at an out-of-state university.

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At the same time, he was very vague about where he might be working while I started that graduate program.

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In my eagerness for an escape from high school teaching, I completely fell for it and applied.

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He had encouraged me to go for an in-person interview for the program, and I had gone.

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The week that I was gone gave him a taste of the freedom he craved.

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I came back, but things were never the same.

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Another red flag that I missed was his budding friendship with someone I had befriended at work, a fellow teacher.

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Let's just say that I was oblivious until it was too late.

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What's important is that it represented to Bob that he had options.

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Meanwhile, I was fantasizing about going to graduate school in-state in classics, and, at the time, I was already literally flunking out of graduate school.

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I was taking education classes, trying to work towards a master's in education in order to keep my job,

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but I was finding it difficult to complete online courses at a time when online anything was still a novelty.

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And, of course, my thinking was far from clear.

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I was also fighting with the high school and district administrators for that second planning period.

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I had to provide documentation of my disability, which, at the time, was officially depression with anxiety,

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and, as much as I hate to admit it, the one thing that wretched therapists came through on for me was documentation.

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The administrators ended up granting me a second planning period by transferring all the students from that period into other periods.

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I would now have 29 students in one period and 33 students in another, while the district's own limit was 30 students per period.

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Learning this was their solution was too much for me, and I resigned, giving two weeks notice.

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Honestly, looking back, I think I quit just as much because my mental condition just kept getting worse, and I simply could no longer cope.

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But I somehow managed to stay on for two weeks after I submitted my resignation.

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My quitting was not unexpected. I was, however, blindsided by Bob's reaction.

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Once I finished my two weeks and had become financial deadweight, Bob told me that our marriage was over.

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So, I cut myself.

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I hesitate to say I tried to commit suicide because the effort was too anemic to allow that label.

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I cut myself. My brain was on fire, and I thought it would bring some relief.

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I had also hoped that I would have the courage to end it all, but the reality didn't rise to that point, not even close.

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I bled a little.

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Enough to concern Bob enough to buy bandages, but not take me to the ER, which means it left an ugly scar.

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At this point, you can probably understand why Bob left me with my parents.

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Well, I can't.

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I was in a major metro area. I was already seeing a therapist and a doctor.

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Why did he drive five and a half hours to dump me at my parents' house and five and a half back when he could have driven fifteen minutes to dump me at a mental hospital?

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That's a lot of driving for a statement that could easily have been missed, except that he spoke the words to me to make it clear.

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He was no longer responsible for me.

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So, I found help by myself.

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It took me a week, being in a different state and out of my mind, but I managed it.

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When my brain caught fire and I couldn't put it out on my own, I sought help.

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I called my doctor.

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Help was 400 miles away, but I found it on my own, fighting against my mother until the moment I convinced her to bring me.

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My mother then drove the entire way there and through the city.

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She didn't trust me to drive and I don't blame her.

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When we arrived at the hospital, I went to check in without my little orange suitcase and got roped into the entire admissions process and psychological evaluation.

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At first, my mother and I were taken to a large, airy waiting room in a complex of small buildings.

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The wall facing the courtyard was made entirely of windows like a built-in fish tank.

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We waited there for the first of several eternities we were to experience that evening.

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We listened as other people's names were called and watched as the people to whom those names belonged were escorted out of the room to a mystery location.

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Eventually, my name was the one called and my mother and I were escorted out of the fishbowl to a rather dull-looking beige office in one of the small buildings off the courtyard.

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There, we sat across a desk from someone who probably gave us his name and position or function, but that detail is lost in the haze of anxiety, agitation, and anticipation that was tearing through my heated brain like a tornado.

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This person, who was probably a doctor of some sort, questioned me in front of my mother, with whom I was not close, about my deepest, darkest thoughts.

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I answered honestly despite my mother's presence because I was desperate for help.

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There I was in the admissions wing of a mental hospital, catastrophizing about how I wouldn't be admitted and, oh my God, what would I do next if I wasn't?

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I really didn't know.

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I don't remember where we waited next, but I do remember spending another eternity awaiting judgment before anyone let us know I had passed the kind of test that you don't ever want to be in a position to take, much less pass.

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I met the criteria for admission into the hospital.

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Once I was admitted, I wasn't allowed to leave. The staff didn't let me back out into the parking lot to get my suitcase.

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My mother had to go back to the car alone with her walker and stuff some clothes into a plastic grocery bag to bring back to me because she couldn't handle my suitcase.

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If she hadn't been able to do that much, I would have had to wear paper scrubs for the duration.

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I entered the ward to which I had been assigned and I was taken to a small white room off the common room where I was asked to take my clothes off and lie on the table.

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It was cold.

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It also hurt because they took a urine sample for drug testing with a catheter.

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We then danced the taut tango of my first ever strip search and cavity check.

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It was not fun, so not fun that I had begun to question my decision to admit myself, but mostly I was numb.

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The reality of self-committal, which had begun with finding out I couldn't leave to get my suitcase, had become fully manifest.

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I don't actually remember if the delivery of the plastic grocery bag of clothes came before or after the examination, but probably after.

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I have no idea how long my mother had to wait during this entire process, but it seemed like a string of eternities to me.

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Close by, there was an extended stay hotel that either just catered to or was affiliated with the hospital.

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My mother checked in there once I was fully admitted and had a couple of changes of clothes.

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The length of my stay in the hospital still had yet to be determined.

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Fortunately, my mother could be patient and resourceful when she wanted to be.

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I'll talk about the particulars of inpatient mental health hospitalization 20 years ago in episode 5, no exit. See you then.

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Don't forget to visit Polarized-Lens.com for previous episodes, blog posts, and a contact form for feedback if you have something to say.

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Thank you for listening. This has been Polarized Lens with Jennifer Merchan.

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Visit Polarized-Lens.com for bonus content.

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I am not a doctor. This podcast is not medical advice.

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If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, don't hesitate.

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Call or text 988 and connect with someone who can help.

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Don't go down that road alone.