This April is the two-year anniversary of my second soul crushing encounter with London’s Psychiatric Machine. The sorry tale provides more background on where I was mentally before undertaking Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
On a Monday in late April 2019, I suffered a severe emotional crisis. The prior 12 months had been awful in so many respects. My mental health had been deteriorating over the previous five years, and this had accelerated. In September, there was a painful family crisis. That same month, I was diagnosed with diabetes and high cholesterol. I wasn’t functioning properly at work and had been placed on a permanent reduced teaching load. Mental, physical, personal, professional – all falling apart.
My confidence was in free fall. There was just one thing I had pinned my hopes on, as a promising exception. I had been nominated for a very prestigious research award. Late April was when I learned that I wasn’t to receive it after all.
I felt not just gloomy and deflated, but furious that the world seemed to be so against me on every front. It wasn’t just my self-assurance that was gone, but my patience. I felt angry in particular that no one had been able to help with my depression, despite that earlier trip to Emerg and, in January and March, two days at a famous and effective mental clinic, Homewood Health Centre. (Kudos to Western Ontario for sending me there at their expense.)
I googled, in my fury, what quantity of anxiety meds and alcohol would be required: “required” as in enough to not merely cripple myself mentally, making things even worse for myself and those around me; not too much that I’d vomit it all up. (Me: the rational professor to the end.)
That’s my last memory of that awful Monday.
I don’t recall how I got there, but I awoke on a gurney early Tuesday morning. Emerg redux. That same doctor who had recommended a warm bath and vitamin D back in September took things seriously this time. (He clearly didn’t remember me. I can’t blame him: his flow of suicidal patients must be a mere blur.) I explained that the team at Homewood had urged intensive inpatient treatment, trying out various new medications under close supervision. He agreed, did some research and found a space at the psychiatric wing of St. Thomas Hospital, half an hour from London. I was transferred there by ambulance. Around noon, I think.
I was admitted, given a room, and a small meal in the shared space. I met other patients. We’d be treated together, I thought. Still mid-afternoon on Tuesday, I went to bed exhausted – the aftereffects of Monday’s pills and alcohol – and slept until about 9 a.m. Wednesday, I awoke feeling positive, my anger mostly dissolved. I was set to meet the chief psychiatrist that morning to go over the treatment plan. There was a promise of help and a glimmer of hope.
Things turned dim pretty quickly. The doctor rushed through the usual in-take questions, impatient with my attempts to elaborate. He didn’t want the detailed work-up from Homewood; he didn’t want the extensive records of my failed medications. After a cursory 15 minutes, he announced that I could stay over one night if I wished.
Beyond shame at that point, terrified, I sobbed, pleaded to receive actual treatment. I could see that the trainee doctor at his side was moved. She tried, kindly, to provide some supportive words. He cut her off and packed up his papers. There would be no follow up care.
Anita arrived that same morning, planning merely to visit and learn the news about the weeks ahead. Instead, I went home with her that same day.
I would continue to decline mentally and physically – not just suicidal, but soon to be shaking, aphasic, unable to even read a novel – until late August 2019, when I began DBT with Hanna W. (my gifted and dedicated mental health Occupational Therapist) and Dr. D.
You can imagine that, however bad the crisis, I am never going back to Emerg. Not ever.