Remembering Kate

cont.

As a child I always thought it was my fault my mother got sick. I didn't know what I had done to cause her illness but I thought that if I said the right thing to her she would get well and stay well. The only trouble was, whenever I was alone with her I didn't know the words to say.

The atmosphere in the hospital was abominable, as state psychiatric institutions were back then. It was crowded, dark and smelly. She slept in a large room which she shared with forty other women. There was only a small night stand between the beds for personal belongings. No privacy. No rest. No peace. Dealing with forty others with symptoms as severe as hers. She recalls that the food was horrid, and being the wonderful cook she was, she would known. She had very limited access to doctors and their was little staff to meet the needs of all those patients. Not much of a prescription for recovery. No one was expected to get well. It was a holding tank, a place where people were managed, not cured or helped to recover. People diagnosed with manic depression in those days (the late 1940's and early 50's), before the advent of psychiatric medications and the focus on psychotherapy and recovery, people with symptoms as severe as the ones she experienced, were expected to live out their lives and die alone in a back ward, forgotten by family and friends. But not Kate. After eight years of severe, recurring psychotic manic and depressive episodes, Kate got well. And she stayed well until her death at the age of 82, 37 years later.

What does her story have to tell us and teach us, almost 40 years later?

No one really knows why those awful mood swings stopped. We just know they did. Hospital staff noticed her moods weren't vacillating wildly any anymore. In fact, she was helping to take care of the other patients.

She and I spent many hours talking about why she got well, about what made the difference. In fact, she was included in, and the inspiration for, both of my studies: my study of how people with depression and manic depression get by on a day to day basis, and my study of how people with severe mood instability get well, stay well and regain control over their lives. These studies gave me the information I needed to write my books, The Depression Workbook: A Guide to Living with Depression and Manic Depression and Living Without Depression and Manic Depression: A Guide to Maintaining Mood Stability.

As I noted earlier, prior to her first episode, her life was stressful and she had little support. Through most of her hospitalization she had little support. But toward the end of her hospitalization, several things changed.

There was a volunteer at the hospital and a staff member who began to take a special interest in her. They listened to her for hours and hours. She was not used to sharing. She interrupted her monologue with apologies for talking too much. But these two dedicated supporters encouraged her to continue, literally for hours on end. She says she had never felt heard before.

In an interlude between episodes at the hospital, she started what may have been the first support group for mental patients ever begun by a psychiatric patient. It was called Mental Health Fellowship. She began the group with the help of a very fine psychiatrist who took a special interest in her case. Even after she was discharged from the hospital, she went back regularly to attend meetings of the support group and to visit patients who had become as close as family through the years. There was another factor that we can't really assess, but that needs to be mentioned. One of the nurses started clandestinely giving her a high dosage multi-vitamin. Perhaps chemicals in her body that had gone awry somehow fixed themselves. Who will ever know?

Perhaps it was her own strong will and determination that made her well. We know it wasn't medications. There were none that were effective in the treatment of manic depression in those days. No one was talking about self help. When she got out of the hospital, she faced some serious challenges. Some so immense that they would have sent most of our moods wildly out of control or scurrying back to the safety of a bleak hospital situation. She seemed to have a sense of the importance of support. This was in 1955, before anyone was really thinking about support for the mentally ill. But somehow my mother knew how important it was to her on-going wellness.

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