I’ve been remembering my mother tonight. She had the worst psychotic breakdown of her life in 2001. She was in and out of the hospital at least six times that year. So many times I lost count. We would have her committed, they’d give her massive doses of antipsychotic medications, and when they thought she was stabilized, they would release her. But she kept relapsing. Finally her condition deteriorated to the point that she had to be led around by the arm. She was so lost inside her own head that she hardly recognized what was going on around her.

Mother usually fought hospitalization, but this time she was so ill she didn’t even realize we were taking her to the hospital. I sat with her out in the waiting room as Dad filled out all the necessary paperwork and signed all the forms. The two of us had been sitting there about twenty minutes when she finally turned to me and asked, “Where are we?” She hadn’t even realized we had left home.

When they were ready to admit her, I led her onto the ward. It was a locked ward with security guards, long, meandering corridors, and a number of doors that had to be opened for us by an employee with a key. When we got there, a nurse immediately realized how confused she was and pulled up a chair for her beside the nurses’ station. I told her to sit down, and she did just as I asked. Dad spoke to someone behind the counter for a few minutes, and then we told Mother we were leaving and that we’d be back to visit the next day. She didn’t know what we meant. She continued to sit there staring off into space and talking to the people who lived inside her imagination. Mother was completely helpless and at the mercy of others.

When we went back the next day, they wouldn’t allow her to see us in the visiting room. There was too many unfamiliar people in the visiting room, and they wanted to keep her behind all those locked doors, so we had our visit in an office beside the nurses’ station. We were told that she believed that she was visiting her family. She thought some of the nurses were her sisters and sisters-in-law.

After she had been in the hospital a number of times, her doctor told us that it was possible that she wouldn’t pull out of it this time and that we might have to put her in a long term treatment facility. Thankfully by October she started to get well, but the breakdown and the drugs took their toll. She didn’t do much of anything those last two years except sleep and eat. After breakfast, she would lie down on the sofa in the living room, and that’s where she stayed all day. The only time she smiled was when I brought her pill to her in the evening. She could go to bed after she took her pill, and that made her happy.