I recently read the story about "Maryland’s severely mentally ill need treatment before the worst happens" in the @washingtonpost. I was struck by the fact that a mother could be in plain sight in public with such a tragic end. Where were the other parents? Why didn't somebody call for help? Why didn't the police pay her a visit? This was a tragic situation. Ideally a citizen would have noted the child was being swung too much, and called the authorities to investigate. Or made a connection that could have grounded the woman in truth and love an helped her. Why is preventive treatment tragically overlooked? Every community needs to look for signs of neglect and child endangerment, especially when their caregivers or parents are at risk for mental illness.
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I have a similar story but with a positive outcome. I became sick shortly after the birth of my daughter in 2005 but I had access to care. I remember just before I was hospitalized in 2006, someone notified the police who came to check on me and my daughter.

Excerpt from "All in Her Head" by Sunny Mera

“Here, you need to be taking these. You are experiencing psychosis,” he said gently but firmly, handing me samples and a prescription to fill for Geodon, the same antipsychotic medication I had taken in the fall.

I trusted Dr. Bouley, so I decided to comply with his instructions. I nodded and opened my hand, where he placed the medication. I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the hospital, and while I waited in line, I listened carefully to the words on the radio. As I realized how powerless I felt against the messages surrounding me, I knew I had to resign myself to letting go of my ego. Here we go again, I thought. I ordered a large iced coffee and took my medication with it before Jamie and I did anything else.

It was midafternoon when I left the drive-through line. I spent the afternoon walking along the Merrimack River by the Manchester campus and playing on a blanket in the grassy patch near the sidewalk next to the water on the east side of the river. About an hour later, despite my iced coffee, I started to feel sedated. Jamie descended into a fussy, miserable mess by 4:00 p.m.—the “witching hour,” as Jack’s mom called it. I tried everything, but she refused food, comfort,
and entertainment. The only thing I could do to pacify her was to carry her around in my arms and walk. But that afternoon, I was too tired from the medicine, so we went back to the car. As Jamie
crawled into my lap, crying, my eyelids and limbs became heavier and heavier, and I eventually succumbed to the sensation.

I woke from my deep sedation to the sound of tapping on the tinted window. It was a police officer. He wore a blue uniform with a shiny new badge on his chest. His skin was dark brown. I opened the
door, smiling slightly.

“May I see your identification, Officer?” I asked.

“Yes, here it is,” he said, holding up an identification badge. “We got a call about an unattended child in a green SUV.” My face burned with the heat of a blush as he told me why he was there. He looked at me with my child in my lap. “But there must have been a misunderstanding, because everything looks fine,” he said. “Can I close the back gate on the trunk?”

“Sure, it was too heavy for me to close earlier,” I said. He looked like he felt bad for us as my daughter continued to fuss and I held her, trying to bounce and pat her to quiet her down in front of the officer. Jamie was still miserable, and I was still struggling against the sedation, but we looked perfectly ordinary, other than my delayed responses and Jamie’s tearstained cheeks.

Jack got to the Manchester campus parking lot that afternoon and took Jamie home. I didn’t talk to him immediately about the police officer incident or my appointment with Dr. Bouley. It wasn’t that I hid it; it just didn’t occur to me that I needed to tell him. After all, we rarely talked about anything anymore, since everything that came out of my mouth seemed to cause Jack to bristle.
Somehow, I made it to class and home that night, and I wrote in my journal. After the police incident, I felt terrible. I knew I couldn’t care for my daughter adequately if I was sedated. By Wednesday, April 19, 2006—only one day after the psychiatrist had prescribed me the Geodon—I decided to stop taking it. I’d become too sedated to take care of Jamie the day before, and hiring help hadn’t occurred to me that day. The only thought I could focus on was taking care of
my baby.

At noon that same day, I put Jamie in her gray high chair and sat down to eat lunch at the McDonald’s in Concord, New Hampshire. Jamie perched across from me, facing Main Street, while my back was against a booth bench. There was an old man sitting in the corner booth next to us.
In my heightened awareness, I was seeing the signs in everything. Earlier, I’d seen a cloud that looked like a pie in the sky, so I wasn’t surprised to see the next sign. Sitting with my back against the window, I read another customer’s hat. The words were laced through the comical buttons pinned around the man’s ball cap. He was into politics, and he supported a liberal presidential candidate, John Kerry. Sitting with Jamie, looking at the ball cap, I saw something special. The sporting gear told me I was near God. The man was a Bruins fan. I read an anagram in “Bruins”: “S near B.” “S” symbolized my name, Sunny, and I’d determined “B” meant “God.” The bees
were essential to nature, and that was God’s domain. Plus, I was a terrible speller, so I sounded out “niur” to mean near. At the time it made sense to me; I read the anagram backward. After I settled into the seat and got Jamie’s meal organized, the old man next to us started talking. “I am a great-grandfather,” he said.

“I hope to grow old enough to see my great-grandchildren,” I said.

“Isn’t that what life is all about?” I smiled and relaxed, knowing I was safe with God nearby.

He just smiled back at me. We started talking about life and kids. When Jamie dropped her Happy Meal toy, a small boat with a bell that chimed every time the boat rocked, I felt the old man studying her as I went to pick up the plastic toy from the floor.

“It’s like a ladder: when people start to fall off, you catch them and help them back up,” he said. “How old is your daughter?”

“She’s thirteen months,” I said.

“I’m over eighty years old,” he said.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “What do you do for work?”

“I’ve been a baby farmer my whole life,” he said with an appreciative look in his eye. We talked about parenthood for a while, until Jamie and I were done eating. I figured it made sense that God was a baby farmer. Every farmer I knew tried to do the best for his herd or crop, but sometimes the farmers I knew made hard choices about the animals they raised. It caused me to think about our world from a new perspective.

When I got home, I called my mom to tell her about my experience. “I think I ate lunch with God,” I said.

My mom didn’t believe it at all. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Well, Jamie and I ate lunch at McDonald’s on Main Street in Concord, and I think I met God,” I said.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

I felt like my mother was a stranger to me in that moment. My mother was a good Christian woman; if she didn’t believe in experiencing God, then who would? I got off the phone as soon as I
could. When I read a message on the hat, as a real man sat at the table next to me, the experience explained the universe in ways I could understand. Society’s role is to pick people up and help them get back on the ladder of life. The idea resonated with me in a deep way. I needed to hear that. I struggled to imagine a future living with mental illness, and thinking God was a baby farmer was the simplest explanation I’d ever heard for why I was living with an illness. I reflected for a long time about how to frame my experience. The way I came to accept my “lunch with God” was that I was sick and I ate lunch with an old, possibly senile, man. He was probably struggling with mental health as much as or more than I was. But I needed to hear those things at that time. It helped me have hope for a future when I needed it most.

That evening, I felt like I was on fire. My skin was burning hot. Radiating. Messages appeared in my inbox. The e-mails told me it was neuropsychiatric, exothermic, and a couple other things. I thought they were meant for me, but Jack said it was just spam and I wasn’t that special. I thought someone was trying to tell me about my burning-skin condition. I got paranoid and erased many of the e-mails. I thought someone knew everything about me. I hoped it was Dr. Richard. To cope with
my desire, fear, and paranoia, plus my worry about Jack and all the time he spent building firearms in the basement, I opened a file and documented my experience by writing passages such as the following:

Thursday, April 20, 2006
There is nowhere to go.
There is no one to turn to.
And I see a psychiatrist and a social worker; I sit in a public
health classroom; I have coffee with moms, shop at the mall,
go on picnics in the park and strolls through my neighborhood.
Why can’t I talk to anyone?

Why am I isolated?
Okay, maybe not functioning totally normally.
After all, I thought I ate lunch with God.
Who would ever believe that?
My mother doesn’t even seem to buy it at all. And if she
doesn’t believe in it, then nobody would.
I am afraid of what the signs say.
I would never do anything like what they want me to do.
You picked the wrong person.
I would rather be poisoned to death than hurt anyone.
I could never live with the guilt of it.
Angels will have to rescue me from this living hell.
Angels, please come and rescue me.
Take me away.
I feel sad.
The house has a terrible smell.
It smells like sewer gases.
My husband told me he thought it smells like my perfume.
It does not smell anything like Chanel Chance.

After I finished writing, I decided I needed to say something to Jack about how suspicious I was of him. I walked into the kitchen, where he was sitting at a stool. He turned to look at me when I walked into the room. At first, there was a long pause, a tense silence. I was the first to break the quiet.

“I know your secret,” I said.

He looked at me, still letting the silence fall.

“I know you have the explosives. I saw them. Why are you building a bomb?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“How could you hide it in Jamie’s room?” I asked. I watched his face blanch.

We quarreled about the basement and the reloading equipment and what I assumed to be an explosive in Jamie’s room.

“You need medication—you’re crazy!” he yelled at me. A wave of fatigue hit me, and I turned and retreated to bed.

The next morning, I felt a little better having had a good night’s sleep, but Jack handed me the medication he’d found while searching my handbag. “You will take this, or I’ll make sure you never see Jamie again,” he warned. I complied in silence and felt him studying me as I swallowed the pills.

“I’m taking you to see Dr. Bouley today,” he said.

In my moments of lucidity, I trusted my insight and the responses from the people around me, like when my mother didn’t believe I ate lunch with God in McDonald’s on Main Street. I fought my fear and listened when Jack told me he’d have Jamie taken away; I didn’t doubt his threat. I knew he was serious that he would strip me of my rights as a mother if he could, and I resented him for that. I hated that he would use my love and need to mother Jamie to manipulate my behavior. Afterward, Jack left with Jamie for the bus station, where he was picking up his mom, who planned to spend the day babysitting. I was upstairs doing my hair, when I heard a faint noise. I set down the
brush and listened carefully.

“The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, heigh ho the derryo, the farmer in the dell.” I could hear the creepy song playing across the landing as I went toward Jamie’s room. I opened the door. One of Jamie’s toys played from her crib. I didn’t know what had activated it.

The cats were nowhere in sight.

God said he was a farmer. Is he in the computer? It is a Dell. When will I stop feeling afraid? Are they going to kill me? The only way I’ll feel safe is if the FBI searches our house for bombs.

What I needed was protection. I was afraid Jack would follow through on his threat to take Jamie away from me, and I worried that there was a war between good and evil taking place over me.

***

I was hospitalized by noon that day. This is a hard story to tell, but I was lucky, I had access to care, and effective treatment.