I’m sharing this story in series of posts for mental health awareness and for caregivers who are walking a path they never expected. #2 The first hospitalization changed everything. Until that moment, I still believed quietly;that if we did the right things, if we adjusted enough variables, we could return to the life we knew. Hospitalization shattered that belief. It marked the point where mental illness could no longer be managed privately, spiritually, or quietly within the family. When She Stopped Speaking What followed was something I had no language for at the time. She stopped eating. She stopped speaking. She barely moved. For ten days, she existed in a state that was deeply unsettling to witness. I later learned the word for it: catatonia . At the time, it felt like watching my child retreat somewhere I could not reach. I bathed her. I sat beside her. I tried to talk to her, even when there was no response. I did paath quietly, sitting near her bed, holding onto faith...
I’m sharing this story in series of posts for mental health awareness and for caregivers who are walking a path they never expected. #1 Mental illness rarely announces itself loudly at the beginning. For us, it arrived quietly; disguised as anxiety, depression, fleeting psychosis that felt like a vivid nightmare, and heightened sensitivity. Like many families, we believed we were dealing with something temporary like school stress, puberty or a phase. She was bright, thoughtful, and deeply sensitive. Early Signs We Didn’t Understand She was born with separation anxiety and had scarlet fever at age eleven, something that may have triggered underlying vulnerabilities, though nothing became obvious at the time. Faith, Fear, and Missed Language The real shift came years later, when I took a job 400 miles away and she was left to manage her daily life on her own at sixteen. I couldn’t hear what wasn’t being said. She couldn’t make sense of the conflicting thoughts she was having; th...