Soulful Journeys Within

The Diagnosis Nobody Knows How to Talk About Picture a waiting room. Fluorescent lights. A clipboard with pages of intake forms. A daughter sits beside her mother, twisting the sleeve of her kurta between her fingers. Across from them, a psychiatrist explains that what the family has been calling stress, anger, rebelliousness, or a difficult phase may be part of a serious mood disorder. The mother listens carefully. She has questions, but she is afraid to ask them. Will this diagnosis affect her daughter's future marriage prospects? What will the relatives say? Will people assume she failed as a parent? Will her daughter ever return to the person she remembers? The daughter is listening, too. She hears the word bipolar. She wonders whether her family will ever look at her the same way again. They leave the appointment with a treatment plan. But neither is prepared for the conversation waiting for them at home. This is the part of mental illness that rarely makes it into the ...

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...