My Mom Worked at a Lunatic Asylum and Then Watched Me Have a Mental Health Crisis

They met at the Northampton Lunatic Asylum in 1970. She had been there since she was 16.

She threw up from nerves on the first day after walking down a long and narrow hallway into a room lined with people sitting in industrial chairs, talking to themselves and drooling. Some were slumped so that their heads nearly touched their chests. Others seemed to leer at her as she passed, trying to catch her eye, watching her walk.

“Nancy has pica. She eats whatever she sees.” She listened to the nursing attendant intently, sure she had stepped through a looking glass into a dark and twisted world. The place reminded her of the high school’s cafeteria. Puke green tiles with dirty grout and sticky floors made her white sneakers squeak piercingly. Someone screamed, bringing her back from a haze. “That’s Carol. She’s a screamer.”

She went home that night and took a hot shower. Stepping into the steam, she toweled off her hair and dressed. Her mother was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, waiting for her. “Ma, I’m going to quit.” She closed her eyes and still smelled the feces and the piss, the antiseptic, and the food. That’s what made her throw up. “Ma, they make them eat dog food there.”

But she didn’t quit; she returned to the asylum where they placed her on the SI-2 ward. It was the best place to be, meaning it was the only ward that didn’t give her nightmares when she went home. She spent her days combing old ladies’ hair and bathing and feeding them. She learned the dog food was highly pureed vegetables and proteins, pulverized to be digestible by mouths without teeth and to prevent choking. After a while, she became numb to her surroundings. The screams became background noises. She knew what to do when asked to use “wrist and ankle” to restrain an out-of-control patient. It’s on this ward where she struck up a friendship with another nursing attendant-- the man who would become her husband and eventually my father.

The asylum opened in 1858 in an effort to create a beautiful and peaceful environment to help stabilize the minds of the mentally ill. Later named the Northampton State Hospital, the asylum grew to over 2500 beds and became a home for hundreds of society’s castoffs. The understaffed institution with questionable treatments was far from a respite for the patients. Many were admitted and often lived out their lives institutionalized. Some suffered from dementia, others severe psychosis. Many came for acute psychotic breaks and never left. Patients were placed in seclusion for days or weeks. Others were found lying on the floors.

The U.S District Court approved the Northampton Decree in 1978 after activists shed light on the conditions of the hospital and advocated for patients to have more autonomy and freedom. I was born six months after the decree. Despite these efforts, the hospital admitted 64,500 patients by 1980. By then my parents had taken new positions, leaving the hospital and their connection with severe mental illness.

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I grew up in the 1980s, in a quaint rural town in a ranch home near a lake, with my own bedroom and ballet lessons.

My mom stayed home until I went to kindergarten and then took a position as an aide at my high school. She heated Elio’s pizza in the teacher’s lounge microwave for me before gymnastics meets, sat through three-hour dance recitals, and had many sleepless nights as we hosted my friends for sleepover parties. My dad worked with adults with developmental disabilities as a job coach and spent weekends mowing the lawn and watching bowling. He rented movies every Friday night from the video store, showtime started at 8 pm on the dot.

I was a good student. I was happy and energetic. When I was legally able to work, I waited tables at a diner. In my free time, I bummed around Northampton at night with groups of friends. We sat on the steps of our favorite stores after they closed. We got ice cream and sat in the park gossiping.

The hospital closed in 1993, flooding the streets of Northampton with mentally ill patients who were now unmedicated and homeless.

Human service agencies attempted to support the hundreds of former patients but lacked the infrastructure to provide the level of care needed for the ex-patients.

The city was an odd mix of trendy teenagers, dressed in black with rainbow hair playing hacky sack in the park beside men and women in rumpled clothing, their life’s belongings in a grocery cart at their side. My friends and I weren’t afraid of them, though we learned to steer clear, especially if one started to yell out at us, cursing and throwing their arms about. We often joked that, when they acted out, the “crazies” must be “off their meds.” The residents of Northampton lived alongside the mentally ill, often complaining, but ultimately going about their lives. The default when things got out of hand, was for a family to step in, or for the “crazies” to spend a night or two in jail.

After college, I moved to a rural town without a defunct mental hospital problem. I carried on with my life, securing a job, becoming a manager, and raising two children alongside my husband. On the outside, I was successful, grounded, and living an enviable life.

My enviable life was hard to keep up and I suffered from a year-long mental breakdown at 40. I use the word suffer intentionally. I still can’t reconcile the notion that the pain and grief I experienced weren’t my fault.

While the onset of the breakdown felt sudden, my mental health had been in jeopardy for decades. I was a nervous child who overcompensated with perfection, control, and people-pleasing tactics to make up for the constant feeling of underperforming and the constant feeling that something bad was going to happen. I had unhealthy coping mechanisms. I had an eating disorder after college and struggled with binge drinking well after having children. Sometimes I would wake up and feel as though I was a shelf that lost one of its screws and everything was sliding off the edge.

The official breakdown began when I gave my notice to my long-time employer. I felt panicked and sad and overwhelmed with the change and the pressures of daily life combined with the pressure of taking a new position in a new place. Days into my new job, I stopped sleeping. I began waking up after a few hours in a sweat and panic. I couldn’t go back to sleep, worrying about how I was going to perform under the pressure of a new position. I missed my former coworkers and dysfunctional work family. My mind raced on the drive to the office, wondering how I was going to manage if one of my kids got sick because I had no vacation or sick time accumulated. My husband worked over 60 hours a week, often traveling, and I had managed for years in a constant state of anxiety and depression. What if I failed? What if people at my new job realized I was a total fraud? What if my old colleagues watched me fail?

I started to cry on the way to work. I cried between meetings, shutting my door to wipe my tears and reapply my makeup. My stomach ached and a heavy weight sat on my chest all of the time. I wanted to jump out of my skin. I wanted to fly away.

No one in my life knew the severity of the situation at first, but they knew something had escalated. When my close group of friends suggested I speak with my doctor about anxiety medication, “to take off the edge” I scoffed at them, citing articles about young mothers using medication to manage their marital problems and the stressors of being a woman in modern society. When they told me their stories and confided about their use of medication, I straightened my back, held my head higher, and sucked it up instead. I was not like that.

I had seen severe mental illness growing up: it looked like homeless alcoholics who saw things that weren’t really there. They were loud and obnoxious, and people who needed medication were failures, not successful mothers who climb the professional ladder and buy matching outfits for their children for Easter brunch.

Eventually, I had no choice. I got worse. After crying and shaking for hours before the sun rose, my husband would hug me and ask, “Do you want to go to work today or go to the hospital?” I took a bath to relax before the day started, dressed, kissed my kids, and put them on the bus. I never missed work or my kids’ activities despite the fact that my entire body hurt like I had the flu from which I would never recover.

Realizing this wasn’t a phase or something that was going away on its own, I signed up for psychiatric treatment.

I swallowed half a dozen types of prescription pills. Each amplified my symptoms. One made me dream I was cutting a man into tiny pieces. Another ruined a weekend trip with my family to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. I cried uncontrollably for two days straight. I wanted to give up—on the pills, the pain, and my life. This was the lowest point for me that year. I resigned myself to taking medication and each made me worse instead of better. Each symptom threatened my stability. While trying to find a medication to pull me out of my heartache and out of the hole, I nearly lost all control of myself. Unfortunately, some pills make you feel better. Some make you want to kill yourself. I was steering toward the latter but I kept searching.

One day I asked my psychiatrist when I would know if a medication was working. “You will stop thinking about feeling this way,” she told me. A year after I was at my lowest, I experienced several days without worrying about sleep or feeling dread in my chest when I woke up. I found a medication that works for me. I will take medication for the rest of my life.

I met with a therapist. Two months into my new job, and in the thick of the medication hunt, I felt out of control. I had never felt this scared, nervous, and out of control in all of my life. During the sessions, I rocked and cried and talked a mile a minute and stared at the wall hyperventilating. At first, our conversations were about survival. We focused on strategies to manage my symptoms, how to deal with my reactions to medication and accomplish my immediate needs like sleep. When we began scheduling sessions once a week we retraced my steps, looking back at my childhood. By exploring my past actions and emotions I came to realize that I had developed coping mechanisms over decades that stopped serving me. I admitted that ignoring the signs didn’t make me any stronger of a person. I learned that I had to love myself to begin the healing process. I agreed to rebuild myself no matter how hard it would be and let go of what no longer served me.

I began talking to my inner child. It sounds ridiculous, but it works for me. I tell my inner adult the same things that I tell my daughters when they are sad or upset.

“You are loved.”

“You are strong.”

“You are smart and resilient.”

“Tomorrow will be a better day.”

“You are human.”

The repetition of the conversation has become melodic. It is how I survive.

Some conversations were easier than others. Many providers and patients think counseling has an expiration date and people grow out of the need for support. For me, it will be a life-long activity. I am grounded and centered one week and manic the next. Together, my therapist and I celebrate my achievements or focus on hour-by-hour needs and tactics, depending on where I am on any given day. During my most anxious and depressed period, I met with her twice a week. Now we meet bi-weekly but I know we can increase the sessions if I need the extra support.

I let others take care of me. For weeks, my friends brought warm meals to my house and helped me put my kids to bed. One friend drove me in a snowstorm to a medical appointment. Another traveled two hours to my house to climb in bed with me and watch Hallmark without talking for two movies. I now update my close circle of friends regularly about how I am feeling. I text them when I have a few sleepless nights. I tell them I am scared and admitting it makes it feel less scary. I walk every week with two friends. We named our time together Walk it Out, Talk it Out. I call my best friend every day before work to say hello and exchange I love you’s. Anxiety and depression left me feeling alone for much of my life. Each day I fight that feeling and surround myself with friends who not only are willing to listen but who are able to step in when I fall down.

I quit my job last year. No amount of medication or positive self-talk changed my perspective. I walked away not feeling that I had accomplished what I set out to do. I left not feeling proud of my work or leaving a legacy. I quit knowing I didn’t live up to my reputation. However, I didn’t lose one night of sleep over the departure and rarely think about whether or not I disappointed the people who hired me. I am not a failure because I didn’t stay. I am stronger because I knew my limits and I found the courage to stop doing something that wasn’t serving me. I’m committed to changing my relationship with my work.

When I called my mom to tell her my diagnosis, she was angry.

I told her I was going to take medication. She commented on my generation’s sensitivity and told me to make my husband help me more around the house.

For her, mental illness was an affliction. It was everything she knew from her days at the mental hospital. Her patients struggled with severe psychosis, and paranoia and demonstrated an inability to function in society. They ate their own feces and screamed and tried to climb the walls of padded rooms. It wasn’t the daughter she tucked in at night or the girl who shined under the spotlight at dance recitals.

But when I couldn’t make a grocery list on my own, wrote out the names and addresses to holiday cards all in one line, and woke up every night screaming it could no longer be denied. I called her back to plead with her to help me even if she didn’t believe in things like mental health diagnoses for the common mom. It didn’t matter whether she agreed or believed me, the rug was swept out from underneath me. The dirt was scattered all over the floor. I needed her to help me clean it up.

I asked my mom to believe me and she did.

Despite the progress I have made, I still struggle with my mental health. I think about it every single day. I continue to have insomnia and I monitor my moods in a journal on my bedstand table. I track my alcohol and caffeine intake and pay attention to triggering foods. When I know I’ll be facing something challenging at work, I schedule an extra session with my therapist to prepare. I spend an extra fifteen minutes meditating. I speak self-affirmations on my morning commute. I can’t help but think about what happened to me a few years ago and wonder if I could return to a state of deep depression and debilitating anxiety. I wonder if one life-altering event will send me back to the place where my darkness lives inside of me.

I am steady unless I’m not. My illness makes me larger than life in other people’s lives. How I decide to manage my mental illness impacts those around me, especially my husband and my children. I am tethered by the people around me. I am a balloon tied to the wrist of those who love me. I trust them to not let go when the wind blows fiercely.

Three years into my diagnosis, I speak openly with my mom about how I feel and how I am functioning. She knows that I need these tools to stay alive. During a struggle through 10 sleepless nights, she checked in on me daily. We joked that there is a thin line between sanity and insanity. Our conversation wandered to her time at the Northampton State Hospital. “I didn’t know any better back then,” she confided, “It was an awful place and I felt like an awful person being there”. I asked her if she thought I would have been a patient if my breakdown had happened half a century ago. Would I have been diagnosed with female hysteria? Would I have been hydrotherapy or electric shock therapy to cure me of my nervous condition?

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe. But you have so many supports in place now. Those patients had nothing.”

My mom is right. I have many more supports in place than any of the patients she cared for at the state hospital. Those patients lacked resources and advocates and struggled with their mental health at a time when society shunned them and pushed them into the shadows. While stigma and bias surrounding mental health persists, resources are more readily accessible and new language exists around mental health that shines a light on not only how common it is, but how it is like any other disease that needs to be acknowledged and treated.

The Northampton State Hospital was razed in the early 2000s.

Hospital Hill is now home to a smart growth zoning area to promote spaces for community and housing. Its history is long forgotten by many, but still in the minds of some, like my mom, who will never forget her experience there or rid herself of the guilt of being part of a broken system — or her guilt about mothering a child who grew up to struggle with a mental illness that she can’t fix.

It took me forty years to get to a place of stability and I don’t take a day for granted. I am full of gratitude for the tools: therapy; medication; meditation; family; and friendship, that keep me going.

My diagnosis will never be razed. It coexists with the home I’ve created, the family I am raising, and the life I am building. I share my story now with others to remove the shame and create a connection for those who feel lonely. You are not alone. We are not alone. We are out on the streets, in our communities. We are leading Girl Scout troops and Parent Teacher Associations. We’re running businesses. We are having dinner with friends and planning vacations. We are picking out fruit at the grocery store and buying too many swimsuits at Target. We are complaining about the weather. We are laughing at memes and making others laugh at our jokes. We are trying to be our best and live our lives with our illness, in no particular way but our own.