I empathize with you and your wife, having recently gone through this same ordeal wih my grandmother. She was committed to the local hospital’s “behavioral health center” after months of severe depression hit rock bottom and she started claiming it was her time to leave this world, that she couldn’t handle it anymore.

My frustrations with that hospital ward are too many to list here, but let’s just say I about lost my temper a few times. She’d been in there for four days and still hadn’t seen a psychiatrist or received any medications! Not to mention that the joke “group therapy sessions” were run by a different “nurse” every day who admitted they had no experience whatsoever in mental health and were brought from other wards because nobody else was available.

I am Bipolar, and after much frustration with doctors, medications, etc… I have decided to just forgo medical treatment for a while and see how I can do on my own. Ill-advised, yes, but so far I’m fairing better than while seeing psychiatrists and going on and off medications. I just need a break from all that for a while.

Also, I want to say that you are a wonderful husband, helping your wife through all this. My husband does the same for me (though luckily I’ve never had to be hospitalized, probably should have). I know how difficult it is for my husband sometimes to live with my erratic mood swings and volatile behavior – I imagine the same is true for you.

The world is a better place thanks to the men like you, my husband, and my grandfather – who help their loved ones through difficult times.

Thanks for this blog too!

Well, I agree with most of what you wrote, except for the part about being my wife’s ONLY advocate. In the context of full-blown mania, you’re right, but what I’ve discovered is that my wife often winds up in full-blown mania because she fails to effectively advocate for herself in the early stages OR she fights anything I or her doctor recommend she needs to do to short-circuit the manic episode.

Many times, I feel as though I’m trying to negotiate (referee?) between the doctor who’s trying to tell my wife what she needs to do and my wife telling her doctor how to do his job. They’re like two stubborn brats, neither of whom will budge one iota to remedy the situation. In the meantime, the whole thing spirals into another couple months of hell for all involved.

you, and you alone are your wife’s ONLY advocate. I don’t say ‘primary’, ‘best’, ‘complementary’ ONLY ONLY ONLY.

my wife has numerous medical conditions; I’m the BP one. after dealing with more doctors than you can shake a stick at, i’m firmly convinced that the only reasons we have doctors and hopsitals is for (in this context): a) ability to get prescriptions for drugs that WE OURSELVES have researched and vetted; b) legally able to restrain our loved ones.

i’m afraid that in order to secure our spouse’s interests we must be 100% vigilant at all times. I don’t know what else you could have done other than hide outside the ward where she had been kept, but that might have done it.

i wonder if hospitals overseas have the same idiotic rules/etc.?

well. i’m just glad that my BPII isn’t quite that bad. Yet.

Peace.

That sounds about right. The first time I took my wife to the hospital to get her checked in, they led us to a room where we were instructed to wait. During the 30-45 minutes of waiting, my wife wandered out of the room about 10 times… looking for a bathroom, looking for a vacant bedroom so she could lie down, talking to some guy in an SUV outside, etc. etc., and then wandering off to a grassy break area where she took an umbrella from a picnic table and settled into her own shady place on the lawn.

The security guards kept telling me to keep her in the room. Finally, I asked, “What do you want me to do, tackle her?” I guess they expected me as the husband to be able to control my wife. What a joke.

Finally, a very competent woman who was handling the check-in was able to coax my wife back inside the building. Unfortunately, later in the evening, my wife became very upset over something and had to be forcibly escorted to another more secure “ward.” I heard it took three security guards. They did manage to keep her in the building, though. That would be a nightmare to find out that a loved one was wandering around in such a state with nothing more than cigarettes and a lighter. It’d be even more of a nightmare to find out that she had a credit card.