the night in the psych ward

or, how I discovered what was at the bottom of the deepest pit.

What you don’t understand until you experience it yourself is that the process of entering the psychiatric ward makes you feel like you have done something wrong. The attendant asked me to hand over any personal items, which turned out to be only my wedding and engagement rings and my phone. I took off my shoes. She patted me down to make sure I didn’t have anything dangerous hidden on me.

I just want to go to sleep.

This was a temporary psych ward attached to the emergency room at the hospital, so accommodations were meager. I was taken to a room with only a bed. There was no other furniture. There was no clock.

Just me and the bed, the sight of which almost sent me into a panic.

I just want to go to sleep.

Sleeping, and the thought of sleeping, was what had gotten me here in the first place. Or, rather, the fact that I wasn’t sleeping.

I just want to go to sleep.

Earlier that night, my husband and I had gone to bed, but I hadn’t been able to fall asleep, and after a few hours, I descended into what felt like madness. In that hazy space of consciousness where you’re not really awake or asleep, I sat bolt upright in bed and yelled to my husband that I was going to die. I said it again and again. My husband called my mom, because our two little boys were asleep, and he didn’t know what to do. She walked in the door and found me sprawled on the living room floor, almost catatonic. She told Christian she was going to take me to the emergency room.

It was Saturday night at our local downtown hospital, and it was packed to the brim. We went to the check-in desk. I couldn’t figure out how to tell them my name. My mom filled out the admission form and dug through my wallet for my ID and insurance card.

I don’t remember what she said to the nurse, but the nurse said I had two options: I could sit in the ER for who knows how long before I saw a doctor, or I could be seen immediately if I agreed to be admitted to the psych ward. The only caveat was that if I chose the psych ward, my mom would not be able to come with me.

I just want to go to sleep.

I chose the psych ward. I needed help. I could either stay with my mom, or I could die. Those were, I thought, my only two options.

My mom hugged me, and I followed a nurse into the triage area. When he asked me what had brought me in, I told him that I couldn’t sleep and I had felt that night like if I couldn’t sleep, I was going to die. What I said didn’t seem to phase him. He took my vitals and I moved along to the area that felt more like entering prison than entering the hospital.

With my connection to the outside world removed, it was just me, in the room, in the bed. The door was left open and the light was on. I don’t remember if there was a switch in the room, but if there was, it either didn’t occur to me to turn the light off or I was afraid I wasn’t allowed to.

I just want to go to sleep.

At some point, a doctor came in and asked me to tell him what was going on. I remember him listening attentively as I tried to summarize the previous month of my life.

“My husband works at a church.”

“Our pastor revealed he had been having an affair and disappeared from our lives.”

“Our church is falling apart.”

“My husband is trying to keep the church together.”

“We have two little boys.”

“I have been having trouble sleeping.”

“Tonight, when I was trying to to go to sleep, I felt like if I didn’t start to go to sleep soon, I was going to die.”

He seemed to grow more alert at the mention of death.

“Have you thought about hurting yourself?”

“I just want to go to sleep,” I said.

He seemed to question whether “sleep” was a euphemism for death, so I tried to explain again that I was just so tired.

I don’t remember what he looked like. I’m not sure I even looked at him. I only remember seeing the people who came in, and the doorway, out of the corner of my left eye. My gaze was fixed on one corner of the room, where the ceiling met the wall.

I just want to go to sleep.

He had a nurse bring some kind of sleeping pill. I don’t know how much it helped. I wished they would hook me up to an IV and pump me full of anesthesia so that I would have no choice. Put me in a temporary coma. Just let me sleep.

The insomnia had begun about two weeks prior. For the two weeks before that, I had been depressed and nonfunctional, relying on friends and family to help with our little boys. Then, it was as if a flip got switched, and I suddenly was agitated and awake all the time. As the day wore on my anxiety would increase. Once it was dark I felt a dull roar of dread in the back of my mind. Soon, I would have to go to our room and try to go to sleep. And based on past experience, it wouldn’t work. I had tried every OTC sleep medication that existed. I borrowed essential oils from a friend (the smell of one of them, the name I can’t recall, still almost sends me into a panic attack if I accidentally smell it). I would lie in bed at night and just stare at the ceiling. Maybe, around 4 am, I would sleep for an hour or two. I couldn’t nap during the day. I was just on, always on, forever on.

The week leading up to the psych ward, there were multiple nights where I didn’t sleep at all. I had read before that sleep deprivation was sometimes used as a method of torture, and I felt I could affirm its usefulness in that context. I would have done anything to be able to sleep.

I just want to go to sleep.

My room in the psych ward was an artificially illuminated wasteland, outside of space and time. The lack of a clock left me unable to gauge how much time had passed. The open door let me hear the yelling from other patients across the hallway. No one came in to check on me; it seemed like the kind of place where the squeaky wheel gets the grease. They had given me medicine and there was nothing else they could do for me. The only thing I could do was wait. I had no idea when or if I’d be allowed to leave.

The thoughts that went through my mind in that room were the most terrifying thoughts I had ever had. Would they end up transferring me to a more permanent facility? If so, would someone decide I wasn’t fit to take care of our boys? What if I couldn’t be their mom anymore? What if I shouldn’t be their mom anymore? What if I was careening toward a true psychotic episode and I might hurt them one day? What if I had already lost my mind?

There was no one to reassure me. In that lonely place, my mind continued to deteriorate.

I stared at the corner. I closed my eyes. My eyes would quickly open. The corner was still there. Maybe one minute had passed. I wondered if the ceiling and the walls were real. Was I in the room, staring at the corner? Was this a real place? If they determined I had lost my mind, would it just be me and the bed and the corner of the wall, until I died? The corner of the ceiling seemed to be the last thing tethering me to reality.

And then, after hours that felt like years, with me still unable to sleep, the atmosphere in the room changed.

That is the only way I can describe it. Although I did not see or hear anything, I knew immediately that I was not alone. I was still staring at the corner. I didn’t hear an audible voice. The corner didn’t materialize into a person. It was still just me staring at the corner.

And yet I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was Jesus with me, there in that bare and naked hospital room, in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, on August 22, 2015.

What I then understood, as I continued to stare at the corner of the ceiling, was that there was no guarantee that I would ever leave that room or that I would be reunited with my husband or that my boys would still have their mama in their lives. There was only Jesus. And in spite of my circumstances, and in spite of my own brain silently screaming that everything was not OK, I knew that I was safe. I might lose my mind. I might have already lost it. But I knew that I was not alone, and I would never be alone.

Hours later, which was the next day, someone came in and said that I had fulfilled the requirements of the psych ward, which was an overnight stay since they didn’t think I was a danger to myself. (It would have been nice if they had filled me in on this information at some point prior to that moment.) Someone was coming to pick me up soon. They gave me back my clothes, my phone, my wedding ring. I was able to call my husband, who was getting ready to go to church with the boys.

(I want to quickly pause and say that we were in extreme circumstances; but if you are part of a church and the wife of a staff member is in the psych ward, please make arrangements for the staff member not to have to be at church so that he can pick his wife up from the aformentioned psych ward. I am not angry at anyone about this now, and I wasn’t then. This is just a friendly public service announcement.)

Our pastor had immediately resigned after his affair was revealed, and my husband was the only other staff member. He wasn’t even ordained as a pastor yet, but he was now teaching Sunday school, leading music, and preaching weekly at our church plant. He had talked to my parents, who lived in the same town, and they were on their way to get me.

I entered the psych ward alone, and I left the psych ward alone. Although the place was locked up tight when you were a patient, once they had set you free, you were on your own. I followed the signs to the exit and waited under the awning outside the emergency room in what I had worn to bed the night before. My parents pulled up shortly and took me to their house. I took a shower. My mom gave me some of her clothes, a tie-dye shirt from a donut restaurant in Pittsburgh and cotton shorts. I collapsed into their bed and, mercifully, fell asleep for a few hours.

I had just wanted to go to sleep.

The following week I went to see my doctor. The night before the night of the psych ward, I hadn’t slept at all, so I had gone to an urgent care and told them I was having insomnia and was planning to see my doctor the following week, but I needed something to get me through the weekend. The doctor didn’t ask many questions, but he did prescribe me a few pills of Valium, which I had never taken before. I took one shortly before bedtime that night.

I had brought the pill bottle with me to see my doctor, because like a dutiful patient, I knew they always asked what medications you’d been taking. When I described the events of the weekend and told him I had taken some medicine before the incident, he asked me to show him the pill bottle. He read the label, looked at me compassionately, and threw the pill bottle in the trash.

“This is a benzodiazepine,” he said. “Some people have extreme reactions to them, and it sounds like that was what happened to you. And the reaction was just compounded by the fact that you were already extremely sleep deprived. You should never take a benzodiazepine again.”

There was an immeidate sense of relief. I wasn’t crazy. I had just experienced a perfect storm of life circumstances, my body’s traumatic stress response, and an unusually negative reaction to medication.

That knowledge didn’t help me sleep more, although with my doctor and therapist helping me, things did eventually improve. My brain slowly came back to me.

But I was not the same person I had been before. Through counseling, I realized that I had been infected my whole life with an undiagnosed cancer.

The cancer was my dependence on myself.

I thought, because it had always worked, that if I just tried hard enough, everything would be OK. I was a Christian. I had trusted Jesus and what he had done for me on the cross. But practically speaking, I still thought I pretty much had to take care of it all alone, because Jesus was probably busy, and I wasn’t sure he really liked me all that much.

Discovering this about myself was deeply painful. I looked back at my life thus far and saw it through an entirely different perspective. I had so much compassion toward the girl, the woman, who thought everything depended on her. What a terrifying place to be. How can anyone survive there?

The answer, of course, is that you can’t. And I didn’t. The events of that summer coalesced into a situation where whatever remaining vestiges of self-reliance I still had were taken from me. At the time, it felt like I was being ripped open, vulnerable and raw. But with the passage of time, I see that the Lord came with the gentleness only he can offer. I wouldn’t have seen him clearly if he hadn’t taken it all away. It was a severe mercy, but how thankful I am that he did not leave me with the burden of thinking I had to hold everything together.

This summer marks 10 years since the night I spent in the psych ward. By God’s grace, I have not felt myself quite as close to the brink of insanity since then (although 2020 came close). But in the past year as I have been learning more about shame and anxiety and how they function in my heart, I have butted up against a fear that I’ve realized connects back to that summer night. In times of stress or great overwhelm, I go into self-protective mode. While this is natural for all of us, I sometimes take it too far. I will cut myself off emotionally from people around me, including my own family, because I feel my mental resources draining out of me.

What will happen if I am emptied completely of the ability to think and reason? While I know that the reaction to the medicine is what ultimately landed me in the hospital, I also know that I never would have taken any medicine if I hadn’t already been on the brink. It is not hard for me to imagine a future where my brain runs into something it can’t cope with, and it causes insomnia or something worse, and I am once again alone and unable to do anything to help myself.

In those moments my mind journeys back to that lonely night, in that bright room, where no one could help me and I could not help myself, where I stared at the corner of the ceiling for hours and somehow, against all explanation, knew I was not alone. And I am reminded that even if all my mental faculties are poured out like water onto the ground, never to be gathered up again, I will not be forsaken. I do not hold all things together, not even myself. Jesus does.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. — Colossians 1:15-17