“All I really know about The Woman is how she takes her tea. Well, that and the fact that she is very, very mentally disordered, and needs urgent, intense psychiatric care. This time she said that she had just been discharged from hospital after a five-week stay, some of it in isolation: “You don’t know what it is like, being put in isolation,” she said. She wouldn’t say why she had been in hospital, or quite where, but my suspicion was that she had been on a mental ward, and had somehow escaped.”
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The apparition at the doorstep | Deborah Orr | Comment is free | The Guardian
Reading this reminded me that I am grateful to have been diagnosed with chronic depression when I was a teenager - because if that was going to be my lot in life, it was better that I learned how to cope with it when I was still in the care of my parents (and, for that matter, when I still had private American health insurance). I don’t like to think too much about what the outcome would have been like if I had that first breakdown, on the scale that it happened when I was a teenager, in my twenties. But it happens to lots of people, in all kinds of circumstances, it’s awful, and it quite boggles my mind that it’s not a higher priority when it comes to health care policy debates.
