As the days passed, and Fried and I resumed our increasingly distant marriage, so, slowly but surely, I slipped more. Because I had been happy and free of symptoms for so long, I simply failed to understand. I had forgotten, in the way that people often do forget real pain. All I knew was that every day my mood was becoming darker and that every day I was moving a little further from my husband and children. I continued to cook for my children, to help them with their homework and to play with them—these joys and obligations helped keep me going—but I began to wonder how long I could do it.
The sunniness and light all around me began to dim; my surroundings and everyone in them took on soft grey tints. Our finances were growing steadily worse and I began to feel guilty that I had contributed so little to the household. I felt sad, exhausted. And I began to do what I now know, in one form or another, I always did—I began to look for people to blame for my unhappiness, and I dreamed of escape.
My darkness wasn’t my fault; it was someone else’s, and, in this case, Fried’s. In the red diary, I had written: “I do not want to be married any more. I do not want to be co-dependent on a man for my life. I have my own road to travel and I must do it alone.”
I was in this state of grey despair when Raven, our young dog, died. Mary-Jean’s death, my miscarriage, my increasing estrangement from Fried: the tragedies—and that’s how each one felt—were piling up.
And so the slide quickened. At first, my bleakness felt like a comforting escape from the menacing world. In my mind, I had found a safe, dark place to be, a cave in which the light faded beyond the entrance and I could retreat in my mind into the darkness.
It was only much later, when I heard Leonard Cohen’s words from his song “Anthem” (“There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in”), that I realized that for a depressed person, the light can be a tiny flame. Just recently, a friend asked me if I would write a letter to her daughter, who was wrestling with severe depression. What I told her was this: At the darkest hour, you will see a tiny shaft of light in the form of the love and compassion of others. I urged her to reach out for that light. I know that now; I didn’t know it then.
My cave was not a safe place at all, but a deep, bottomless pit, into which I fell deeper and deeper. I had no energy, made no plans. I slipped through the days, loving the children, trying my best to look after them and doing all I could to stop anyone noticing what was happening to me. For a while, I thought I would feel better if I found a job, but what job? I was too old to work in television, and although I had a vast pile of photographs I couldn’t think what to do with them.
There were days when I felt as if I were in mourning. I sat on the floor, making collages by cutting up photographs of my past, searching for meanings in the pictures. I spent hours in a shed at the bottom of the garden at Newboro Lake, painting the inside white and red, longer and longer there each day. This was my escape hatch, my way of holding on, of avoiding facing up to the depression that, each day, enveloped me more firmly in its grey, bleak light. But the cost to my family was huge.
We struggled on. Then, in the summer of 1995, when we were again back at Newboro Lake, I woke up one morning with an excruciating pain in my neck. When the pain failed to get better, I feared it might be the onset of arthritis.
One evening, I found that I could no longer lift a saucepan or open a tin without extreme pain. I saw a general practitioner and described my symptoms. He listened, then told me to stand up while, one by one, he put his fingers gently on various parts of my body. When I had let out a squeak of pain each time he touched sixteen of eighteen pressure points, he told me that he thought I had fibromyalgia.
My first reaction was one of relief. Here was a clear medical problem and something that could quickly be treated. I was wrong about that. Fibromyalgia, the doctor informed me, was an illness that came from the mind, not the body. What I was suffering from was referred pain, and it was manifesting itself by travelling to different parts of my body.
The brain, he told me, has a very clear picture of different parts of the body, but no clear picture for anxiety, sadness, low self-esteem or loss. And because the brain doesn’t know where to send the signal, it sends pain wherever it can. What had to be treated was not the pain itself but what lay behind it. And this, he said, was clearly depression. This all made horrible sense to me. Looking back on the previous few years, I now realized that what I had been suffering from was indeed all too like my earlier bouts of depression. Why had I not recognized this before?
Apart from a period in the early 1980s, when I was also taking lithium, I had never been on antidepressants. By the 1990s, Prozac was widely recognized as an extremely effective drug, and for most people it had very few side effects. The doctor wrote me out a prescription. I went to the pharmacy and came home relieved.
With some reason: within a few days, I felt as if spring had come again. The world regained its colour, the grey bleakness dissolved and energy flooded back into me. I started baking, gardening; I began to laugh again. The world, which had seemed empty of joy, was once again lively, funny, full of laughter.
The doctor had put me on a fairly high dose of Prozac. I kept the dose high and stayed on it for several years. What I was to learn only later was that with bipolar illness, Prozac can act as a trigger for mania. To me, at that point, that pill felt like a miracle drug, and I kept the dose high and stayed on it. I did a bit of research into the brain and discovered that the general medical view was that in depression the brain is depleted of serotonin, and that antidepressants, when they work well, restore serotonin.
And when, from time to time, I had little bursts of mania, I was relieved, not frightened, taking them for glimpses of even greater happiness and energy. That was in the early days. But before long, the bouts of mania became more frequent, the intervals in between shorter, and as their intensity increased, so I became more and more alarmed.
All through this period, Fried and I had been growing increasingly apart. Partly because he loved golf, and partly because golf was a good way of meeting the kind of people he needed to meet for business, Fried had taken up the game seriously and joined one of Ottawa’s more exclusive clubs. But the membership was expensive and we did not have the money for me to join as well. In any case, much of my time was still taken up with Kyle and Ally and the three boys, when they came to stay, though now that they were older they were often away doing things on their own.
Prozac had caused me to gain weight once again, and when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself—in every way. I had become boring, to others, but also pretty boring to myself. So I took the course I always took: I looked around for someone to blame. And just as I had once blamed Pierre for everything that was wrong with my life at 24 Sussex, so I now blamed Fried for my restlessness and perpetual dissatisfaction and my unbearable sense of defeat. I blamed him for the recession and for losing all our money.
I blamed him for being so self-controlled and so unloving when I had lost the baby and for the ease with which he moved on from trouble. I blamed him for not reading more books. I blamed him because I was fat and unattractive and he didn’t like me much anymore.
Blame began to fill my days. Fried and I had almost totally ceased to communicate and I moved out of our bedroom and into a separate room of my own. Then my menopause began; and just as the hormones active in childbirth and pregnancy had once triggered in me violent swings of mood, so too did the hormonal changes of menopause.
When I went to see a doctor and told him about the ungovernable seesaws in my moods—from despairing to ecstatic in just a few hours—he patted my arm reassuringly.
“It will pass,” he said. “You just have to wait.” And then he added, in words that now strike me as funny, “You are shrinking quite nicely.”
He was referring, of course, to my diminishing bones and indeed all my parts save my nose—one of the changes that menopause induces. At the time, all I could think of was this: Who wan
ts to shrink?
Everything now seemed to conspire to make me vulnerable—every casual remark, every disruption, every untoward event. My weight was still increasing and the Prozac no longer made me feel better. My energy had sunk to almost nothing once again. And so I took a fatal turn. I telephoned the general practitioner, who told me to stop taking Prozac and to start something else. This was a mistake. The drug was new, and perhaps doctors were still trying to get a handle on its use.
I came off the Prozac all at once, without reducing the dose bit by bit, choosing to forget Dr. Fieve’s words about the dangers of coming off medication too suddenly.
Deciding that I needed a break, I left the children with Fried and went off to see my mother in Vancouver. I had hardly set foot there when the mania began to rise. I became involved in one of those ridiculous and dangerous pyramid schemes then doing the rounds. The principals involved would later do time in jail. I had gone to a dinner and heard someone boasting about the dizzying profits she had made from porcelain figurines that practically sold themselves. I swallowed the bait.
Dopamine is a chemical naturally found in the brain, and it gives high energy and creativity under normal circumstances. But what I was experiencing were surges of dopamine, great, all-powerful waves so that I could feel the energy coming out of the tips of my fingers. I had racing thoughts, most of them disconnected. This is called “impaired insight”: you think you know everything but you don’t. You can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t function. You’re almost touching heaven, but not.
I can remember excitedly telling my mother and my sisters that these porcelain figurines would make our fortunes. I kept urging my family to come in with me, to buy hundreds of figurines and store them in our garage. By now I knew, as did my mother and siblings, that things were getting out of hand. They could tell by my restlessness and rapid speech.
One of them urged me to call the doctor who had prescribed Prozac, and when he returned my call he expressed worry that I had come off the drug too suddenly. I told him how I was feeling. He was appalled and told me to go at once to the local hospital and get them to look at my eyes. His great fear was that I was now in the grip of full-blown mania.
When I got off the phone, I told my mother what the doctor had said. Her reaction was the same one as she had had many years before. I needed a cup of tea and a good night’s sleep. In any case, the hospital would only send me to a psychiatrist, who would blame her for being a bad mother. What my mother did not realize was that I was wired, not tired. She was right in one sense: I did, indeed, need a good night’s sleep, or any sleep at all. I had barely slept for several weeks because my frenetic, racing mind gave me no rest. I felt full of ideas, confidence, exuberance. Since there was nothing I could not do, why not sell porcelain figurines?
The next morning I went skiing with an old friend named Ross MacDonald. My energy and my courage knew no bounds. I was like an eleven-year-old girl, leaping over blind drops, and my friend kept urging me to slow down. He was also mystified by all the peculiar things I kept saying. I told him that I had decided to change my life, that I was leaving Fried and would buy a house in Vancouver.
When I got home that night, I felt possessed by feelings of power and insight. I was convinced that whatever I wanted to do, I would do brilliantly. My doodles were works of art, my sentences were brilliant turns of phrase that would fill prize-winning books. My mind was fizzing, racing, jumping from thought to thought, scheme to scheme, idea to idea. I felt as if I had a thousand-volt charge surging through my head. Those around me, meanwhile, were plodding, dull, unadventurous. I also had an irresistible urge to laugh, to sing out loud, to dance around the house. I believed that every man around me found me irresistibly attractive. I had been here before.
But no one can live for very long at that fever pitch. Next morning, I was taken to St. Paul’s Hospital and put into a psychiatric ward.
CHAPTER 10
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
“Look at all this. You’ve got the most beautiful life and the most wonderful children who love you very much. Why are you so sad? Why can’t you just love your life?”
MY SON, MICHEL, ONE NIGHT IN A CANOE ON NEWBORO LAKE, SUMMER 1998
I had not been in a mental hospital since my brief stay in 1974, almost twenty-four years earlier. There had been good times and bad times in between, periods of happiness and periods of acute misery, and spells on lithium and Prozac. But this was different. This had a horror all of its own.
On my wild day on the slopes I had fallen and hurt my knee. In order to get me to see a doctor for my manic and terrifying moods, my distraught family told me that I needed to have my knee checked. When I realized that I had been tricked into a seventy-two-hour observation stay at St. Paul’s Hospital, I was furious, paranoid—and terrified. Above all, I felt betrayed. My mother, though she did visit me, was appalled that her daughter was in a psychiatric ward. She was afraid of mental illness and never really accepted what I had gone through. Surely, she would have thought to herself, life has its ups and downs and everyone feels sad at one time or another?
(Much later, in the summer of 2008, I gave a speech as part of a Unique Lives and Experiences lecture series. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Diane Keaton were all on the bill that summer. I gave the talk at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver in front of a huge crowd, and there, in the front row, sat my mother. She heard, really for the first time and in crushing detail, what I had been through. What I remember about that night was how tender my mother was with me after that speech. Her eyes had been opened.)
My sisters, nervously, came from time to time to visit me in hospital. Justin, who was teaching in Vancouver, was there constantly.
The first thing the doctors did when I was admitted was to put me on strong tranquilizing drugs to bring me down from the mania. I was given Epival (valproic acid), which contains sodium valproate—an anticonvulsant used chiefly to treat epilepsy by stabilizing electrical activity in the brain but also sometimes as a mood stabilizer and to control episodes of mania. I fought my handlers the whole way. So violent did I become that I was put into a straitjacket and locked into a padded cell. There, I sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” continuously for two hours until they agreed to let me out. I have no idea why I chose that song. I only know that that was the most humiliating moment of my life; I have always had a fear of being imprisoned, so that experience will remain with me until the day I die. My strongest emotions were defeat and loneliness: never, before or since, have I felt more alone or more abandoned by the world.
I was under constant observation—CO, it’s called. Someone sat at my door and watched me twenty-four hours a day, even as I slept. This was unnerving, but I accepted it. I had been the prime minister’s wife and I was used to being guarded.
The psychiatric ward was pleasant enough. I had my own room and there was a well-lit, homey common room. But there was nothing at all for the patients to do, and we were strongly discouraged from discussing our problems with each other. In any case, we were, for the most part, too heavily drugged to talk, and I have always had a horror of communal living. My time in Morocco in those hippie camps, growing up with cousins—both had instilled in me a love for privacy. When I felt strong enough, I shuffled around the ward, trying not to bump into other patients who were shuffling along their own desperate paths. As the drugs began to work, I felt increasingly confused, lacking in all energy. One morning, I was told I could go for a walk if I wished. I shuffled my way around the block and came back. I could have escaped, but I was so sluggish that I doubt I could have gone far.
Along with my feelings of abandonment was a conviction that I had been turned into a prisoner—with no rights, no friends and an indeterminate sentence. That initial seventy-two-hour observation period had been extended indefinitely, though now I was a “voluntary” patient: I could have left had I insisted, but I had neither the will nor the courage to do so. All I could think about was my children, and ho
w I longed to be with them. Fried was in Ottawa with Ally and Kyle, and didn’t come to see me; nor did the children come, since he felt that a mental ward was no place for a nine-year-old girl to see her mother.
At the height of my mania I had written terrible and abusive letters to Fried, blaming him for everything. Michel, on the other hand, hearing what had happened, immediately got into his car and drove eight hours from Rossland, in the interior of British Columbia, where he was then living, to see me. He brought me a notebook in which he had written, “Your family loves you very deeply.”
The food in the hospital was totally unappetizing and seemingly lacking in any kind of nutrition. There was no privacy: we were checked every few hours all through the night and there were no doors on the shower stalls. I was sick, sick to death, of being so sick.
A young doctor had been put in charge of me, and from the first moment, we neither trusted nor liked each other. I found her unsympathetic, verging on cruel; she clearly found me impossible. Everything she did or suggested I fought against. When my sisters came to see me, I begged this doctor to let them take me home. I told her that I could be put in their care and that they would fly with me back to Ottawa.
She was adamant: I would not be discharged until she said so. Only later did I learn how important it is to like and trust your psychiatrist and to feel that he or she is in your corner. Not all psychiatrists are brilliant, and not all like every patient, but there was no connection between the two of us. The weeks passed. I wandered, zombie-like, up and down the corridors, growing more and more sedated, more and more indifferent.
Changing My Mind Page 19