My Mental Health Journey

In this episode, I share my personal experience in 2012 being committed to a psychiatric institution against my will. I speak about how I got there, what it was like inside, and what I have learned in the years since about how to maintain mental wellness to the best of my ability.

In a world where there is silence around mental health issues, it is my hope to help normalize these struggles as well as work toward erasing the stigma.

There is hope, and together we can make progress.

Transcript

Welcome to Within Us.

Within Us is here to further your well-being,

Mental,

Physical,

Emotional,

And spiritual.

This is your place for the transformational tools and strategies to tap into mindfulness,

Emotional awareness,

And well-being for the collective.

My name is Azriela Jankovic and I am so glad that you're here.

Alright,

Happy Monday everyone and welcome to another episode of Within Us.

It has been over a week since my last episode came out and I want to share a little bit with you about why because I've been in touch with a lot of you over the past week and a half and actually I've heard from more people in this community and through social media and elsewhere than ever before in my life.

So I'm going to backtrack a little bit.

Last week I was interviewed by Natalie Q who is a wonderful podcast host of a show called Your Spin Out is Gorgeous and part of her mission is to destigmatize mental illness and different struggles that people have and she has quite a story herself and she invited me on her show to do an interview about my mental health journey.

So you may have heard the episode and I posted it on my Facebook and I also posted a picture of myself from November 15,

2012,

Exactly three days before I was committed to a psychiatric ward against my will and I asked on social media,

Does this look like the face of a crazy person?

I didn't think so.

My story in 2012 is a story of one episode.

I've had more than one and I decided to focus in on the 2012 episode because it was the first time I was ever in a psychiatric institution and I again was brought there against my will and it was really a perfect storm.

It was a time when I succumbed to a lot of stress in my life from different areas,

From what was going on in my family,

From what was happening at work to some prescription medication I was prescribed by a doctor and I was taking that I probably shouldn't have been taking from a lack of sleep,

A lack of self-care and really a lack of understanding that I needed certain things that I wasn't getting at the time.

I think to go back to that moment,

I didn't know.

I didn't know what I didn't know and of course hindsight is 20-20 and if I could go back and I could tell myself what to do all over again to avoid that situation,

I would and I would succeed because I know I would succeed because I've done that several times since and I've learned what it means to look after my mental health and I've learned what resources there are for me and for people in similar situations.

I've also come to believe that we all have mental health to look after and that as much as someone might experience a psychosis and be diagnosed and be dealing with a medical intervention or a medical system as a result,

I think there are moments throughout each and every one of our days where we feel disconnected from our highest selves and our rational mind and I think that can be occurring because of a very simple moment of stress.

So if you've ever used the expression like,

Oh wow,

I really just lost it,

I think taking that moment of losing it and then compounding it,

Making it constant,

Repeat it over the period of minutes,

Hours,

Days,

You get a sense of what it can be like to be in a psychotic state.

So I'm not actually going to reshare the story from 2012 on this episode.

I'm going to say that if you want to hear it,

You can listen to Natalie's episode.

It's going to be in the show notes linked and I'm myself being pretty careful just about what I'm telling and when.

It's a pretty intense story.

It's an intense journey and since I came out and shared it,

I've been contacted by dozens of individuals who have suffered in silence,

Really felt isolated,

Who have perhaps looked after loved ones who have been affected by mental health issues and what I'm coming to see is that there's a lot of work to be done in terms of education,

In terms of our learning.

What are these complicated vehicles that we're living inside of,

These trillions of cells?

How do they operate?

Why do they operate the way that they do and how can we optimize the vehicle that we have?

How can you optimize yours?

How can I optimize mine?

There's really no shame in being human and living in a human body and having these human struggles.

That's part of why I started sharing with my story.

That's why I shared with Natalie.

I do want to tell more of it here.

I am also going to be sharing different articles as time goes on,

But it's going to be a process and most likely a slow process.

In the meantime,

I want to let you all know I've been contacted by so many people.

I could read you these notes from listeners.

My daughter has struggled with depression and she can't find the right resources.

I was contacted by a mother whose daughter actually committed suicide last fall here in Israel.

I was contacted by a woman who runs an organization that advocates for those suffering from schizophrenia and related disorders.

I'm really starting to learn more and more about what's going on in this field.

As I learn,

I will continue to share and I want to say more than anything,

Right now I'm not a medical doctor.

I'm an educator.

I teach meditation.

I teach spiritual tools.

First and foremost,

Number one,

To look after your health.

Really important that you know what your resources are and that you get the care and if it's first aid that you need that you know who to call depending on what country you're in.

I'll be honest,

The resources out there may not be perfect but we have to work with what we have and guarding your life and guarding your health and the life and health of those around you is really the number one most important thing.

With that said,

I have a few things going on right now.

Number one is I do business mastermind coaching.

Right now my coaching groups are full but I open them three times a year and we work on all sorts of transformation to show up and serve in our unique capacity.

I love doing that so,

So much.

My groups are off and running and it's just incredible to see the work that's already taking place and the collaboration that's taking place.

I want to say to you that you could,

Especially right now in this time of change and transition,

Reach out to someone and find someone with whom you can have the honest conversations about what you're going through,

Asking for feedback,

Asking for insights.

Nobody has to show up perfectly right now.

Nobody has to show up perfectly ever.

You don't have to show up in perfection.

I was sharing with the group yesterday,

Imagine that the most famed pizza chef from all of Italy came to Israel and came into my little village to sell his pepperoni pizza.

It could be world famous.

It could be most delicious but if he didn't know that in our village we don't actually eat pepperoni pizza,

He would wonder why nobody's buying the pizza.

If he were to come here conversely and show up and get to know the people and learn about our dietary rules and the way we eat and what we eat and so forth,

He could really come up with something that would meet our needs and that would serve us if that's something he wanted to do.

In our groups,

Really one thing that we're focusing on so much is getting to know who needs or who potentially needs whatever it is that you have to share,

That you have to offer,

That you have to teach,

That you have to give.

Everyone has something.

That's part of the reason why I share my story because for me,

These lessons that I've learned,

I want to make sure that they get out into the hands of people who can utilize them and who can benefit from them.

I want to share with you one lesson that came up from my 2012 journey.

In short,

What was happening in my life was that I was 30 years old,

32.

My youngest of three children was two.

He just went back to school.

He started preschool and I started a doctoral program that summer.

I decided single-handedly in taking on this new endeavor that nothing in my life,

None of the balls were going to drop,

None of them.

I would still manage my home and I would keep up with everything.

I was not going to let anything go.

That was my mantra.

I went to the doctor and I got a prescription for Adderall to help me focus in class.

It was amazing in the beginning because it helped me cut back on hours of sleep.

I didn't need to eat as much.

Right off the bat,

I was saving so much time that I could devote to studying,

Getting the best grades,

And continuing to give my kids everything they needed,

Trying to,

And trying to be perfect in every corner of my life.

A few different stressors came up over the course of the fall,

A few months into this journey.

One of them was at work and another one was in our family.

There was a death in the family.

My defenses were so down and my self-care had been so neglected that I literally didn't have the resilience to process the stress.

Rather than processing it,

I just flew into a manic frenzy.

That was the point at which things spiraled out of control and I wound up being dragged into a police car by two police officers for praying.

Actually that was the offense.

I was praying rather than answering their questions.

I was so petrified seeing these police officers show up at my friend's house where I was just trying to kind of get some fresh air.

They showed up because someone who cared about me,

Who loved me,

Called a mental health hotline and the mental health hotline dispatched the police.

So there was not a compassionate care model that showed up for me.

After that night,

Being dragged into a police car and then shot up with antipsychotics and being knocked out,

I woke up on the floor of a public psychiatric facility in East Los Angeles.

I didn't know where I was and I immediately walked to a pay phone and I called the one number that I knew by heart,

Which was my good,

Good friend at the time.

She kind of broke it down for me and told me what had happened.

She told me that they would try to help me.

They would send food.

I couldn't really eat the food in this place.

It wasn't kosher and kind of picky.

But that was the least of my problems.

I was in this place and they were giving me medication that I didn't know.

I didn't know what it was.

I didn't know what it would do.

It knocked me out.

It doped me up and took away my personality,

Took away my ability to think and actually made me really,

Really sick.

I was there for three days and I met really incredible souls,

Many of which were homeless,

Who had been through lifelong journeys,

Battles with mental illness and had been really lost in the system.

There were gang members there.

I witnessed full blown violent assaults and I saw it all.

One man I met,

His name was Barry,

And he was an older man in his 70s.

He was Jewish and he had been a really famous trumpet player in his early years.

But I think he lost the battle to mental illness.

I don't know what all was involved in terms of his journey,

But he was so sweet and he was always doing these magic tricks for me and trying to make me laugh and smile and make me feel better in this place.

He was actually really happy to be there because for him it meant that he wasn't on the street.

What felt like jail for me was really like a respite for him.

That was really eye opening for me.

So I spent some time in that place.

I got out.

And when I got out,

I went down to my parents' house with my family for Thanksgiving and I was so drugged up that I was having a lot of physical ailment as a response to all these new drugs that I had just been put on that week.

And I had to check into the emergency room because I was so dehydrated.

And I spent a day in the emergency room just from dehydration and then over the course of the next few days I was dealing with so much trauma and so much anger about what had happened to me that I stopped being able to sleep again and called a friend to help me,

Take me for a drive,

Kind of just help me go through whatever it was that I was going through and she suggested going back to the emergency room.

And I went and they asked me a lot of questions and I sort of passed the test in terms of like was I sane or not.

I passed.

And I came out of the emergency room and I didn't want to return home yet.

And so my one girlfriend,

She I guess like didn't feel equipped to deal with what I needed or help me with what I needed.

I don't remember the details but she called someone else who used her powers of deception actually to get me back in the emergency room.

She didn't know what to do with me and she either she didn't know what to do with me or she didn't want to get involved or she just thought the best option was me being committed again.

And she did what she could to get me back into the emergency room.

She told me that she needed a pregnancy test and I should come with her.

And I went in and when I was in she spoke to the staff and basically told them that I should be handcuffed and locked up again.

And I was just kind of sitting on my gurney like reading Psalms silently to myself.

But in the eyes of the staff in the hospital to them that looked like insanity.

So apparently that was a punishable crime.

They handcuffed me to my bed and brought in a security guard and then I was transported by ambulance to a place called Delamo Hospital in Torrance,

California.

And I spent a week there.

And I could tell you all about the week that I spent there.

It was really an intense week of my life.

It was a step up from the first institution in a certain way.

It was part of a hospital.

It was kind of like you know it's like 1970s interior of a building.

And there was like a big room where there was a little TV.

People would all sit around and watch TV and flip through the channels.

And there was a payphone in the hallway and then there was like a line where you would stand three times a day to get your medication.

And they would make sure that you took what you took.

You'd have to like open your mouth and show them that you took whatever they were giving you.

And there were these psychiatrists that would come in and give you checkups.

And my psychiatrist when he came in I tried to like get to know him,

Talk to him.

And I remember I was braiding my hair.

I had a lot of anxiety just like being there.

And I kept braiding my hair.

And he told me that because I was braiding my hair like clearly that there was something really wrong with me and that I needed to stay in the hospital.

And at the time like I just remember feeling like he was he was signing on the line because if I stayed in the hospital he'd have a paycheck.

It was like this self-serving mechanism that the doctor used to keep me in.

And the longer I stayed in the crazier I got.

I mean I in this institution just to give you a sense I was in a room with four women.

And one of the women was like banging her head against the wall constantly.

Another one was hallucinating and she she hallucinated that I was her attacker.

She had the hallucination that I was someone who attacked her in her like previous experience before she got to the hospital.

And so she assaulted me when I wasn't looking on my bed she started punching me and hitting me.

And so I started screaming of course.

And then the staff came in and restrained her.

And I think they they moved her room.

And I try to stay away from her for the duration of my time there.

It was a really interesting place because they put the psych patients and the detox patients detox from drugs patients in the same the same ward of like 40 people.

And some of the people who are detoxing from drugs they were there.

I think instead of going to jail they had this option to go to detox.

So there were people in who were like detoxing from heroin detoxing from crack.

I was detoxing from Adderall you know the drug that my family physician had given me.

But I was around people that were going through a lot of serious trauma.

And I was actually sexually harassed by one of the patients there and his name was Tommy don't know his last name and this isn't about calling him out.

But essentially what would happen was they would line us up to go out for recess.

They give you like these 15 minute breaks outside on this grassy patio area.

And it's when most people go out to smoke cigarettes smoking cigarettes is like a big thing in psych wards because for some reason smoking provides people like a lot of anxiety relief.

And so as we would line up to go outside there were cameras on parts of us.

But Tommy knew like where the cameras were and weren't.

He'd been there for a long time.

And he would sneak up around me and grab me.

And you know here I am I'm like this 32 year old woman an Orthodox Jewish I wear like long skirts and long sleeves and a hair covering and clearly not dressed provocatively in any way shape or form.

And even if I was it wouldn't matter because what he did was so uncalled for uninvited and out of line.

And when I would tell the guards they were just kind of laugh at me.

And and that was it like balls.

It stopped there.

The buck stopped there.

There was no recourse.

And so after about seven days of being there I felt really fortunate some of my clients came to visit me and some of my friends came to visit me and my rabbi came to visit me.

But I was really really struggling with the trauma of this place.

And I got to the point where I just said to them you know I'm going to sit on the floor.

So I think I said I'm going to lay on the floor next to the payphone until you get me into a place that can help me a place that is an actual place of care not a place of trauma.

I mean friends I could tell you so many more stories like what the they're not called wardens they're called the people who work in there.

They have a special name.

They're kind of like these medical assistants.

They're not nurses.

They're not security guards.

They're like somewhere in between.

And the things that they would do.

I mean you could bribe them to give you extra time in the dining room like if I dropped a dollar on the floor they would let me sit in the dining room and finish my food for longer or if my husband delivered me food from a restaurant because I'm again like I have certain dietary preferences pretty strong preferences and I preferred not to eat the foods that were laid in with chemicals in this institution.

I thought they were making me worse and not better.

So my husband would bring me fresh food and they didn't even need to allow me to to receive it and so in order for me to receive it I had to like bribe them somehow and I mean it's just you know when you think about that reality like how untherapeutic it is it's unreal.

So by the end of the week I just said I'm going to lay on the floor until I get into UCLA and UCLA is one of the I think it is the known as the best psychiatric institution in Los Angeles and that's still covered by some form of insurance and so it was full but I said I'm going to lay on the floor until someone gets me to that place and if it means me being here for the next week I'll be here that's fine you know.

I guess looking back they could have put me in solitary confinement like they could have really done something to me but it just seemed what I needed to do at the time and so within a matter of hours like I was in an ambulance and they were transporting me to UCLA and so I got to this third institution and I will say that UCLA was a much more therapeutic place.

It wasn't perfect but it was much closer.

I was able to over the course of my time there and then in the daycare program there find a doctor or psychiatrist who really saw me and was really open minded enough to help me get on a path of healing and I started learning new therapy tools.

It's really when I started getting into a lot of this personal growth and development on a deeper level and I needed it.

I had to do it.

You know it was for my survival really and so that began my journey and it led me back home and that was a road in and to itself.

My husband took on just like so many responsibilities at home and we also had to have like extra childcare and we had like community members step up and help us in the beginning deliver meals and things like that which was super helpful.

At the time looking back I remember people were bringing me things I thought people were bringing things I thought people were reaching out to me because they felt sorry for me and I thought my friends like saw me as some charity case like they just felt so bad for me and they kept reaching out to see me and to talk to me and I really shut down.

But after a period of months this is a story I told last week on Natalie's show.

One of my friends called me and I really had run out of excuses so she invited me to coffee and I met her for coffee on my way to pick up my kids from school.

This was like four or five months after I got out of the hospital.

It was a spring day and we sat down for coffee and I just couldn't stop crying.

I couldn't even speak and she just looked at me and she said Ozzy like is this what you've been going through?

And I nodded my head in agreement yes you know it was and she just looked at me and she said I was there I saw this all unfold and I know that you did not do anything wrong this is not your fault.

And that was this pivotal moment it was this turning point for me that woke me up and I remember I just looked up at the sky and I saw it I noticed it for the first time and I said to myself you know this is something this is something important and so I drove home that afternoon and spoke out loud to the infinite one to God asking for help asking for wisdom and the message that I got was as Riella you have to look into your life at what you're doing right you have to turn your attention and start noticing what you're doing well at where you're showing up where you're serving and so I went home and I started writing little notes in my on my iPhone like in the notes app I started writing one day it was like you got out of bed today when you didn't really want to and you got dressed even though you were so self-conscious and you didn't feel comfortable with what you're wearing you left the house anyway because you wanted to drive your kids to school and be there for that and it was things like that that I started writing down in the beginning and then like the list just took on a life of its own and I would in a low moment open it up and look at it and see what I had done that day or that week in terms of acts of service and acts of just showing up in goodness and I got my life back you know it wasn't like didn't happen overnight it was a process but I got my life back in a major way I mean I feel like now I'm living a life I only could have dreamed of back then but I had to go through all of that to get here and I think that there was just one moment I remember I walked into my rabbi's office and I thought he felt sorry for me you know I thought that was like the only reason he would talk to me at the time which wasn't true he saw more good in me than I saw in myself and he said to me you know Azrielah one day you're gonna look back at this and it's all gonna make sense you are going to understand it this is gonna help you with something you don't know what it is right now but trust me it's true and I believed him to a point you know there was like a certain piece of it that I felt was so cliche about what he said to me but looking back now I know that like he really did mean what he said and thinking about the way that I perceived other people's behaviors just thinking like oh wow people feel so sorry for me that must be why they're talking to me or that must be why they want to hang out with me they feel sorry for me they actually saw more good in me than I was seeing in myself because I was so focused on my shortcomings and my feelings and how I wasn't perfect and how I should have known better and oh I never should have let myself go down this road or I blamed myself for all of it and then suddenly getting these diagnoses and realizing like I'm a person who had psychosis I'm damaged goods there's something really wrong with me here I what if I never have a life back what if what if what if my husband doesn't want to stay married to me what if my kids find out and they're embarrassing me forever what if my colleagues at school find out and they don't even want me in their program anymore and what if they won't study with me anymore and what if they won't acknowledge me or you know they won't think that I'm fit for this doctoral program what if nobody ever wants me to coach them again or be their education specialist again that's what I was doing at the time I was so afraid and you know it's so fascinating because over time what I came to learn little by little was that those things could not have been further from the truth and they felt true but all of the people who I thought would never want to work with me again a lot of them came back and they do work with me and they they were able to see my good even when I didn't so this process that I went through is really one of learning not to identify with a diagnosis or a stigma learning to take care of myself as a whole person there's really an interplay between the different parts of who we are our brains and our bodies our emotions our minds our spirits and there's an interplay between all of them that we can learn to pay attention to and learn to look after and you know I think if there's one message from what I'm sharing with you today here it's that nobody needs to be perfect you know you don't need nobody needs you to be perfect nobody needs you to have it all together to be the perfect mom or wife or dad or parent or friend or human being like you're showing up honestly and being real that this life can be hard and yeah you know some of us may seem to have it better than others and I feel really blessed to have the resources that I have in my life and you know living in a first world country and having a roof over my head and like there's so many gifts that I have but at the same time being present with what's challenging is important and I think that the person who pointed that out to me most poignantly is Dr.

Edith Eva Eger and she is 91 years old she's her second book is about to come out that's called The Gift her first book was called The Choice and she's an Auschwitz survivor who's been a trauma psychologist for her entire life for her whole career and she says that anyone can live in the Holocaust of the mind anyone can live in the Auschwitz of the mind and you know I would never say something like that because I didn't go through that but her experience and her wisdom are such that she knows how painful the prison of the mind can be so it doesn't matter what our lives look like on the outside or what our lives look like to other people or what we do have like all of those things are phenomenal and we can show up in gratitude but at the same time someone's life can look really really shiny on the outside and they can be suffering and going through so much internal pain on the inside so I don't think that you or I need permission to feel the pain we don't need other people to say yeah it's okay you can feel this pain you can you can feel the hardships of your emotions or the hardships of your mental illness no matter how great our lives are no matter how privileged or gifted or blessed we are we still can struggle and I think it's super important to acknowledge that and also not have guilt about it because if I were to sit here and say oh well you know I'm married and I have four kids and we're all like pretty healthy and you know we have a car in the driveway like and just write off my mental health issues it wouldn't make any sense like the two things aren't even related there are organic issues going on for my mental health for your mental health and it doesn't matter what the exteriors look like there's a rich inner world there are trillions of cells at play here and ultimately those are the things that are going to are going to mean our well-being those are going to point to our well-being and we can learn that there's a dynamic interplay and we can tap into all sorts of therapies and tools to help ourselves but I think the very very first step is acknowledging no matter how blessed we are no matter how grateful we feel we need to look after our mental health it's really really important and at all places like there's this spectrum there's people who really really suffer who know they have diagnoses it's a really like medically complicated and serious situation and then there are other people who have like day-to-day struggles who like don't want to be labeled and yet they're still dealing with mental health issues so this is all over the board and I went to my doctor yesterday he's an MD he's also a specialist in functional medicine and he guided me on a meditation and he did a check-in with me on my supplements and we had a whole talk about sleep hygiene and routines and you know practicing making sure to practice meditation like even when it doesn't feel productive exercise sunlight so many different factors so I definitely want to share continue sharing these resources for you I wanted just to do this like open episode of my sharing and debriefing with you because I've heard from so many of you so I'm gonna invite you to ask me your questions about any of this you can message me on Instagram it's Azriela underscore Jankovic on Instagram I'm gonna put a link to my Instagram in the show notes and just DM me there you can also send me a message on my Facebook page it's within us podcast with Azriela Jankovic so that's there I'm gonna link it for you and just send me your questions and I will do my best to answer them I'm gonna also do my best to share episodes with transformational tools I have a couple that I'm excited about coming up really soon I interviewed my brother who's just amazing his name is Benjamin Farley and he has his own amazing story to tell I'm not gonna tell it for him but he wrote a book called the unchained life manual and he has a bunch of different tools that can help with mental well-being that's in a forthcoming episode and I hope to bring him on like more than once to this show because he has a lot to share and he's also been a really big part of my life and my journey I have another episode where we touch on mental health as well with rabbi Ellie Spitz who has been a synagogue rabbi for 30 33 years in Southern California he's also a scholar he travels the world speaking teaching and learning meditation spirituality and the afterlife mysticism and he's written three books and one of those books was about his mental health journey and he was also in a psychiatric institution and dealing with suicidal ideations early on in his life and so he shares about that that's coming soon and I've also got a few more in the queue I have an episode of my good friend Shira Gura who talks about living deliberately and I have an episode that was recorded in February from someone who I really adore his name is Jonas on Goldson and he talks about the importance of leading our lives and living our professional lives from a point of ethics and our talk was fascinating so little by little these episodes are me coming out but I want to make this podcast for you I want to answer your questions and because I've gotten such an outpouring from you on this topic I want to be there for you so keep me posted friends this Wednesday I have a meditation circle it's a women's global circle of insight I'm doing these every Wednesday now it's 9 p.

M.

Israel time 11 a.

M.

Pacific time 2 p.

M.

Eastern time and it's a combination of guided meditation personal growth and also meaningful conversations and this week there's gonna be an option to either join a small group conversation around a topic or to stay with me and do a Q&A and more of like a journaling experience so I have a really special group of women coming and I have a group of women signed up for the month and I also want to make space for you if you're interested in being there so I'm going to best way to do this I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to sign up for three the next three and if you haven't been yet and you want to try one for free you can just email me directly I'm gonna make it really easy for you and tell me that you want to try one for free and I will reserve your seat all right so that's the story if you are male and you're listening to this and you're like Adriella what are you doing you are in you are like 12% of my listener and listeners and and I want to make a space for you too I've been asked by a lot of the women to make this like a women's experience but it's evolving and it's growing and changing and if you happen to be male I do not want to discriminate against you you are a wonderful human being I want to be there for you also so can you just let me know that you heard this and that you you want to join a circle and and just let me know what your needs are and I will see what I can do for you all right my friends so thank you for being here I hope this was helpful in terms of shedding some light on my journey and sharing some tools with you for yours this is gonna be like the least produced episode that ever was because I just wanted to share with you and there's lots more in the queue so stay tuned and as always abundant blessings to you wherever you are in this world and we will connect soon you

Reviews

TY,

For sharing your story. May others adopt this additive towards mental health and mental wellness, so they too can live a more fulfilled whole life.

Namaste

🕊️Peace🤸 Shalom 🐵

Thank you for your openess and vulnerability. That was encouraging to me.

Thank you Azriela for sharing these podcasts on mental illness. Very informational and confirmation I need to protect my own mental health while providing for my parents whom are in their 90s and still live at home but should be in an assisted living. My mother now has some dimentia on top of other mental issues. It’s been almost impossible at times trying to deal with her because she will not acknowledge anything is wrong with her and has never sought help in my lifetime of 67 years! I’ve tried to have her committed once but they wouldn’t do anything because she wasn’t suicidal but my dad tried to take his life because he couldn’t take it any longer. That was about 6 or 7 years ago. He can go to a veteran’s nursing home but he refuses to leave her and she refuses to go anywhere. I’m the only child and some days it’s more than I can even comprehend about how long this could go on. Meditation has been life changing for me and kept me sane! 💜