Jeannie Vanasco
Too Rushed
for Hannah
December 14, 2012. In a psychiatric hospital just north of New York City, I’m interviewing Andre about his mania and depression. Together, we’re drafting his illness timeline; that way, he can share the essentials with his doctor in less than five minutes. Any longer, and doctors here get antsy, like rich people waiting in line.
“Isn’t this cheating?” Andre asks me.
“It’s studying,” I tell him.
“School would have been much easier had I known.”
“I hear you,” I say, one of my stock replies on the ward.
New staffers often mistake me for one of them. I wear button-down shirts. My fellow patients comment on how normal I look. Dress for the job you want, I tell them.
Another reason I resemble a staffer: I actually speak with the other patients. I probably could sneak out, “elope” is the official term, but then someone might get fired.
“You hear that?” Andre asks.
Down the hall, past the nurses’ station, there are gasps and crying. He and I follow the noise into the activities room where the other patients cluster around the TV. Jose repeats: “it’s horrible, horrible.” Children have been murdered at their elementary school.
“How could anyone…” travels from patient to patient, like a flask.
“Mental illness” echoes among the journalists.
Another patient says my thoughts exactly: “Please don’t let him have bipolar.”
We’re in the ward for mood and personality disorders: borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder, and—the most common diagnosis here—bipolar disorder. The last time I was locked in this ward, three years prior, I told another patient: “Bipolar seems to be over-diagnosed, don’t you think? Seems like everybody here has it.” And she explained: “Almost everybody here does have it. You are on the ward for mood and personality disorders.”
No one says much the rest of the day.
“Can you imagine losing a child like that?” Andre asks me.
I think of my dad, whose daughter died in a car accident when she was sixteen. I’m named after her.
“I don’t think you ever get over it,” I tell Andre.
The day after the shooting, a new patient arrives with a swastika tattooed on his neck. The nurses initially assigned him a room with a Jewish patient, but then the Jewish patient asked them if they were crazy. Now the Jewish patient is crying in the quiet room, and the patient with the swastika is crying in the activities room. I’m reading on the couch—because I’ve been discouraged from reading in my room. The TV is on, like always. The past two days, all anyone here wants to watch is the news. The gunman’s diagnosis hasn’t been released, or if it has, I don’t know it. I’ve heard mentions of Asperger’s and schizophrenia.
The patient with the swastika joins me on the couch.
“I hate skinheads,” he says, scratching at the swastika. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a violent person.”
On the TV, parents are crying.
“I’m not like the monster who did that.”
***
It’s 2018, and I’m not here to make a new argument: mental health patients are not more violent than the rest of the population. The American Journal of Psychiatry released a 2006 study reporting that people with severe mental illness commit roughly one out of every 20 violent crimes. Most people with mental illness are never violent. One percent of psychiatric patients released from hospitals commit gun violence against strangers. Usually, the only violence that mental health patients commit is against themselves. So, we’ve known this for a while now, but—judging by news coverage and responses to news coverage—a lot of Americans still don’t believe this. Last November, after the mass shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas—even NPR callers, who I’d expect more of, insisted that the mental health system was to blame.
This has all been on my mind—not because of a recent mass shooting but because one of my students killed herself a few days ago. I’m sad and confused and shocked, even though I remember feeling suicidal as a college student. I think of my history professor who noticed my pressured speech, elliptical thinking, and tears, and how—in reporting me to the campus health center—he probably saved my life.
I’m a creative nonfiction professor who’s deeply familiar with mental health issues. How could I not have seen my student needed help?
She’d attempted suicide years ago. She’d also been raped. She told me this in my office. She then wrote about it with, it seemed, deep hindsight. But then I look back at her old essays, and I’m embarrassed by my written comments on the early draft of one essay: how the ending—which is about 2016 being the loneliest year she’d ever known—“feels too rushed.” How the timeline—of rape, hospitalizations, and trip to Israel—is confusing: “you’re asking the reader to jump around too much.” I wrote compliments as well—because the essay is beautiful. But when you’re depressed, you often miss what’s great about you.
Her parents told a school administrator that they knew I was close with their daughter and they thought I should know, and so the administrator emailed me. Because I was on winter break and it was a weekend, I didn’t read the email until thirty minutes before the student’s funeral. I missed it. I hear the service was so packed that some people had to stand.
I remember the last time we met. It was finals week, and she was in my office, discussing all the books we’d read that semester. I could tell she was stressed, but I didn’t think she needed the campus health center. She needed one less final to worry about.
“Congratulations,” I told her after our hour-long meeting.
“What do you mean?”
“You just earned an A on the final.”
As far as I was concerned, she had aced the exam. I told her that she didn’t need to attend the final.
“You don’t know how much this means to me,” she said.
We made plans to meet after the holidays.
***
I think back to December of 2012, when I interviewed Andre. After five hours of conversation, he mentioned that his parents had looped an electrical wire around his neck and hung him as a baby from the basement pipes. He felt so convinced of this that I briefly wondered: could it be possible?
Ever since hearing about my student, I’ve been making a list of former students and friends with mental illnesses. I’m checking in, anxious each time a call goes to voicemail.
“Just wanted to say hi,” I tell them.
I’m also rereading old emails and texts from my student, searching for signs I missed. A month before she killed herself, she sent me an email recommending a poetry collection. I bought the book and told her I was looking forward to reading it. I started reading it today. The epigraph: “Mental illness is not a communicable disease, but there is a strong body of evidence that suicide is still contagious.” Suicide no longer feels like a possibility to me. But in the hospital, it did—and maybe that’s why I listened to Andre for more than five hours. The last time I met with my student, I cut off the meeting after one.
“Phenomenal” I wrote on her essay about her suicide attempt. I had suggested cutting this line: “A grown woman, now—or growing still—who has survived so much and still has so much to survive.” I regret my suggestion. I want that line.
photo by Theresa Keil
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of The Glass Eye: A Memoir. Her writing has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times, Prairie Schooner, the Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, and on NewYorker.com. She lives in Baltimore and is an assistant professor of English at Towson University.