This photo of my mother Stella, in the black dress, and her family was taken outside the family's duplex in May 1959. Two months later, my mother would have her first nervous breakdown. She was committed to a mental institution in Montreal, Canada, and given several treatments of Electroconvulsive Therapy, also known as ECT.
Electroconvulsive Therapy had a negative effect on my mother. For years afterward, she complained about never feeling quite like herself again. Not only did she have issues with her memory and learning skills but, she now had PTSD from the ECT. Because of this, she refused to go to the hospital in the future for the fear of more treatments.
The nurse hands me over to my mother and sends us home from the hospital in June of 1970. One of the few photographs of my mother smiling while holding me in her arms.
The day after my parents took me home from the hospital, my father took this photo of my mother holding me in the kitchen. Her hands were shaking and she couldn't stop crying. She was overwhelmed with Postpartum Depression and no one knew how to help her. She quickly handed me to my father and climbed back into bed. That's when she made the decision not to breastfeed me because of her fear of spreading her mental illness.
During my Baptism in July, my mother had her third nervous breakdown due to her sister-in-law, Claire. When the pictures came back from the lab, she quickly cut out all images of Claire before inserting them in the photo album.
A year-and-a-half later, my mother held me in her arms in our duplex in Montreal and sang Italian nursery rhymes to me.
Things I've inherited from my mother, are displayed in my home. Her rosary, a picture of my grandfather with his bicycle in the alleyway behind our home in Los Angeles, a calendar marked with the date my grandfather died, and a postcard from the Italian village my mother grew up in. After my grandfather died on March 12, 1980, that date became my mom's annual trigger for nervous breakdowns.
On December 2, 1994, my mother died unexpectedly after another long breakdown. She was only 55 years old. I can hear her voice clearly saying in Italian, "Don't waste your money buying me flowers. They are just going to die."
The first and last entry I've ever made in any type of diary was on September 6, 1996. It was in a novelty store journal being advertised as a 'Wish Book'. It was my first official panic attack and I remember I had no one to talk to and no resources to get the help I needed. All I could think of was how sad my mother would be if she knew that I had inherited her illness.
In less than four years from now, I'll be the age that my mother was when she died. I've now struggled with mental illness for twenty-five years. My only wish is that she was here to benefit from modern mental illness treatments that could have helped her live a normal life. I try to hold on tightly to the memories I have of her but, they seem to be deteriorating as quickly as her fur coat, and fading as fast as these old color photographs of her.
HANDLE (her) WITH CARE
“Handle (her) with Care” is about the fragility of my mother, the fading memories that I'm holding onto of her, and the struggle with mental illness that we shared as mother-and-daughter decades apart.
My mother had her first nervous breakdown at the age of twenty and was committed to a mental institution in Montreal, Canada. Over the course of a few months, she was treated with ECT, Electroconvulsive Therapy, which had a negative long-last effect on her. For years afterward, she complained about never feeling quite like herself. It caused her to have issues with her cognitive skills and in addition to that, she was dealing with PTSD from shock therapy.
After I was born, she was overwhelmed with Postpartum Depression and no one knew how to help her. Because of her fear of spreading her mental illness, she made the decision not to breastfeed. Growing up was difficult at times, especially during the month of March of each year, which was her annual trigger for a nervous breakdown. This was the month that my grandfather passed away.
In December of 1994, my mother died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-five.
After her death, I experienced my first bout of panic attacks and depression and didn't have any resources to get the help I needed. All I could think of was how sad my mother would have been if she were there to see that I had inherited her mental illness. In 2018, I spoke about my struggles publicly for the first time in an article for the Huffington Post in hopes of bringing awareness to the illness and helping erase the stigma.
The memories of my mother continue to deteriorate, but I hold on tightly to the few material things I have left of hers. My only wish is that she was alive today to benefit from the same medical treatments that I benefit from, and we could live a better life together.