His Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward: An Interview on Love, Writing, and Mental Illness (with Mark Lukach)

In this episode, we talk to Mark Lukach, author of the book My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward: A Memoir, about his experiences as the loved one of someone with new onset symptoms of mania, depression, suicidality, and psychosis. Mark tells us the story of his wife Giulia and how their future changed unexpectedly when they were 27 years old and she was first hospitalized on a psych ward.
He describes why he wrote his article and then his book (no other books on caregiving in a romantic relationship! and feelings of loneliness), the response from others (including parents at his school!), and the role of writing in his marriage. He also shares it has been like in his relationship as a caregiver.
Mark details how he redefined what love is and the role of love in illness and pain, as well as learning to plan for a crisis in between crises. He also beautifully explains what’s it’s been like to be the caregiver and have his feelings and experience unacknowledged by so many—from her professionals to the mental health insurance system. He imagines what an ideal mental health system for caregivers might then look like—including redesigning the waiting room—and how maybe it could all be fixed with one word: inclusivity. Mark's website is here.
TRANSCRIPT
David Carreon: Hi this is David Carreon.
Jessi Gold: This is Jessi Gold.
David Carreon: And this is Psyched. Today we have Mark Lukach, a teacher and freelance writer. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Wired and other publications. He's currently the 9th grade Dean at the Athenian school where he also teaches history. He lives with his wife, Julia and their sons in the San Francisco Bay area. Mark first wrote about Julia in a New York Times Modern Love column, and again in a piece for Pacific Standard Magazine, which was the magazine's most read article in 2015.
David Carreon: Mark, thank you for joining us.
Mark Lukach: Sure thing, thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
David Carreon: Mark, tell us about this piece that you wrote about. What's the story behind it?
Mark Lukach: Sure thing. I actually don't initially identify as a writer. I really am a high school teacher, right? I met my wife Julia when we were actually in our first week of college. It was very much puppy dog love at first sight, like chasing rainbows into the sunset kind of thing, you know? It just felt like a fairytale in many ways. We ended up getting married, pretty much directly out of college, and moved to California soon after that. I thought the future was set. I had this amazing woman who I was in love with, who I was married to, we were gonna have a family. I was doing my dream career of teaching high school history.
Mark Lukach: Then when we were 27, Julia ended up having a psychotic episode. This was totally out of no where for us. It's onset was really disorienting and pretty terrifying, because we had no sense of what mental illness looked like. Julia was definitely always really ambitious and had some perfectionist tendencies and could be hard on herself, but in no way would that, to me indicate ... I didn't expect or have any reason to expect that she was gonna end up having delusions and be fully paranoid and have to get hospitalized.
Mark Lukach: How it all went down was that, she ended up starting a new job and for whatever reason the combination of the work stress and the self imposed expectations, she kind of got paralyzed with anxiety at work and had a hard time doing even fairly menial tasks. Day to day emails, she would overthink everything, she'd forward them to me to proofread these two sentence emails and say, "I've been working on this for two hours, because I want to make sure it was just right." That was nothing like the Julia that I had known before who was always so effective and efficient at work.
Mark Lukach: It started looking like that, and then it grew where she ended up experiencing ... she was having a hard time falling asleep. She lost her appetite, and then eventually she ended up not sleeping at all. I'm like, "What's going on. What's happening to you?" I actually had a friend who was getting a Ph.D in Psychiatry, and I checked in with him and he's like, "You know what, she's probably just adjusting to this new world, this new job." It was her most important job that she'd had.
Mark Lukach: So, we were kind of like, it's just situational, she's hopefully gonna settle in and adjust. I thought that was really good advice, but I had a hard time accepting that Julia couldn't just figure it out. I was like, "Julia, you're tired. You've...