BRAIN FOOD
Carrie Brown was handcuffed to a hospital gurney. She had been waiting for more than five hours, under the watch of a guard, for a specialist to determine if she should be committed involuntarily for psychiatric treatment. Her heart rate had normalized now, and she looked back on how this wretched day had completely unraveled.
It had begun with the usual gloom of depression that had been with her for most of her 38 years, but a new sense of despair had also crept in recently that she just couldn’t shake.
To make matters worse, she hadn’t slept for the past 48 hours. In fact, in a sort of driven frenzy, she’d made herself work for 36 of them.
From her office at Microsoft where she was an executive assistant, she’d telephoned her therapist because her mental storm was unbearable. He’d returned her call, but it hadn’t helped. “I’m done,” she said finally, and then hung up.
Carrie had seen numerous psychiatrists before. Her health care bills averaged $36,000 a year. Various medications over the years had not worked out for her. One particularly bad year, she’d been on five different prescriptions; a few had helped for a time, but also made her “zombie-like,” violent, restless or suicidal. One drug put her in a state of unrelenting panic attack for weeks.
She left the medicines behind and stuck to talk therapy but was still stuck in her depression graveyard.
That evening, as Carrie drove home from her office, occupied with thoughts of ending her life, she saw a police SUV approaching as she neared her house. It was something she’d never seen in her exclusive suburban neighborhood. The officer in the driver’s seat glanced at her as they passed each other, and in her rearview mirror she saw the SUV do a U-turn and follow her.
“He called the police!”she thought of her psychotherapist and, panicking, stepped on the gas to make
