A Mental Health Emergency
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Description
Imagine you’re six months pregnant with your first child and the person you love, the person with whom you’ve built a life, wakes you up in the middle of the night convinced there are people in the house. But…there aren’t. He’s convinced you’re being followed. But…you’re not. Where do you turn for help when your mental health crisis is invisible? Jenny Heddin took her husband to the emergency room only to find they weren’t equipped to handle their crisis. Like millions of Americans, they were turned away because there wasn’t an available bed. This week, we hear her story and are joined by our producer, Jackie Danziger, to talk about bed shortages, parity laws and psychiatric boarding.
Season 2 of Last Day is created in partnership with The Jed Foundation. The Jed Foundation (JED) empowers teens and young adults with the skills and support to grow into healthy, thriving adults. You can find tips, tools and resources for taking care of your emotional health available at: www.jedcares.org/lastday
Resources from the episode:
- Jackie’s Reading List:
- Emergency Mental Health is a Throwback of the 1950s Emergency Department
- Trends in Emergency Room visits
- Seattle Times: Public Crisis, Private Toll: The hidden costs of the mental-health industry’s expansion
- Treatment Advocacy Center – Beyond Beds
- NAMI – State Mental Health Legislation: Trends, Themes and Effective Practices
- Learn more about mental health parity laws and how to submit a complaint or appeal for denied care through the Kennedy Forum’s Parity Registry.
- For recommendations on how to report on suicide, visit https://reportingonsuicide.org/.
If you or someone you know is struggling emotionally or feeling hopeless, it’s important to talk to someone about it now. Contact one of the resources below for a free, confidential conversation with a trained counselor anytime.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
Crisis Text line: Text “Connect” to 741-741
The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386
To follow along with a transcript and/or take notes for friends and family, go to https://lemonadamedia.com/show/last-day shortly after the air date.
Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.
Transcription
SPEAKERS
Jenny Heddin, Matt Heddin, Jackie Danziger, Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 00:00
If you are just tuning in, I encourage you to go back and start listening from Episode 1, it’ll make more sense. As for what you’ll hear today, we have worked hard to ensure that our storytelling around suicide is as safe as possible. But we can’t address this issue by tiptoeing around it. Instead of warning, who should and shouldn’t listen before each episode, we want to encourage you to press pause, if and when you need to. We’ll be here when you’re ready to press play.
Matt Heddin
“Hey, it’s me a. It’s about 10:40 on Thursday, I was just giving you a call. I don’t know exactly what time we’re gonna finish up today.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
This is Matt Heddin, leaving a message for his wife, Jenny.
Matt Heddin
“It might not be 6. So if you need to eat, go ahead and eat. I will stagger if something else if need be. Anyway, I’ll be out here, if you’re having a good day.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
I know voicemails are kind of old fashioned now. But there’s something special about them, you know, not in the moment, but down the line. They’re like these perfect little relics of totally ordinary moments. And there’s something so comforting about how utterly normal and boring they are.
Matt Heddin
“Hey it’s me (unclear), saying what’s up and see how your class finished up. I’m just sitting outside on my dad’s porch watching the fireflies, the cicadas sing their evening songs. Today was a good day.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
These messages are like accidental time capsules. Different than wedding photos or holiday cards. Because they’re so candid. They capture who someone was when they weren’t consciously creating a memory. When they were just checking in on you to say hi.
Matt Heddin 02:07
“Anyway, it sounds like you had a good teaching weekend, which is awesome. You deserve that. You’re working really hard. I know you have. Anyway, I love you. I’ll talk to you later. Have a good night.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
But not all of Jenny’s voicemails from Matt, were this ordinary.
Matt Heddin
“Hey, baby, give me a call when you got a chance. I just think I saw the Batman. I know I’m not on my anxiety medication. But driving a green on the”
Matt Heddin
“Hey, baby, I reported the whole (unclear). And I disconnected the garage for, just for safety sake. I’ll reset the garage door code and all of our clickers and stuff tonight when I get home. But for right now, let’s just leave the garage door.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
So here’s the thing, these last two voicemails sound just like the others, a husband calling with a quick run of the mill check in. But they’re not. It doesn’t sound like it. But this is an emergency.
Jenny Heddin
Up until that moment, he had been, you know, super logical, you know, he’s a trained scientist like very steady emotionally.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
This is Jenny, Matt’s wife, the recipient of the voicemails.
Jenny Heddin
And I remember sort of waking up in the middle of him waking me up in the middle of the night. And he is just you know, terrified. And he is obviously convinced that there was like somebody trying to break into the house.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
There wasn’t anyone trying to break into the house. But this was the beginning of a new reality, where Jenny no longer lived in the same world as her husband. So what do you do when you’re experiencing this kind of emergency?
Jenny Heddin
It was like we had two options. We either waited like on a two-month waitlist to see a psychiatrist or we went to an emergency room. That was it. Those were the two options that we had. We had like no other route into getting, like very serious professional help for him.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 04:37
This is the problem with the enormous gap that still exists between mental and physical health care. It’s hard to convey the urgency when the problem is invisible.
Jenny Heddin
When you go to the emergency room, I feel like there’s all these signs that are like don’t come to the emergency room unless it’s actually an emergency. And then you’re there for like a mental health emergency. It’s like the weirdest thing, because you’re not bleeding, you know. So of course, you’re like the least on their priority list.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Being at the bottom of that priority list also leaves you at the end of the line. And it turns out Jenny’s experience isn’t so unique. In fact, it exemplifies a nationwide problem. And I know I say this a lot, but it has life and death consequences. According to a 2019 report, emergency room patients with deliberate self-harm or suicidal ideation, had substantially increased risk of dying by suicide within a year of that visit. For Jenny, she took her husband to the hospital in April. And by May, he was dead.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
I’m Stephanie Wittels Wachs and this is LAST DAY.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 06:06
Let’s start at the beginning. Matt and Jenny met through mutual friends and fell hard and fast. She liked him immediately. He was so super smart and fun. And he had this very cool job.
Jenny Heddin
He was a big outdoor person. So he had a what I was referred to as like a nine-year-old boy dream job. He was a Wetland scientist. So he got to like Trump around out in the wilderness all the time. You know, he was from Kansas originally. So like, we’re all kind of Midwest gentlemen, old fashion type.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
When you’re the old fashion type, you don’t wait around when you know you’ve met the one. So after dating for about a year, Matt proposed to Jenny on her birthday. And just a few months later, they were married.
Jenny Heddin
So right after we got married, pretty much the month after I got pregnant with my son. And I kind of always remember because the day that he developed psychosis ended up being like the night before April 1. And so as we were experiencing that, I was like, “this is the worst April Fool’s joke ever.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
So the setup to this shitty April Fool’s joke is that Matt had a routine eye surgery that led to a short period of sleeplessness. So here’s Jenny, six months pregnant. When her sweet outdoors, the logical scientist husband wakes her up in the middle of the night convinced there are people in the house.
Jenny Heddin
You know, I’m just sitting there, like, I don’t know what is happening, like, exactly. But it definitely seemed like strange, it definitely seemed like that whatever he was thinking was happening was not, you know, in keeping with reality at that point.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 08:01
I think there is this stereotype about, quote, unquote, “crazy people”. And one of the first symptoms that goes along with that stereotype is seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. It’s the reason our JED partners weren’t thrilled when we said we were doing a story about someone experiencing delusions. But this is why we shared Matt’s voicemails, because he doesn’t sound like a stereotypical person having a nervous breakdown. He sounds like a sweet husband trying to troubleshoot a safer garage system. So at the very beginning of the delusions, it was scary because he was scared. And it seemed possible that they really were in danger. So they called the cops who came to the house, Matt explained what he saw. They all look around together, nothing adds up. So they leave. But Matt is still really upset.
Jenny Heddin
He just got more and more like upset as the, you know, like night kind of wore on and I think was like five in the morning or something. And we ended up calling his best friend in Tacoma because he was like, absolutely, Matt was absolutely convinced that he had to leave our house. And so we made arrangements to have his friend come down to Olympia and pick him up. And Matt was like, “I don’t want to have him come to the house.” “We have to like arrange it elsewhere.” You know, it was very like spy movie, he gets in the back of the car, like down on the floor, makes me drive him to another like location and his friend picks him up and takes him to his house. And you know, I’m six months pregnant. So I’m tired at this point. And I’m like, I just need to go back and like get some sleep and then maybe he’ll sleep and maybe this is just like some kind of weird thing where he just needs sleep.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
In Matt’s mind, he was now the target in an assassination plot. And he needed to get away from Jenny in order to keep her safe. But in Jenny’s mind, that was exhausted. I mean, lack of sleep can actually rewire your brain and be a precursor for all sorts of devastating things, including psychological disturbances. So that felt like the obvious answer. So Matt makes it to his friend’s house, and Jenny goes back home to get some much-needed sleep herself.
Jenny Heddin 10:30
And I figure, you know, he’ll sleep and wake up and it’ll be fine. And he does wake up, and he is still absolutely convinced that there are people that are trying to kill him. And so we kind of decided Ben and I to, you know, take him to the local emergency room up in Tacoma, to try to see if there was something that they could do for him.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
She describes this as their best experience in the ER, they were seen pretty quickly, and they got an evaluation.
Jenny Heddin
We got in there, and you know, the social workers trying to talk to us. And it’s tricky, because, you know, Matt presented really well, he did not present as a person who was experiencing psychosis. I mean, his story sounded a little strange, but he kind of wrapped it in enough logic that I think it didn’t appear as concerning. And so, you know, as a loved one, you’re sort of like, trying to tell like signaled the nurses and the social workers, and the doctors like, this is serious, you know, this is like, more serious than this person is letting on.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
But in the end, it didn’t actually matter how serious they thought Matt situation was. Because even when they determined he did need help, they weren’t equipped to give it to him.
Jenny Heddin
They told him, they didn’t have any psychiatric beds available at that particular hospital, but they could find try to find one for him. And he was pretty adamant that he would not leave that hospital, he was either going to take a bed at that hospital, or he was going home. And so they gave him like some sleeping aids and like one dose of an anti-psychotic and discharged us.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 12:27
So essentially, Matt didn’t get the help he needed because there wasn’t space for him. And this was a recurring problem in Washington state where they lived. Starting around 2010, Washington had one of the highest rates of serious mental illness in the nation, while ranking 49th for psychiatric bed capacity. The system that Jenny suddenly found herself in was built with an enormous gap between need and available care.
Jenny Heddin
So we were kind of back to square one at that point. And we then kind of just proceeded to, like enter this crazy world of trying to figure out what to do next for him. So we did set up an appointment at his primary care doctor’s office, again, it was one of those things where he was describing a lot of anxiety. And I was in the room with him like trying to be like, this isn’t an anxiety, but you also don’t want to throw your loved one like under the bus.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
This is an incredibly uncomfortable position. Jenny is allowed in the room, essentially, like a chaperone. But Matt isn’t her kid, she can’t lean over and overrule his description of his own symptoms, not only because she’s holding on to the husband-wife equal power dynamic. But also by this point, she’d learned that trying to deny his delusions didn’t help. It made things worse, actually. So she hoped the doctor would read between the lines, but they didn’t.
Jenny Heddin 14:01
So they gave him a prescription for anti-anxiety drugs and send them out of the office. We went to go fill them the local grocery store. And while we were in the grocery store, Matt became convinced that there were people in the store that were there to harm him. And, you know, I think like, I was still thinking, like, I still hadn’t switched into thinking about him as like somebody who was, you know, ill. And so I let him drive the car. And the next thing I knew we were on our way to the airport. And he is convinced there’s people following him he calls the cops like, we get, you know, escorted off the freeway by the State Patrol and the State Patrol is like trying to talk to him and trying to talk to me and I at that point had this like, do I say something to the officers like about what’s happening here and I kind of end up saying like, it’s fine. You know, we’re fine. We thought somebody is following us. They’re not.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Why did you tell the cops that it was fine? I want to kind of get inside your head at that moment. I’m sure it was terrifying.
Jenny Heddin
Yeah.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
And at that moment, like, what were you thinking?
Jenny Heddin
You know, I mean, it’s one of those things like, in retrospect, I wish I would have said something. I think and this is like, I think a lot of our story is how heavy the stigma of mental health like weighed on me at the time, he had a professional career. Like, I didn’t want him ending up, like, in jail, you know, while they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with him. And, you know, I was like, this is this person that I love, like so deeply. And I didn’t feel like while it was terrifying, like, I didn’t feel unsafe, really. Like, it wasn’t it was scary because it was so like chaotic. But I didn’t feel like I was like in physical danger. And I think I just kind of froze like it was all happening. So I mean, at that point, when that happened, that was like 36 hours from the onset of his psychosis.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 16:24
Imagine your entire life turning upside down in under two days, Jenny could barely keep up. And let’s not forget, she is six months pregnant. Before she knew it, they were at the airport, Matt ditch the car and ran. Luckily, her parents live nearby. So that’s where she went. They called airport security and they were able to resolve the latest emergency of the moment. But there were a million more tiny emergencies just ahead. At this point, Jenny knew things weren’t going to go back to normal. And she went into Hardcore Doer Mode.
Jenny Heddin
I’m like, “Okay, Where’s the phone list? What’s the research?” Like, you know, and I’m like, “Okay, well, we’ve got three months. Like, we’ve got three months, like, we’re gonna figure this out.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Jenny was ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work, make some phone calls, find the right doctor, start the process.
Jenny Heddin
I also think I had this belief that like, he’s sick. Surely there’s an answer, right? There’s a cure, it’s just a matter of finding it, it’s just a matter of like opening the right door, and like finding the right key.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
The emergency room still felt like the right door, especially because their first visit had at least gotten them in front of a doctor pretty quickly. But the second visit to the ER was very different.
Jenny Heddin
When we went to the emergency room down here in Olympia, you wait for a really long time. So we were out in the waiting area for probably about 12 hours.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 18:08
Part of the reason the wait time was so long was because there was only one emergency physician on call that could do psychiatric evaluations. And 12 hours is an absurd amount of time to sit around in a public area with someone who is convinced he’s being followed. So Jenny starts pleading with nurses,.
Jenny Heddin
We’ve got to get back into a room. Otherwise, like he’s gonna leave. And so they did finally put us back into a room. But it’s like an emergency room. So he’s on the bed, and he has to be like, on the bed. And I am just in like these plastic chairs off to the side. And at that point, again, I’ve been in the emergency room for 12 hours.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Every once in a while a nurse would offer her a bed so she could rest while they waited. Then another nurse would come and kick her out. It went on like that for what seemed like forever.
Jenny Heddin
Or we’re just waiting and waiting and waiting. And then finally they send a person in to do the evaluation and they just talk through a bunch of questions. The evaluations lasts about 45 minutes to an hour. That’s where I started to also like find out like more about Matt’s family, his mom had some mental health issues and there was like kind of more trauma there than I had known about, or that even you know, his family had told me about.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
By the time Jenny came into Matt’s life, he was estranged from his mother. But it turns out she had some pretty significant mental health issues as well. including but not limited to hallucinations, not unlike the ones Matt was experiencing now.
Jenny Heddin
And, you know, I think it was pretty clear to that evaluator that he was not really in touch with, you know, reality. Unfortunately, what happens with mental health is that just because somebody is not really, you know, in touch with reality doesn’t isn’t enough to put them in a hospital, they have to meet that dangers to solve for others or they have to voluntarily admit themselves.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 20:21
But Matt didn’t think he was sick. They were eventually able to convince him to admit himself into the psychiatric ward. But it wasn’t because he believed he was having delusions, it’s because it was the safest place to be. Remember, Matt’s reality is that he was being chased, that he was in danger. And this seemed like a secure place for the moment. But even with the decision made, they still had a ways to go.
Jenny Heddin
And so after we did the evaluation, it was another 12 hours of waiting for a bed to open up at that hospital for him to move over into that. So yeah, we our first real stay in the emergency room was about 24 hours long to finally get him fully checked in to the psychiatric unit.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
And if that number horrifies you, as much as it horrified me, I’m sorry to say that this is the status quo for far too many people in this country experiencing a mental health crisis. More on that after the break.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Welcome back.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Okay. Before we go any further, we need to lay the groundwork for Jenny’s story, because this isn’t just a Matt and Jenny issue. This is a systemic issue. And you hear me yapping at you every single week. But the person who’s behind the scenes knee deep in the academic papers, is my producer Jackie. And this episode has taken the grad school level research to a whole new level. So here to present her thesis paper is Jackie Danziger. Welcome, Jackie.
Jackie Danziger 22:09
Thank you very much. So first things first, let me cite my sources. We talked to multiple providers and policymakers and then I fell down a real rabbit hole, reviewing reports from the National Alliance for Mental Illness or NAMI, the Treatment Advocacy Center, and then I spent some time with some amazing reporting from the Seattle Times. And it turns out these 24 hours wait time that Jenny experienced is actually one small example of a much bigger problem known as psychiatric boarding. That’s what you call it when people show up to the ER with a mental health crisis and are then held for days and even weeks waiting for a bed to open up. This is a mounting concern, because the number of people turning to emergency departments with these needs grew by over 55% from 2006 to 2013. Right now, one in eight visits to the ER involving mental health or substance use condition, despite the fact that many ER’s are not actually equipped to help people experiencing a mental health crisis.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Okay, so when you say they’re not equipped, are you literally talking about capacity or resources like flesh that out a little bit?
Jackie Danziger
Right, well, it’s kind of all of the above, there is a real staffing issue. For most urgent care physicians, the most training they get is a one-month psychiatry residency. And this problem, it goes back decades. And in some ways, it’s the result of what happens when good intentions just run out of steam. In 1963, the federal government passed the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, a very long term for an idea that I actually think you would agree with, which is that too many people were being institutionalized too aggressively. And most patients would actually be better off in a community center designed to treat a full spectrum of needs.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Yeah, I love that. It’s like, very whole person care. Not one size fits all, doctor Nzinga Harrison would approve, all that.
Jackie Danziger
In theory, Yes, exactly. The only problem, these centers never really materialized. Instead, years pass, political tide shift, budgets are slashed. And eventually federal funding for community based mental health centers is eliminated altogether.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 24:10
So it sounds like essentially, we recognize that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a compelling movie, but pretty terrible in real life, and we wanted to create something better. And we had the idea to do something more humane, but we just never did it.
Jackie Danziger
Yes, and right around the same time that the community health advocates passed, Medicaid becomes a thing. But it includes an exclusion that prohibits reimbursing states for adults who are receiving mental health care or substance use treatment in a facility with more than 16 beds. This is actually part of the original Medicaid bill. It still stands today. And it is the only part of the program that doesn’t pay for medically necessary care simply because of what you’re trying to treat.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Okay, wait a minute, so, okay, let’s make this a broken arm. Are you saying that there is a stipulation under Medicaid that says, “Wait, wait, the arm is broken. But the hospital has 17 beds, and we won’t pay for that?”
Jackie Danziger
Yes, which sounds crazy. And it is. But again, the idea was mental institutions are bad, too many people are being locked up. So let’s force states to create better options by not paying for the old model. But the new utopian vision never panned out. And as a result, the US has fewer psychiatric beds per capita today than it did in 1850. And this is how you end up with a system that’s not only bad, it is inconsistently bad, as one 2019 report put it, quote, “the United States is effectively running 50 different experiments with no two states taking the same approach” which means that the quality of care you’re going to receive depends almost entirely on what state you happen to be in when your crisis occurs. This is also why you see Mental Health Parity laws getting passed at both the federal and a state level.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Right. And then, okay, remind people what parity laws are.
Jackie Danziger
So parity is literally the opposite of disparity. In this context, it means that mental health and physical health should be treated the same. The laws are designed so that that’s not just like a philosophical stance, but it actually applies to the way that insurance covers mental health treatment.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 26:09
And do these laws work?
Jackie Danziger
Not quite, at least not quite yet. Again, it’s inconsistent. And these laws are being implemented in a system with a lot of, if you will, preexisting conditions.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
I appreciate your medical humor.
Jackie Danziger
Thank you, I appreciate you. Listen, you can’t fix the bed shortage by just adding more beds because that won’t solve the fact that there is also a serious doctor shortage. And both of those go back to how much insurance is willing to pay for any of this care in the first place. It’s like you said, this is a systemic problem, you’re going to need systemic solutions.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Okay, so if this problem started decades ago, why are we still here now?
Jackie Danziger
Well, friend, you know, all last day roads eventually lead back to stigma, you need political will to make big sweeping changes. And that is hard to do when the stereotypes about people with serious mental illness are baked into the very system that responds to them. For example, statistically, every state in the country incarcerates more people with severe mental illness than it hospitalizes, which just contributes to the idea that this population is dangerous or violent or just generally undeserving of compassionate care. And that doesn’t just impact the process to get into care. It is reflected in the way that we approach inpatient treatment for mental illness.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
This brings us right back to Jenny. After that second trip to the ER where they waited 24 hours for a bed to open up, they did finally get Matt into the psychiatric ward of their local hospital. But it wasn’t exactly what Jenny had hoped for when she envisioned care for the most important person in her life. In fact, it felt more like a prison than a hospital.
Jenny Heddin
I don’t understand why if your loved one is going through substance use treatment or mental health treatment, like why did you have to have such a foundationally different experience? Like than somebody who has a heart attack, somebody who has cancer? Like it’s you’re living in like a completely parallel system. And it’s like, you know, people have been talking about with COVID, like not being able to see their family members in the hospital and like, welcome to the world that people in mental health and substance use live in that you don’t get to see your loved one, you get to go on visiting our and, you know, you’re tucking your person in like, it’s a jail. It’s not a medical experience. It’s not a therapy, terribly therapeutic feeling, even though I don’t think that they’re trying to do a bad job. But you have to take the shoe laces out of your shoes, you have to take the strings out of your hoodie, you can’t have any electronic device. So if your loved one calls you from that place, they’re on like a phone in the middle of a room like its..
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 28:48
It’s dehumanizing
Jenny Heddin
It’s completely dehumanizing. And I don’t understand it doesn’t seem like it serves any therapeutic value. And the other piece that was hard for me when my husband was an inpatient was, they didn’t include me. Like, I had to beg for information. I had to like, say, you know, like, How am I supposed to support him in his recovery? There was nothing. I talked to his psychiatrist a couple times, but I’m like, like, how do I deal? This is my first rodeo with this extreme mental health issue. How do you deal with somebody who is having you know, paranoia, or like a psychotic break?
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
What she is saying hit me so hard in the guts because as a family member with a loved one going through drug treatment multiple times, which was equally stigmatized. We had no idea what was going on with him and we certainly had no idea how to support him when he got out. It was like he went away because that was supposed to be the best option for him. And we were on the outside of it, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best and when I say the family needs to be let in on treatment. I’m not talking about family weekend at the treatment center, I’m talking about a collaborative care model where both the family members and the person impacted are getting the help they need independently and collectively. And the thing is, I’ve heard versions of this from family members over and over again, working on seasons 1 and 2 of this show, there isn’t enough transparency, or even an opportunity to prepare yourself for what’s coming next.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
And what’s unique about Jenny’s story, is that simultaneously, she had the exact opposite experience when it came to her prenatal care, which was all about what to expect when you’re expecting. I mean, she couldn’t get any insight into what to do next for her husband’s psychosis. But she sure did know how to breastfeed a baby and what every single step of the birth process would entail.
Jenny Heddin 30:55
The first class that I went to, yeah, was supposed to what was happening during his first week of inpatient stay, and yeah, it was at the exact same hospital. And so, you know, I went to my first birthing class without him, it was a very weird thing, because at that point, I was going to the hospital every day for visiting hours. But then it was like, oh, and then this night, I’m gonna be there, but to go to a different part, and you’re there with all these couples, and they’re, like, totally normal. And you’re sitting here, like, my whole life is falling apart. On the side, and I’m learning about like, baby CPR, like this is really, I felt very disconnected from like, the whole end of my pregnancy, because it was just like, okay, it’s just this thing that’s happening. It’s not like, it’s not the primary focus of my life at that point.
Jenny Heddin
You know, I think the hard part too was like, I felt at that point, more connection to Matt than I did to our child, because like, he wasn’t here yet, our son wasn’t here yet. And so it was like, I’m like, whoo. And certainly, I was like, I can’t, I’m not going to do this, like without him, without my husband. So like, he’s the paramount thing that has to get like fixed here, like, so we’ll just throw all of the like energy at everything that we have to do for him. Because that’ll fix it, we’ll be fine. We’ll figure this out.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 32:30
Matt was discharged without a long-term treatment plan, or really any plan at all. This again, is pretty standard for most of the country. Unlike other physical conditions, it is totally routine to leave the hospital with nothing more than a list of suggestions and best wishes. But if you recall, Jenny basically has a ticking time bomb in her belly. And it was about to go off.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
We’re back.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Jenny’s due in seven weeks, which is a decent amount of time to get things in order for the baby’s arrival.
Jenny Heddin
You know, I’ve been obviously, you know, we’ve been in sort of, you know, crisis for a while. My husband actually happened to be home at that point, he had done two different stays inpatient, and he would, he had switched medications, we were kind of waiting to see if it would work. And I had to kind of redesign I’ve been thinking a little bit about what was going to happen on with the birth of my son, which at that point was still seven weeks down the road. And but then I was having to make arrangements for like, who was going to actually be there for Matt, because I just wasn’t sure how he would handle the stress of the delivery,
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
which might have been a bit more complicated because the baby wasn’t sticking to the plan, either.
Jenny Heddin 34:00
My son at that point was in the breech position. So I was doing like everything I could to try to get him to like turn over. That was like another you know; I think project to kind of take my mind off of things. And so I ended up going and seeing this like massage person that day. And I remember talking to her about what was going on with my husband, and she said this like phrase to me that I’ll never forget where she said, I said, I just I’m so scared of losing him. And she said to me, “You already have the question is are you going to get them back?”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
That statement on its own, let alone from a complete stranger could knock the wind right out of you. Now imagine you’re pregnant, and the baby’s breech, which if you don’t know means the baby is essentially upside down. And Jenny knew that if she couldn’t get the baby to turn she was looking at a major abdominal surgery, which stressed her out even more. So she went home and did the only thing that provided some shred of relief, she took a bath.
Jenny Heddin
Then after I took my bath, all of a sudden my water broke.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
And the baby wasn’t due for another seven weeks. But rather than panic, she goes into denial mode. She eats salad, checks in with her doctor just sort of tinkers around the house. And finally Matt’s like “you are freaking me out, let’s go.”
Jenny Heddin
He like completely terrifies me driving over because he is again, like completely convinced that people are going to try and get us and his worst fear was that in trying to kill him, they would somebody would injure me. And so he hated driving us like us being together in the car. But obviously I was not driving myself. We end up going into the, again, the same hospital. And he had done his inpatient and emergency rooms and our birthing class and all the stuff, except this time we’re walking into the maternity ward.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 36:12
they get there, Jenny runs down the list of symptoms and the delivery team moves very quickly into emergency mode.
Jenny Heddin
It’s very clear that like, my water is completely broken, like, you know, everything this labor’s like full on moving forward. And he’s in a breech position. So at that point, they’re like he, this is gonna be a C-section. And I think like part of it was like, I was so disconnected from my body that like I was not registering like labor like it, it basically felt like for me, it went from like zero to 60. Like, they were saying, like you’re having contractions, and I wasn’t feeling it. And then within like a half an hour, I was like having contractions like every minute. And so you know, especially if like you have a C-section, there’s this weird time where like, you get sent into the room, and they’re prepping you and like your husband doesn’t get to be there. And like, that was just so, I was just I think I was just in disbelief over the whole thing. This is not, we just ran out of time. Because now my son’s born. Now I’ve got two people, I’ve got to try to figure out and take care of and all of this.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Jenny had been out of her body for so long, running on fumes. And here she was alone, in an OR facing the fact that a baby, her baby would be here in a matter of minutes. And the situation with Matt still hadn’t changed.
Jenny Heddin
And my son is premature. And so they’re talking to me about like all the things that come along with having a pretty much or you know, luckily, we’re at 33 weeks, because they were like, well, if you’re at 32, you could have brain bleeds and you know, all this other stuff. And so, you know, I’m getting like perhaps then Matt comes in, it was probably like the most like our relationship had fall like normal since he’d gotten sick. And then my son was born. And he actually like, I didn’t get to see him initially, right? Because like Matt gets to see them. And they get us let us take a picture with the three of us. And then like, he went to the NICU, and I went to recovery. And like I was by myself in recovery for like 45 minutes. I know because I want Matt to go with our son. But you know, I’m just like, I don’t know what we’re gonna do at that point.
38:49
So my son was born on a Monday, that following Friday was actually my birthday. And that was when they let me know that they were moving my son up to Tacoma, to another NICU because he needed to have a higher level of care. And I was just like, you know, the punches just keep coming. Like it’s my 35th birthday. My son is getting transferred to another NICU because they’re not sure like, you know, they have to do something more with them. And I’m like, I don’t know how we’re going to handle the logistics like I can’t drive, I physically can’t drive. And now my son’s half an hour it’s way My husband is still very ill. I’m just trying to figure out logistics.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
But at this point, there wasn’t much more she could do and follow the doctor’s recommendations for her son Henry, and hope for the best when it came to Matt.
Jenny Heddin
There was an interesting thing with his psychosis every time was sort of moved locations. We usually get like a day or two where he would feel safer. But then a couple days after the transfer, we were eating lunch at the cafeteria and he was like, “Oh, those people are here.” And that was always like the side like, okay, it’s gonna, like start escalating from there.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 40:11
Jenny knew the signs when things were about to get really bad for Matt. But she had a new baby that needed her full attention. preemies often have trouble feeding at first, it’s like a really big deal in the NICU. So she was focused on trying to get Henry to accept a bottle while he’s screaming, starving and spitting up milk.
Jenny Heddin
I’m trying to like work on that with him, and pump and do all of this stuff. And Matt calls me and is like, I’m heading back to Olympia. And I was like, I can’t go. I’m not going like I have to stay here with our son. And so I didn’t, I didn’t go.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
I ended up talking to Jenny for over two hours. And this was the first time in the story that she flat out says no to Matt. Up until this point, her husband was the priority. every choice revolved around his safety, his professional reputation, his feelings. And for the most part, the baby had just become a part of Jenny’s logistical considerations. Another scary variable in the 5000-piece puzzle to get her husband well. But the moment Henry was born, those priorities instantly changed. Now, she’s a mom. So Matt leaves, and she stays.
Jenny Heddin
I was basically stuck at the hospital at that point, because I had no car. I couldn’t drive. And then I called the place he had done impatient at. I kind of like, I don’t know what to do here. Like, I don’t know what to do next for him. Like, he’s wanting to go home. I don’t know if like, that’s safe. And we also like we’re exhausting our support network. Because of course, like this other thing is like, nobody knew what was happening. And I didn’t tell people because of stigma. So we only had a few people in our lives that kind of knew what was going on. And I’m like, trying to get people like, “Can you go check on him?” Like, you know, I don’t know. You know, like, every time he was by himself, I was like, I don’t know, if he’s gonna, like, do something.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 42:33
Jenny felt like she had run out of people to call. So she just had to sit with her very worst nightmare. This fear that something terrible would happen to Matt, which it did.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
When you went back to the house when you found Matt, which is just so horrific, and I cannot imagine I’m so sorry. I’m just imagining you in this state with this new baby. So you found him? And then what happened? How did you register it?
Jenny Heddin
I mean, I’ll always remember it, right? Like, it’s one of those moments, I think it’s the only moment I’ve had that I ever felt this way. Or it’s like, I just knew, like you had crossed over this threshold, and you are not allowed back. And you want to go back so bad. So, so bad.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
It had been eight days since Henry was born premature. And now Matt was dead. There’s no possible way to begin to process that level of shock. So Jenny, turned to her friend Joe, who had lost her husband to suicide.
Jenny Heddin 44:09
And I was like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do this, like, and she said, you’re gonna have to let people carry you. That’s it. You’re gonna be like at the bottom of a well, for a long time, and you’re gonna have to let people carry you. Like, that’s the only way you get through. And so like, I really it was a huge lesson for me as a person who’s a Doer, a person who had been taking care of everything to like, pass the baton and let other people do stuff.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Jenny moved in with her parents after her son was discharged from the NICU. And she let her dad help her tie up all the loose ends, like going to the bank and dealing with Matt’s accounts. The stuff you don’t think about but is and I am speaking from personal experience the most infuriating shit to deal with when you’re grieving. But she held on to the one thing that grounded her.
Jenny Heddin 45:11
I think honestly, having my son, you know, I talked about that a lot. I don’t know how that would have gone. If I hadn’t had my son. He forced me to be present every single day. Like he just, you know, it’s infants, like they just are needy, super.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Super selfish.
Jenny Heddin
I was like, “dude, I’m grieving over here.”
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Jenny recalls them just edging out together, she watched every episode of MAGNUM P.I., it was a great show, we all have one, she went right into therapy, and immediately started working on the trauma doing EMDR and eventually was able to move back into her house and start building her new normal. Which, of course, didn’t feel normal at all.
Jenny Heddin 46:00
I think the hard part like is you it’s like you enter this, like parallel universe where, like, at the beginning, you can still see the other path like so clearly. And I remember like, my visual for it was like, if I liked to go walking with Henry a lot, and, you know, when you like, walk at night, and you can see into somebody else’s house, like I can still see, obviously, everything so clearly about what should have happened, like, Matt should have been well, we would have had a second child, we would have like moved out to a piece of property. Like we had all these things that we had just started like talking about. And I’m like, but then you’re not there, you’re not in that path, like you’re in this like other path. And you just have to, like figure out how to, like, live in that space. And it’s, you know, I always say to people, like, you know, you’re in the ruins, like, and you’re sitting there, like with your crazy glue, and whatever.
I mean, just trying to, like build this thing back up. And you can tell people, like you can tell who’s been in the rooms, like, and you can tell who has not had that experience. And, you know, I think like that those of us like we just rely on like other guides, you know, and like, I had my friend Joe, and other widows like guiding me. And then I’ve been able to guide other folks like since that time, of like, you’re here. And it’s like, again, it’s the weirdest thing. It’s like you’re in this parallel universe. And you can see like real life, it’s like it’s through a two-way mirror. Like they can’t see your life. But you can see theirs, and you can see like what normal life looks like, and you’re like, I’m not living that, right now.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
It took a long time for Jenny to start feeling like she was living at all. But that is very different today. She has a job, she loves, trying to help families in our community. She’s got a great partner who she’s been with for a pretty long time. And he has a close relationship with Henry, who’s five years old now.
Jenny Heddin 48:07
Henry is like an incredible kid, he’s going through a major music phase for I don’t know, like the last two years, so he pretty much sings 24 hours a day. He’s pretty kind of chill about things. Generally, and a really like happy kid. You know, communication is a challenge.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Henry had speech delays early on, but that was initially chalked up to him being born premature. By the time he was two, Jenny took him to get evaluated.
Jenny Heddin
We ultimately ended up getting an autism diagnosis when he was like right after his fourth birthday. So we’re working through that. It has a lot of the same feelings of working through the mental health system. You know, they want you to do all this, like early screening, early intervention, and then you go to try to get a diagnosis or something like that, and it takes a year. So I know when I was calling to make appointments for him to get a potential diagnostic appointment, he like everyone’s telling me a year and I was just like, sat in my car and cried, because I was like, are you going down this road?
I know how this goes. And a year when you know your kid is four and you know, there’s a lot of development happening. And you know, the research says that early intervention is important. Like that just feels crushing and so we’ve gotten to a good place now. We did finally get his autism diagnosis. He does part time kindergarten now and part time autism therapy and getting him like services was hard, but now we’re in a much better place with him.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 50:01
Supporting her son has thrown Jenny back into the maze of the healthcare system. By now she is a pro at navigating paperwork, juggling appointments and knowing when to push past initial closed doors. But she still comes across a lot of frustrating barriers. I asked her, if based on her experience, she feels like the system is to blame for what happened to her husband.
Jenny Heddin
I’m always of two minds about it, you know, for sure the system could have done better, the system sucks. I mean, it’s gotten a little bit better. I think, honestly, in the five years that have passed, like, I know now that there’s more options available for like a mental health urgent care type option.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
This is totally true. There has been a major push recently for stronger parity laws and better alternatives for people with mental illnesses. The system isn’t totally broken, but it is still challenging to find consistent care.
Jenny Heddin
And again, I just keep comparing this to you know, either my son’s experience in the NICU or like other people I know who’ve gone who’s like, you know, spouses have gone through like serious illness. Like there’s like hospice, there’s in home nursing, there’s like all these things, and they don’t offer any of it, any of it. And his health crisis was just as serious as cancer just as serious as a heart, you know, heart issue just as deadly clearly. But we didn’t treat it that way. And so, you know, and the reality is, is that there’s not nearly the kind of research that’s going into these types of issues, right? Like, when’s the last time you did a Five K for psychosis? Like, and there’s literally one fundraising event for suicide prevention. And it’s like, everybody gets lumped together, like every single possible reason for having suicide. And again, I go back to you like, we didn’t need suicide prevention, we needed a cure for his psychosis, and we didn’t have that. And so yeah, I think the system can clearly do a lot better.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 52:20
The sad thing is, most of the progress we’ve seen only happens after stories like Jenny’s. It’s not like we suddenly found the political will to care about mental health coverage. It’s that enough people in power had to answer for wrongful deaths as a result of delayed care. Or, more frequently, people in power found themselves impacted firsthand, losing loved ones, because there were no good options when they needed them. Needing a cure, like Jenny, and not finding one.
Jenny Heddin
Many of us, you know, I think suicide widows like, we also recognize, like, I don’t, we would want like I would want Matt to come back. But I want well Matt. And I don’t know that that’s who I would get. Like, I think that there was also an alternative life where he never got better. And we were in and out of psychiatric. And maybe he ended up on the streets. And maybe we had to get a divorce and maybe I had to have custody and a protection order. People end up with that lifestyle too.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs
It is shameful that these are the only two options Jenny felt she had one where her husband and father of her child ends up dead, the other where he’s living on the street with an untreated mental illness. And these two options may sound extreme, but they happen every fucking day. And they sure do reflect our values as a society. Because these situations are not the result of personal failure as they are commonly characterized when it comes to mental illness and drug addiction. They are the result of policy failures. We’re gonna get into this in a couple episodes, but let me step on my soapbox for just a moment to say that until we invest in our mental health, on a systemic level, we will keep losing friends, family and loved ones who felt like they had no options.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs 54:45
Next week, we bring you two stories of overcoming childhood trauma and beating the odds.
Speaker 3
Honestly, I was in a place that was very, very dark and it was like I was trying to swim but I was drowning and to not be able to express that because you think all right here I am now at that point in my career on a top female athlete in the world, you know, and people look at me as a sign of strength, you know, they notice story of me and my grandmother, my parents a person has overcome. Now I feel like I got to live up to that.
CREDITS
LAST DAY is a production of Lemonada Media. Our supervising producer is Jackie Danziger. Associate producer is Giulia Hjort with additional production assistance by Claire Jones. Technical Director is Kegan Zema. Music is by Hannis Brown. Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, Stephanie Wittels Wachs. We are thrilled to partner with the JED Foundation this season and grateful for all their wisdom and support. You can find them online at JED Foundation. And you can find more mental health resources at jedcares.org/lastday. If you want to hear more last day we have a whole first season. Go listen to it wherever you get your podcasts. And while you are there. I beg of you to take a moment to rate review and subscribe if you haven’t done so already. You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia. You can find me at @wittelstephanie. I’m Stephanie Wittels Wachs. See you next week.
