When I shared these thoughts with a friend of mine, she told me, “You need help, Ahuva. Either you get help, or I’m going to tell your parents.” So I told my parents, and they took me to a different therapist, with whom I actually worked well. She did cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with me, but when I continued having episodes — about once a month at that point — she recommended that I begin taking medication.

“I can deal with this myself,” I insisted. “I don’t need medication.”

“The therapy alone is not helping you,” she said. “You need medication in order for the therapy to be effective.”

She sent me to a psychiatrist, who put me on an antidepressant and later prescribed antianxiety medication as well. By the end of ninth grade, I was doing really well, and I graduated therapy, even though I was still experiencing the occasional panic attack.

That summer, I spent a week working in a camp in the US for mentally challenged people, where I was assigned a 21-year-old camper with severe mental disabilities. I liked her, but she liked a different counselor better than me and made no secret of her preference. I invested tremendous efforts into taking care of her — showering her, changing her, lifting her — and I found it very distressing that she didn’t want to be around me.

After a few days of feeling drained, tired, and frustrated, I had a massive panic attack. “I can’t continue working here and feeling like this” turned into “I can’t continue functioning! I can’t continue living!”

So I went to the edge of the camp and collapsed, crying hysterically.

For the remainder of camp, I felt anxious and agitated, and when I returned home to Eretz Yisrael and started tenth grade, things continued to deteriorate, despite the meds. I would come home from school and head straight to my bed.

One day, when I was in school, I felt a panic attack coming on, so I hurried to the bathroom and called my mother on my cell phone. “Can you call the school and tell them I need to leave early?” I asked her.

I couldn’t approach the school secretary myself and explain why I had to leave. She would take my temperature, offer me Advil, and urge me to stay in school a little longer, and I absolutely could not deal with that.

My mother agreed to call the school, and I went to the office to sign out. To my misfortune, the principal was waiting for me. “Why didn’t you call home from the office?” she reproached me. “You’re not allowed to have a cell phone in school.”

She started to lecture me about school rules, but I was in no state to be lectured. “Look,” I pleaded, “I’m having a panic attack, and I need to go home now.”

Instead of earning her sympathy, I aroused her ire. “Why didn’t your parents tell us about this?” she demanded. “How dare they hide such a thing from us!”

By the time I got home, I was a mess. That night I had a massive panic attack, and contemplated ending my life. “I can’t do this anymore,” I told my mother. “Something has to change, because I can’t live like this.”

Concerned that I would hurt myself, my mother called my psychiatrist, who instructed her to give me a higher dose of anxiety medication and bring me to see him first thing in the morning.

“I don’t like hospitalizing people,” the psychiatrist told me the next day, “but we can’t go on like this. Ahuva, you need to go to the hospital.”

I was in shock. Me, in the hospital? In the psych ward? I wasn’t crazy!

The psych ward was totally not what I expected. I had envisioned glaring white floors, creaky hospital beds, forbidding curtains and machines, and crazed patients running amok. Instead, I discovered what looked like a very nice dormitory, with two beds per room, carpeted floors, sunny balconies, and patients — all teenagers — who looked surprisingly normal.

Most of them, I discovered, suffered from eating disorders. One was frum, one was nonreligious, and the other eight came from frum families but were currently off the derech. One of those was my roommate, Cindy, a great girl with an eating disorder who became an instant friend.

The first few days in the ward were uneventful. In addition to meals — six a day, in deference to the many girls with eating disorders — we had school in the morning followed by one-on-one sessions with a therapist, as well as occasional meetings with a psychiatrist.

The fifth day of my hospital stay, I was talking to my younger sister on the phone. “Why did you leave home?” she asked sadly. “We miss you.” My parents had visited me, but my siblings, who were minors, were not allowed to visit. Talking to my sister made me really homesick, and I went into my room and cried.

While I was there, Cindy came in and told me she wasn’t feeling well. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m killing myself.”

I didn’t know what to do. But then she left the room, and she seemed fine. And we were in a hospital, so I didn’t think anything could happen.

Later, I saw that she looked awful. She had indeed attempted suicide. That night, her father came to sleep with her, so I was moved to a spare room, alone. I felt horrible.

The next day, a staff psychiatrist approached me. Instead of asking if I was okay — and I wasn’t; my friend had just tried to kill herself — he blamed me for what had happened. “We heard that you knew what Cindy was planning to do,” he said, “and you didn’t tell us.”

He was very harsh with me, which made me feel even worse. Then he punished me by confining me to my room for 24 hours. Cindy was transferred from the psych ward of our regular hospital to a full-fledged psychiatric hospital, the name of which struck terror in the hearts of all the girls in our ward. That hospital was where the really bad cases were sent, and the ward staff would threaten us that if we didn’t behave, we’d be sent there, together with all the psychotic people. We were all petrified for Cindy.

On Friday, after a week in the psych ward, I was discharged. At home, I had a breakdown, and actually attempted suicide. My parents called an ambulance and took me right back to the hospital.

No one in the hospital spoke to me about what had happened. The therapist assigned to my case was on vacation, Cindy was gone, and I had no one to talk to. I was miserable.

This place isn’t going to help me, I thought. I want to get out of here.

I was discharged again before the next Shabbos. At home, I was talking with my family, and suddenly something triggered me and I started feeling bad again. I tried taking my life a second time, and again, my parents took me straight back to the hospital. On the way, my mother was crying, and I felt terrible causing her and the rest of my family so much pain. But at the same time, I was so desperate to end my pain that I couldn’t care about what I was doing to other people.

This time, the hospital wanted to send me to the facility where Cindy was, but that place had no openings. The hospital insisted, therefore, that one of my parents stay with me at all times — which they did, even though they both had jobs and other children to care for. I was allowed to leave my room for meals and school only.

Before the next Shabbos, I called my therapist and said, “Shabbos is coming, and I can’t be stuck in my room with my father for 24 hours. Can I please be allowed to leave my room?”

“No,” he said. “Sorry, but this is hospital policy. Good luck.”

This is the end, I thought. I’m done. I’ll never get better.

I attempted suicide a third time, right there in the hospital.

My terrified father alerted the nurses, who called the psychiatrist, who didn’t know what to do with me. They put me on sleep medication until Sunday morning, when they transferred me to the dreaded psychiatric hospital.

My parents and I were really unhappy about this, but we all realized that the hospital I was in wasn’t the right place for me.

When I arrived at the psychiatric hospital, Cindy came to welcome me. “The psychiatrist here is amazing,” she told me. “You’re going to love her.”

“No way,” I said. “I hate psychiatrists.”

When I met the psychiatrist, she told me, “You’re going to stay here for as long as you need to get better. We don’t discharge patients until they’re ready, and we don’t send them anywhere else. You’re here, and we’re going to deal with you. But this is going to be a long hospitalization. We don’t send people home the day they start to show signs of recovery — we wait until they’re fully cured.”

I liked the way she spoke to me and explained everything. In the previous hospital, if anyone did something wrong, such as attempting self-harm, they were punished with decreased freedom. Here, if you acted out, your freedom was similarly curtailed, but it wasn’t presented as a punishment. “We see that you need more help,” the staff would say, “so we’re going to keep a better eye on you.” Their whole approach was much kinder, even if essentially they were doing the same things.

I was a totally uncooperative patient, however. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t need or want to be in this place, so I resolved to behave well so that I could get myself released — and then I would take my life.

When I met the therapist assigned to me, I sat and stared at the floor for the entire 35-minute session, not saying a word. I fully expected to be punished, but at that point I no longer cared.

“We understand that this is hard for you,” the therapist said. “You can take your time. But don’t expect us to start trusting you until you start trusting us.”

“The only reason you want to talk to me is to feel good about yourself,” I lashed out at her. “It’s not because you care.”

I honestly thought no one on the staff cared. “You just want to get paid,” I told the psychiatrist. “You don’t really care about me.”

“The staff here doesn’t get paid according to the number of patients in the ward,” she replied calmly. “We really do want to help you.”

Unlike the nurses in the previous hospital, the nurses in this facility would leave the nurses’ station and sit and chat with the patients. They’re not so bad, I eventually admitted to myself begrudgingly.

I started getting used to living in the psychiatric hospital, which was actually a full campus built on beautiful grounds. I also began trusting the staff, who, I came to realize, genuinely cared about us.

I had done dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) in the other hospital, but there I hadn’t listened, paid attention, or cared what it was about. Here in the psychiatric hospital, I paid attention — and what the therapists said actually made sense.

I had always thought I had power over my emotions, but now I discovered that that wasn’t exactly the case. I couldn’t change my feelings, but I could change the way I related and reacted to those feelings. The best approach to negative emotions, I learned, was simply to accept them: “I’m sad right now, and even though there’s no reason for me to be sad, it’s okay to feel this way.”

In the first hospital, they had given me tools for coping during a panic attack: go for a walk, take a bath, read a book, breathe deeply, count five purple things in the room. I had tried all those strategies numerous times, but they didn’t help. In this hospital, I learned that the time to work on warding off a panic attack is before it hits. The time to do your exercise, your relaxation, your recreation, your breathing, and your distraction is when you’re feeling good, or when you first start to feel down. That prevents the icky feelings from escalating into a full-fledged attack. If you let yourself descend all the way into the doldrums, you’ve lost the battle.

As I confronted my emotions and learned to accept them, it dawned on me that a big part of my struggle was that I didn’t have a reason to be depressed. In my DBT sessions, I learned that you don’t need to be able to pinpoint a reason for your depression. “This is the situation right now, and this is what you’re dealing with,” my therapist explained. “Why it is this way doesn’t really matter.”

That was an eye-opener for me. Another eye-opener was learning that while some people develop depression as a result of difficult or traumatic life experiences, other people are actually born with a tendency toward depression, because their brains contain fewer pathways on which positive emotions can be conveyed. So I didn’t have to fault myself for my illness, or search for factors in my environment to blame. I was no more to blame for my condition than a person born with physical disabilities is to blame for his.

Although I presented with depression and anxiety, the staff at the facility told me that those were merely symptoms. The underlying problem was lack of emotional regulation, which led to depression and anxiety. Apparently, people like me experience highly intense emotions and find it excruciating to bring emotional intensity down. DBT gave me a framework for understanding myself, why I am so emotional, why it’s so hard for me to calm down, and why other people don’t “get” me.

In the meantime, I was seeing other patients in the hospital getting better and moving past their self-destructive behaviors. This instilled newfound hope in me, and made me start thinking that perhaps I, too, could get better.

I spent nine months at the psychiatric hospital. For the first three months, I didn’t leave the campus at all; my parents were allowed to visit on Tuesday and Friday, but none of my siblings could come.

By the time I was allowed off campus with my parents, I was doing much better. But when I got into the car with my mother, my first thought was, I can grab her hand off the steering wheel and drive us over a cliff. That thought scared me at first, but then I told myself, It’s okay if that’s the first thought that popped into my head. And just because the thought came into my mind doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it.

I was let out of the hospital very slowly and gradually. First I was allowed to go out to a nearby mall for a short time. Then I went home for a few hours when my siblings were not there, just to get used to being home — which was very emotional for me. Then I went home for another few hours when my siblings were home. Then I slept at home for a night. Then I started going home for weekends.

About a month ago, I moved back home. I’m still attending a day program at the facility, which will continue through the summer, after which I’ll hopefully be attending a program that combines schooling with therapy.

My medications have been changed recently, causing dramatic mood fluctuations, which are difficult. Overall, though, I’m doing much better. I don’t have panic attacks anymore, and even though I do sometimes feel overwhelmed or anxious, I no longer think about harming myself.

How I feel about the future really depends on how I’m feeling at any given moment. Most of the time, I want to finish high school, get a college degree, and get married. But sometimes I don’t want to do anything with my life; I just want to lie in bed. When a mood like that hits, I just wait for it to pass. I’ve learned that emotions are temporary, even if at the time they feel very real and permanent. All I need to do is ride out the low feelings, instead of getting anxious about them. They’re part of my journey through life — a journey that I’m not eager anymore to end.

I have to say that one of the hardest parts of this journey has been the stigma attached to mental illness and people’s reactions to hearing that I was in a psychiatric facility: “You’re in, like, an asylum? Are you insane? Do you, like, hear voices? Do they make you walk around in straightjackets? Do they abuse you there? Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry for you!”

I’m actually a normal person who struggles with an illness, just like anyone else in a hospital. I don’t hear voices, but some of my friends do, and they’re still nice, normal people. I’ve never been in a straightjacket, nor are they used anymore in mainstream hospitals. The staff is fantastic and supportive and are anything but abusive. And I consider myself lucky to have received the care and treatment that I did.

As for the biggest question I get — “Why can’t you just get over it?” — the answer is that mental illnesses are illnesses. Would you tell someone with disabilities to “just get over it”?

Just as there is no shame in getting stitches for your knee, there shouldn’t be any shame in getting “stitches” for your soul. Personally, I’m proud that I got these stitches.

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha Issue 670)