WHAT DO YOU SAY TO YOUR WIFE IN THE ’PSYCH WARD’?

Memoir details a young couple’s journey with mental illness

It was the time in life when Mark Lukach and his wife, Giulia, were meant to be building their careers, saving for a home and planning for a family.

They were in their late 20s and married — having met and fallen in love as undergraduates at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. — and believed they had a head start on making a beautiful life together.

But three years after moving to San Francisco, the couple faced an unexpected challenge: Giulia, who at 27 had just taken on a new job, experienced a sudden psychotic break, which led to a monthlong stay in a psychiatric ward. In his memoir, My Lovely Wife in the Psych

Ward, Lukach details his and Giulia’s journey through her episodes of illness and recovery. Along the way, readers meet their English bulldog, Goose, and their young son, Jonas.

Lukach, now 34 and a history teacher at a private school in the San Francisco Bay Area, spoke with the Star about how a memoir emerged from his family’s experience with mental illness.

Giulia’s first unexpected psychotic episode happened when she was just 27. It must have been terrifying for both of you. When did you start writing about your experience?

I started writing almost immediately. But it wasn’t writing to be published. It was writing emails to her parents and my parents as a way to keep them informed. Everyone was so desperate for information. I would spend a lot of time at the computer sorting out my thoughts through these very lengthy emails. And in order to tell them what was going on, I had to make sense of it all to myself first.

How many emails did you write?

Well over a hundred. And these emails would take two or three hours to write. The first (psychotic) episode took up about nine months of our lives.

Giulia was in the hospital for the first month and then when she was home, she was heavily medicated and going to sleep really early.

So at night I would write these emails. Every little detail felt so essential. Her illness was like this mystery and I believed that if I was able to unlock some clue, then maybe we would be able to get out of what we were in. When did you first realize these emails

that you were writing would or could turn into a published story?

After her first episode, when Giulia got better, there was this huge gap between us. She thought, “Hey, I’m better, I don’t want to think about the serious heavy stuff, I just want to have fun.”

And I was like, “You’re better, but now I need to feel bad; this was a hard nine months and I need someone to process it with.”

At first, the primary goal was to write a story for Giulia so she could get a better sense of what the year had been like for me, to bridge that gap. Then some friends nudged me — and only after talking with Giulia — I submitted an essay to the New York Times and that got the process started.

September 2009

“Get out of here!” Giulia shrieked as she pointed at us. “It’s not safe! You need to leave!”

Suoc (Giulia’s mother) and I stood in the doorway to Giulia’s bare room. It was our first visit. We had dropped Giulia off the day before and spent every minute of the past 24 hours waiting until we could come back. Now we were here, to see the inside of the psych ward, with our beloved Giulia in it, and she was screaming at us to leave.

Giulia sat upright on a twin bed that was stuffed back in the far corner of the room, her blanched blankets a heap around her. The tile floor and the walls were the same colour, a white so insignificant that it was practically a noncolour. She still wore the hospital gown they had changed her into at the ER, the blue faded after years of use. Next to her bed was a bedside wooden table, with two chairs nearby, and that was it. The room was otherwise empty, useless, colourless space.

Giulia’s door was just a few feet away from the nurses’ station. I learned later, when they moved Giulia to another room, that this room, always within eyesight and earshot of the nurses, was for the most vulnerable patient.

I was distraught with impatience to see some type of improvement after a night in the psych ward. I was also anxious to assess the conditions of the hospital and, most important, to see how Giulia had handled her first 24 hours alone. I had been calling the hospital every hour on the hour, but the only report I had gotten was that she had been in her bed all day and refused to engage with anyone.

Instead of the improvement I was hoping for, Giulia was worse — more agitated, more intensely delusional. “Stay away from me!” she continued to scream.

I still didn’t know how to engage with her outbursts, so I resorted to calming, gentle assurances, as if trying to soothe a scared child.

“Hi, Giulia, it’s good to see you,” I gently replied over her loud warnings.

“Get out! The Devil is here and he wants you. You need to leave now!” She was hysterical with fear. I looked over my shoulder back at the nurses’ station, and the two nurses working there were watching us intensely. Visitors were not allowed in patients’ rooms, but since Giulia had just been admitted yesterday and hadn’t left her room, we had been granted an exception.

“Honey, it’s OK, there’s no one to get us,” I said slowly as I fidgeted in the doorway and forced a smile to hide my racing anxiety. “We’re just here to see you.” I paused and tried to shift the conversation to the condition of the hospital. “How are things going? Are you doing OK in here?” I instinctively took a step forward, to be closer to her, and Giulia exploded.

“Don’t you dare come near me!” she screamed. She was uncontrollable with a fear that something was going to happen to us.

I retreated back to stand shoulder to shoulder with Suoc in the narrow doorway. We stood in helpless, defeated silence. I could hear Suoc’s heavy breathing, the first I had really noticed of her since we’d stepped onto the elevator up to the third floor for our visit. I was so focused on seeing Giulia, I had almost forgotten that Suoc was there. We were practically holding each other upright in the doorway, both of us consumed with love and fear for Giulia. Excerpted from My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward, by Mark Lukach. Copyright 2017 by Mark Lukach. Published by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.