Word: andreae
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...Andrea only got worse. Staying in bed all day, she scratched four bald spots into her scalp and picked sores in her nose. She used her nails to score marks on her legs and arms in her silent obsessions. Her mother and other relatives say Andrea was slipping away, and they could not reach her. At this time, she would later tell psychiatrists--but not her husband, he says--she experienced visions and voices. She would hear commands: "Get a knife! Get a knife!" Then the image she first saw after Noah's birth returned: a knife and a person...
...Andrea told Rusty and her mother that the children were "eating too much." When 4-month-old Luke cried, Andrea would try to rock him to sleep and give him a pacifier, but she would not feed him. The task of weaning the infant to a bottle fell to her elderly mother, who struggled to care for her grandchildren and her own sick husband...
...until Andrea became ill did her relatives fully realize that mental illness ran in the family. They began to confide in one another, says Jutta. Andrea's brother Andrew and sister Michelle are being treated for depression. Her other brother Brian found out he is bipolar. The more they talked, the more they all suspected that their father had been battling depression. Andrea, as far as anyone knew, had never been treated for her pre-Rusty bout of depression...
...before she was to meet her new psychiatrist, Andrea disappeared. Rusty tracked her to the bathroom, where she stared at the mirror, pressing a kitchen knife against her throat, deliberating. "Give me the knife," Rusty demanded. She told him to get out. "Let me do it," she said. He moved toward her, grabbing her arm and prying the knife away. Upon hearing the details from Rusty, psychiatrist Eileen Starbranch wanted Andrea hospitalized again. This time she would be sent to Memorial Spring Shadows Glen, a private center in northwest Houston...
After 10 days, Andrea was nearly catatonic. Electroshock therapy was considered. But Starbranch decided to try an "emergency injection" formulated from a cocktail of drugs, including the antipsychotic Haldol, which she used only in dire cases. The effects were immediate, recalls Rusty. His wife exhaled like a wounded animal and moved erratically around the room before she slept...