A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

Elliott’s 11th essay is a description of her mother, focusing significantly on her mother’s mental illness and relating it to her own anxiety and depression, as well as her husband’s depression. Elliott lays out the ways her mother’s bipolar disorder manifested. Her mother could be energetic and lively and fun during the initial manic period, before the descent into a more insidious form of mania where she would vehemently lecture anyone she could about her paranoia or religion. Then, she would collapse into a catatonic depression where she would be utterly unresponsive, lying in bed for days or weeks. Mike, Elliott’s husband and father to her child, started experiencing severe clinical depression on a nearly yearly basis beginning in university. This prompted Elliott to learn how to handle someone with severe depression differently than her father, who would take her unwilling mother to a mental hospital each time her bipolar disorder became too much for him to handle. After seeing the harmful effects of institutionalization on her mother, Elliott made certain Mike had agency over his own decisions about his treatment. Yet it wasn’t until she was 26 that Elliott could admit she had severe depression and anxiety.