Losing her way
Over the next two decades, Lovejoy handled her mental health issues as best she could. She took a series of easy jobs, but felt ashamed of them; she clearly wasn’t living up to her potential. She married a man, even though she thought she might be gay.
At the same time, Lovejoy was carrying a serious burden: a creeping sense of despair. “Every time I went to that place in my head, I called it ‘the darkness,’” she says. “It felt like I was falling down a chute.”
In 2007, as she entered the final year of her 30s, Lovejoy found herself divorced and living in an attic apartment with her two children. She was manic, depressed, worn out and barely maintaining her job. Then, at a doctor’s appointment, she broke down and wept — and the doctor admitted her to the psychiatric unit at UW Medical Center.
“Finally, someone noticed that I was miserable,” Lovejoy says.
It was the first of three hospitalizations that year. But instead of turning a corner, Lovejoy felt her life begin to dissolve.
Her boss gently told her not to come back to work. She lost her apartment and moved in with her boyfriend — “a bad move,” she says. And in a decision that she still regrets, Lovejoy surrendered custody rights to her children, Zola and Delilah, saying that she felt like “a horrible mother.”
Then she found a lifeline at Harborview Medical Center: dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT.
Finding a therapeutic lifeline
A type of cognitive behavioral therapy developed by Marsha Linehan, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, DBT was groundbreaking in that it brought together two therapeutic opposites: acceptance (through meditation, exercise and other activities) and change (through therapy and learned skills).
In a stroke of good fortune for Lovejoy, Harborview was doing research on DBT when, encouraged by a friend, she called the hospital. Doctors diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder and entered her into the trial, which involved group therapy and individual counseling.
“At first, I hated everyone in the group,” says Lovejoy with a laugh. But she started exercising and meditating. She argued less with her boyfriend and felt less depressed. Her relationship with her kids improved.
“I saw examples of people who were getting much better,” says Lovejoy. “That gave me a lot more confidence.”
