‘The Bravest Person I Have Ever Known’: Mom Describes Daughter’s Descent Into Mental Illness And Suicide

Natalie and Doris Fuller. (Photo: Treatment Advocacy Center) 

Last month, 28-year-old Natalie Fuller from Baltimore, Maryland ended her life by stepping in front of a train. Her mother, Doris — with whom Natalie authored a bestselling book at age 16 called “Promise You Won’t Freak Out: A Teenager Tells Her Mother the Truth About Boys, Booze, Body Piercing, and Other Touchy Topics (and Mom Responds)”— wrote a heartfelt and honest piece for The Washington Post detailing the mental illness that consumed her daughter’s existence.

“My daughter lived more than six years with an incurable disease that filled her head with devils that literally hounded her to death, and she did it while laughing, painting, writing poetry, advocating and bringing joy to the people around her,” she stated. “She was the bravest person I have ever known, and her suicide doesn’t change that.”

(Photo: Treatment Advocacy Center video on Natalie’s life) 

During Natalie’s senior year of college, she suffered from her first psychotic episode. “In the span of a few weeks she went from being a dazzling young adult with the world at her feet to a psych-ward patient with an arrest record. Only much later did I learn what a devastatingly common trajectory this was,” Doris wrote.

Natalie and Doris Fuller. (Photo: Treatment Advocacy Center)

Although Natalie went one-week without sleep, the family chalked it up to jet lag (at the time she was traveling abroad). A few months after that when Natalie complained about her friends whispering behind her back, Doris assumed it was typical college roommate drama. “With no history of mental illness in the family, auditory hallucinations never crossed anyone’s mind.”

But about six months later, Natalie believed even strangers were talking about her, which led to her multiple arrests for crimes, like trespassing. The police finally brought her to the hospital one night where she was committed to the state’s public psychiatric hospital. Natalie was treated for severe bipolar disorder with psychosis and was released after two months.

Natalie as a child. (Photo: Treatment Advocacy Center video on Natalie’s life)

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 75 percent of lifetime cases of mental health conditions begin by age 24, and more than 25 percent of college students have been diagnosed or treated by a professional for a mental health condition within the past year.

“Mental illness tends to present itself around 18 or 19, and very often this is when young adults are going off to college,” Dr. Robi Ludwig, a nationally recognized psychotherapist who is a regular contributor on CNN and The Fox News Channel, tells Yahoo Health. “So it makes it particularly hard to identify the difference between just typical adolescent/early adulthood issues versus is there a mental illness going on.”

Related: Bipolar Disorder — What You Need To Know 

She adds that most people who are diagnosed with bipolar disorder have a family history with the disease, which is now considered a spectrum disorder. “The spectrum is broad, so people who may not have been diagnosed in the past would be diagnosed today.”

(Video: USA Today) 

After Natalie’s initial diagnosis and treatment, Doris says her daughter stayed with her for the summer and described her as being “sane, revived and seemingly her vibrant old self.” Then she returned to college in the fall to restart her senior year — and, as is common in these scenarios, stopped taking her meds. “Within minutes of walking through the door for a weekend at home, her delusion-loaded thinking and behavior made it obvious that what I eventually came to think of as ‘the demons’ were back.”

Natalie was re-committed to the hospital and Doris admits that this relapse was more severe than her initial psychotic break. “Her second commitment to the hospital lasted 10 months, an eternity in an era where the average psychiatric stay is about five days and most people who are psychotic never get a bed at all.”

While she did rebound again, the devastating cycle continued: Natalie would take her meds, feel stable and then would forgo the meds believing they were no longer necessary. “Yet if she even inadvertently missed a few days of medication — even while receiving therapy and other forms of treatment — the demons would return, and one of the first things they would tell her was to stop taking her medicine,” Doris wrote. “The second thing they would tell her was not to talk to her mom, the most powerful other influence in her life. Each time she obeyed and relapsed, she plunged into a longer free fall, hitting the ground harder, recovering more slowly and returning at a lower plateau.”

Related: The Number One Cause Of Depression

Natalie entered what would be her final cycle last fall. “There were no apparent signs of psychosis, and she seemed happy and healthy to everyone around her, but she said we couldn’t see inside her head. In November, six years after her first break, she announced that because she was going to have hallucinations anyway, she was giving up meds for good. Now 28 years old, she stopped the injectable antipsychotics and oral mood stabilizers that had helped her rebuild her life, and her mind began its final, fatal unwinding.”

Ludwig emphasizes the important of parents keeping their eyes and ears open, especially if major depression or mental illness is part of their genetics. “You want to look for anything that is a significant change,” she states. “You know your child’s general personality style, so if you see that they’re withdrawing in a major way, a loss of interest in others or in things they really cared about, a tremendous drop in schoolwork or functioning or problems with concentration or memory, as well as logical thought process, these are all warning signs. Also take notice if someone describes feeling disconnected from themselves or their surroundings, or feeling that things aren’t real.”

As for a typical warning sign of someone who may fall into the psychotic range: “If their sensitivity to sight or sound or smell is suddenly heightened or they suddenly find certain situations over-stimulating.”

Related: Can Exercise Help Treat Anxiety? 

Ludwig urges concerned parents to seek help. “If you have a question about your child, you do not have to make a diagnosis alone and should not be burdened with that responsibility,” she states. “They can simply have their child evaluated by a mental health professional who can further assist them about the right intervention. If your child is an adult, you may want to say something like, ‘I’m concerned about you. You don’t seem like yourself and I’m here to support you. Why don’t we find out what’s going on because I’m sure you want to feel better, too.’”

Related: Depressed? Anxious? It Could Be An Early Sign Of These Illnesses

Doris, who is now an executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center—an Arlington-based nonprofit dedicated to eliminating barriers to treatment for people with the most severe psychiatric diseases — has been touched by the outpouring of sympathy and grief from others who have also been affected by this illness. She also shared that Natalie had hoped to become a peer counselor since she felt the mental health system needed to be reformed.

“’Natalie will help our society to move forward,’ a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital wrote me upon learning of the suicide. ‘She is helping us to look at mental illness with the respect, the compassion and the dignity it deserves.’ I hope so. Natalie would have loved that legacy.”

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