Domestic violence and verbal threats met that standard, in theory.

In order for them to take him to PESS, or for the psychiatric screeners at PESS to commit him involuntarily, he had to be an imminent danger to himself or others. The police had been to the house a couple of times, but there was not much they could do. Once his switch flipped back to manic, he would refuse to even discuss the possibility that something was wrong, let alone consent to seeing a psychiatrist. He rode out much of that episode in a state psychiatric hospital, and having him admitted again seemed the best way to keep him and my mother safe. He was given a diagnosis of bipolar syndrome in 2005, during a similarly disturbing period. He didn’t know what was happening to him. In rare moments of lucidity, he would cry and apologize, confessing that he was terrified. More than once, he threatened to burn the house down. On another day, he poured motor oil over her windshield as she was pulling out of the garage. At one point, he tried to jump out of the car as my mother was driving down the highway on the way to the doctor’s office. When his suspicions grew to include his immediate family, he became violent and threatened suicide. Convinced that nameless people were trying to kill him, he slept no more than an hour or two a night and started drinking after five years of sobriety. That August, my father, who was 69, became abruptly and deeply paranoid. Down the hall, a police officer guarded locked double doors. A disheveled, rail-thin woman paced and wept in the room across the way. Harsh fluorescent lighting fell on cracked and faded yellow walls. We were playing our card game at the Psychiatric Emergency Screening Services, or PESS, a small locked-down unit in the community hospital near my parents’ apartment in Somerville, N.J. It was a mood completely incongruous with our setting. He was rambling, and the inflections of his voice betrayed sheer manic joy. Then he began speaking Sicilian, instructing me to repeat after him: “ Napeladan mangia pane!” (“People from Naples eat bread.”) “ Calabrese testa dura!” (“People from Calabria have thick heads.”) My father has the most amazing blue eyes, and right then they were wide and eager, like an overexcited child’s. He reached for a magazine to show me the vintage Mustang he said he was planning to buy my mother for their 45th wedding anniversary, which, he reminded me, was just six months away. “That’s 321 for BaBa, and 227 for String Bean,” he said, tallying the ledger we were keeping on a piece of scrap paper.īefore he finished writing the numbers, he began a rapid succession of anecdotes about his first car. He cracked a wide, toothy grin as he laid his cards on the table. We were on something like the 15th round of rummy, and my father was winning decisively.

Mad father game moter