There’s a Crack in Everything: Thirteen is the Lucky Number

CHAPTER 13

One of the conditions for my psych ward escape was that I show up for the two-week Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) the Monday after my Friday release.

As a rather ironic and funny sidenote, PHP is also the acronym for a popular psychoactive drug… so you could be required to go to PHP to get off PHP.

I was happy to go to PHP, if for nothing more than to have time around other people which was so hard to come by with Covid. I’d be sure to wear my mask and regularly wash my hands and we had to be vetted with the standard Covid questions each morning and have our temperatures taken to be cleared for group sessions each day. It would be for two weeks, 8:30–2:30, Monday to Saturday.

There was nothing new in PHP, it was the same sessions as in inpatient around coping skills, healthy diet, some sharing of how we were doing which was the most therapeutic for all of us.

Hearing others’ stories, from people who were truly willing to share their pain and who may have been unwilling to go there for fear of retribution in inpatient… for some of them speaking it for the first time… was deeply moving. We could sometimes cry for others when we couldn’t cry for ourselves.

The weeks following inpatient and then PHP were the darkest of my life.