THERE was a time when my wife, Giulia, said “Yes” to almost everything I suggested. But before she consented, there was always an unnatural pause, a pause so small it may have gone unnoticed by others. But it was painfully obvious to me. That pause did not come from her; it came from the antipsychotic medication she had to take.

Two years ago, when Giulia and I were 27 and in our third year of marriage, she suffered a psychotic break. She had no history of mental illness preceding the abrupt arrival of delusions and paranoia. It was a bewildering decline that snowballed from typical work stress to mild depression to sleeplessness to voices speaking to her in the night.

The medicine combated the psychosis by slowing everything down: her metabolism, movements and response time. I didn’t like what the medicine did to her, but I liked even less what her unmedicated self was like and capable of doing, so I gave her the medicine. I observed her as she took it, making sure she did not hide it in her mouth and spit it out later. She still managed to do that a few times anyway.

To try to make sense of why she had to live in this medicated haze, I thought of her condition as being like an old television, the type where you have to turn the dial to change the channels. For some reason, Giulia had become stuck between channels, so all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackly white noise, and it drove her mad, right into the halls of a psychiatric ward.