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“Yes,” she said. “I just don’t feel right.”

A state trooper drove us to McLean, and on the 45-minute drive over, Diane held my hand and kept repeating, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Please stop,” I told her. I was the one who was sorry.

McLean has a private entrance, but we still had to wait in a parking lot until the coast was clear. Once she was taken to an admissions room, I was asked to sit in the stairwell, out of sight, during the intake interview. She was finally admitted under a false name, “Jennifer Blake.” It was scary for her, surreal for me.

For the next several days, Diane rested and worked with her therapist, a truly caring and able woman who was our strongest advocate throughout Diane’s recovery. Her sister, Lynn, came up from Atlanta and spent time with her while I was at work. Diane took a battery of tests: IQ tests, physical tests, stress tests. We then met to discuss the results. The doctors concluded that she was extremely smart but was obsessed with always doing the right thing perfectly, being perceived in the right light—and felt she would pay a huge price if she wasn’t. They helped her see that she had the strength and intelligence to overcome those insecurities, but she needed to understand her own limits. Medication was prescribed to help her rest, and with the help of her sister, her therapist, and others, she began to drill down to her own emotional core.

Her anger at the media had not dissipated, and she felt that she and I had been treated unfairly. While in the hospital, she read the National Governors Association website to learn what type of support other first ladies had. Some had drivers on their staffs; others had flower arrangers. The first lady of California had a $500,000 budget, two correspondence secretaries, a chief of staff, a driver, and a robust website. Diane had no staff, no budget, no state residence, nothing—but she had been humiliated for hiring one person to help her do the unpaid job of first lady. She wrote a sizzling letter to the Globe that conveyed her feelings of betrayal. She asked both me and her therapist to read it first, and we advised her not to send it. At this point, creating even more tension with the media was not going to improve her health. I told the McLean staff to stop delivering the Globe to Diane’s room. The kryptonite wasn’t helping.

Over dinner one night at the hospital, we got to talking about the public life we were living. “You were proud that I won,” I said. “But you were hoping I’d lose.”

She looked at me in stunned silence for a long time. “How did you know that?” It was true.

For the first several days at McLean, we placed a premium on secrecy. The doctors felt that the stigma of mental illness and the meanness of the media would not be useful. For the first few days, even my staff did not know; I literally sneaked in and out of the hospital in the evenings. (One thing I have noticed about being a black man: If you’re dressed in jeans and a casual shirt with a cap on, people will often look right past you.)

But Diane was worried that the story would leak, and we would be chasing it instead of being forthright. She was also tired of being ashamed, of feeling bad.

“I don’t like you sneaking in and out of here to see me,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of not feeling well. I think we should tell people I’m here so we get ahead of it.”

She knew it was going to hurt—talking about mental illness is the ultimate sacrifice of privacy—but she felt that was the better option. I supported her, but the doctors thought it was a big mistake. “Diane’s already dealing with profound stress because of public scrutiny,” the chief resident told us. “This will make it much worse.”

Diane knew, however, that at some point, she was going to have to face her friends, her colleagues, and her clients, and she wanted them to know the truth. It was also the reassertion of her control over her own circumstances, and it struck me as amazingly brave. Besides, her medical team, her sister, and I were right