Mental Illness
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VOICES OF THE HIDDEN CHILDREN
Imagine... a five year old caring for her sister two years younger and her mother who has schizophrenia. My Mum was first hospitalized when she was 23 years old, I was 2, and my sister was on the way.
Schizophrenia is probably one of the most misunderstood disorders. Some people think it means “Split Personality” or that people who have schizophrenia are always violent. These things are not true, let me tell you my experience...
My mother was put into hospital, for the second time, when I was 5 years old, my sister was 3. My father was physically abusive towards my mother because she wasn’t coping. So, for a start, my mother was more likely a victim of violence, than a perpetrator.
My sister and I were sent to an orphanage about an hour away from where our mum was, due to the difficulties between my parents. This is one of the earliest memories I have of our family. We visited our mum in hospital but we didn’t know what was going on.
The Ten-year Mental Health strategy for Queensland, 1996 admits that primary school children between 5 and 13 are “most at risk of severe disturbance”, this, to me suggests that more services need to be available for children especially where MI is apparent in the family.
I think my mother has had schizophrenia for 25 years, she has been hospitalized twice but she still will not talk about her problems to anyone or seek help.
Most adults try to keep children from unpleasant realities, partly because they think they wouldn’t understand it, but children, like most adults, are more afraid of the unknown, than by certainties, bitter though these may be. Avoiding the issue or giving false explanations will not help the child. Even under normal circumstances, a young persons trust in adults will be shattered if he/ she feels they are not telling the truth and may arouse even greater fears.
After Mum got out of hospital we went to live with her. The hospital did not follow up with my mother’s care or enquire into our emotional difficulties. So from that point on, our family slipped through the cracks in the mental health system. My sister and I became two of the “hidden children”.
The National Survey of Mental Health and Well Being, 1997 found that almost 1 in 5 Australians over 18yrs old, met criteria for mental disorder at some time during the 12 months before the survey. Out of these, only 38 % of people with a mental health problem had used a health service. It was also estimated that over half of all people with mental illness do not receive services and treatment from the health system.
For women the onset usually occurs between teenage years to late twenties, the years they are beginning to bear and raise children.
Living with a single mother with schizophrenia isn’t the easiest thing to do...there were times when mum couldn’t face the day and would stay in bed for 3 days and tell us that she was “on strike” (they were the words she used to say that she was unwell).
We told our father that our mother was “on strike again” when we saw him (once a week) but being 5 years old you can’t articulate the seriousness of it all. So our father didn’t realize that we were fending for ourselves at times at home. He had also felt that he was the cause of her illness and wasn’t willing to deal with it (he told me some years later). Add to that the fear instilled in you from an early age never to trust anyone, being told that your father is the devil and that he is trying to kidnap you and take you away from your mother.
When I was 7yrs old I remember having journals at school in which we wrote our thoughts about our day. One day my teacher Mr Munroe pulled me out of class and told me that what I had been writing was worrying him and asked if I wanted to talk about it, he asked me what was happening at home to make me feel so scared. Being all of 7 years old, I could not articulate what was happening at home, I knew that something wasn’t right but I didn’t know how to explain it. I guess I was also scared that they would take my sister and I away from my mum. I also know that I wouldn’t have coped with my life then without my family.
When mum was unwell we were quite neglected, my father said a few times he picked us up for our weekly visit and our hair hadn’t been brushed since the last time he saw us, or we had head lice. Dad would take us to the hairdressers occasionally to get our hair “fixed up”. We would always answer.. “Mum is on strike again!” My sister used to run after Dad’s car crying when he dropped us off, he said that it was one of the most painful memories for him.
Years went by, things got worse, Sherie and I started refusing to go to school, partly because we were teased at school, we didn’t have very good social skills, and partly I think because we wanted to make sure mum was ok. We both became afraid of the dark, I had many nightmares (in fact I could never sleep well until I was 21 years old) My mother became very abusive and my sister became physically violent towards me in reaction to her.
When I was nine, I had to take my sister and I off to enrol ourselves in a new school because mum had refused (or run out of money) to pay the fees to the school were at. Sherie was bawling her eyes out and I realized from that point on, I would have to look after both of us. Between the ages of 8 and 14, my mother suffered from many delusions, she told us that we were involved in plots against her with the extended family or with the neighbours. Nothing I could do could make her like me or trust me. She couldn’t show any interest in our lives or achievements.
She brought us up to live in fear of other people, not to trust anyone, our father was the “backpacker murderer”, our house was haunted with visions that only mum could see and hear, If someone had escaped from jail, they would definitely be looking for us first. If a plane flew over our house she would tell us that they were going to drop bombs on us, and that we were going to have an earthquake soon, so we had better stock up on tins of food. Everyone was having affairs and somehow she knew all about it. She told us how she had been involved in wars and saving the lives of famous people, and more importantly, the “Royal Family” were head hunting us.
When I look back at all those memories, I remember at some point I crossed over the line from believing in my mother to eventually being able to distinguish what was a delusion and what was not. The younger you are, the harder that is to do.
It’s hard for me to understand how my sister and I made it through childhood without developing a mental health problem ourselves. Sometimes I wish we had lead different lives but you can’t choose that sort of thing. At this point I think it’s important to mention that when our mother was well, she was a fantastic mother and cared for us greatly, and I would never have wanted to be taken away from her, even when I look back now.
It’s not easy watching someone you love change from being a loving mother to someone who seems to hate you without knowing why and when it’ s likely to happen again. It’s frustrating because you are a child and there seems to be nothing you can do about it.
Studies from overseas indicate that 30% of children (that’s 3 in 10) are placed in foster care due to parental mental illness. My mum was not an “unfit” mother, she was Unwell and our family needed support.
Growing up I tried to reach out for help many times, I was ignored because I was young. It’s also fair to say that I wasn’t very persistent because I had ZERO self esteem. When I was 12 I would call my father every afternoon crying and asking him to take me away. My father knew nothing about mental illness and felt guilty that he had been the cause. So every day he would tell me that she was just “different” and nothing would change.
The most painful help seeking memory I have is when I burst into a classroom of people crying, to ask a teacher for help, I was 14. The teacher said that it was just a phase I was going through and that all teenagers go through this sought of thing with their parents. So, in seeking help I stumbled across 1) avoidance 2) Stigma 3) lack of understanding.
So I ran away from home when I was 14 and I didn’t seek help again for another 7 years. For a while I stayed with friends, then another family took me in for 2 years. While I lived with this other family all that time my sister was at home with mum on her own (she was 12 years old). She used to give me letters at school begging for me to come back home... She was abandoned for the third time.
I harboured an enormous sense of guilt about leaving my sister, I felt I had left her struggling and drowning in our chaotic family life. I just needed to build a life for myself that felt worth living.
A good friend once told me that if I hadn’t of left home when I did, I wouldn’t have been alive to support my sister for the next few years. That was one of the most important things anyone ever said to me, it saved me from living with that guilt for the rest of my life.
I always visited home every weekend to make sure they were all ok. Running away from home probably saved my life.
Growing in any family can be challenging at times, but for children in a family with mental illness they have to deal with unpredictable nature of the illness. In these situations where the family is not receiving help, children do not always receive the parental care that they need, often they feel scared to talk about it and may withdraw from people who could help them. Often unable to articulate their needs, these children feel alone.
My sister and I turned out to be very strong people, but there is a price to pay for being strong. In a dysfunctional family you quickly discover that your feelings are a source of danger because they can be used against you. You provide safety for yourself by clamping down on your emotions, since the response is anything but comforting when you turn to your parent in tears and they cannot respond. You begin to avoid rejection by never turning to someone for help.
As an adult child of someone with a mental health issue you begin to see that the parent you depend on is feeling more fear and confusion than you are, so you realize that you can only depend on yourself. Then you become the one who calms supports and reassures your parent. What you sacrifice is the right to feel and express a whole range of human emotion: fear, anger even love. Most adult children of someone with a mental illness agree that “in some way or another you have to psychologically amputate parts of yourself in order to survive”.
Growing up with a parent with schizophrenia presented me with 3 basic problems:
- You feel unsafe in the world because of so much paranoia and because you haven’t learnt’ adequate social skills.
- You have a deep feeling of loneliness
- You feel that you are not worthy of love
In the midst of this, there is little room to be a playful, light-hearted child.
Adult children of someone with a mental health problem often have a tendency to take care of others and may not feel that they are deserving of help, or they may fear the rejection they received as a child. Another important fear is inheriting the illness and thus not wanting to be seen as “losing control”. So the behaviour that seems to help you survive as a child may become damaging to your relationships later on.
It Wasn’t until I was about 17 years old that I could talk about my life with other people, it wasn’t until then that my father finally realized how difficult it had been for my sister and I to live at home with no help. My father then explained to me that mum went to hospital because of a “nervous breakdown” and he spoke of her behaviour leading up to her going into hospital.
When I was in Year 11, a teacher talked to me about my family problems and his encouragement and support got me through the rest of high school. I am still good friends with him now… 9 years later. Just having someone to talk to who was non-judgmental helped me tremendously.
Years after finishing school I discovered that two of my best friends throughout high school had a parent with a mental illness also. None of us knew how to talk about it, whether anyone would believe us or be able to help. The stigma of disclosing was enormous.
A couple of years ago I finished my degree in Psychology, Where my interest came from is hardly surprising! After gathering as much information as I could about schizophrenia and working with and talking to carers and consumers from all over Australia, I can now separate the illness I hate to the mother I love, I think it’s very hard for any family member to get to that point.
All of these things that happened are not my mothers fault, and it took me so much anger to work through to be able to say that. I believe it is a failed duty of care by the health system to protect our family of the impact of mental illness, because schizophrenia like other mental illnesses is a biological illness just like cancer.
One thing that helped me the most is just being able to talk about what my life was like then and how that affects me now. The hardest thing for me was coming to terms with the fact that I am never going to have a mother/daughter relationship like those that some of my friends have, and that’s a fact of life that I have to live with.
My mother and I get along really well now; I visit her often, my sister and I are still her main support. I now realize that her pain was probably much worse than mine.
My sister and I are very close and my partner also has a parent with mental illness.
I have co-written a handbook for support workers titled “Supporting People With Psychiatric Disabilities” Launched by the QLD minister for Disability Services, Anna Bligh in Dec 2000, published by ARAFMI Queensland Inc.
I am now the Senior Support Worker at Coolibah Family Support Program (an initiative of ARAFMI) for families where a member has a psychiatric disability. In my spare time I am involved in producing an educational video which has just received funding through the Child and Youth Institute for Mental Health about young people who have a parent with mental illness and will be out in December 2001.
Some stories have a happy ending…
Help for helpers of adult children of people with mental illness
- Help the person define what they can and cannot influence or control.
- Help them learn how to release resentments e.g. by writing a letter and burning it.
- Encourage the people to take a holiday from their responsibilities and do something nice for themselves.
- Acknowledge that confusion and despair are exhausting and prevent decision-making.
- Confusion, despair, anger and hurt are emotions that need to be ventilated (sometimes, there is nothing you can change about someone else but you CAN come to a point of acceptance- or SHOCK HORROR- change yourself!).
- It’s important to talk to someone who will JUST listen, someone to show you some warmth that you may have been missing out on (because some people with schizophrenia experience a loss of emotion and find it hard to express warmth towards others).
- When I had been neglected or verbally abused, these are the times when you really need to know you are valued, encourage the person to share times when their mother or father showed they cared. When you are angry, it’s hard to remember the good times.
- Help the person learn how to tolerate a possible LONG TERM up and down pattern of frustration, hurt, anger, grief and ways to deal with this e.g. Relaxation techniques, meditation, hobbies, creativity, counselling, eating and sleeping well.
- Identify highly riskful situations e.g. is there certain situations which are likely to set the person off? If so, ways to avoid or get out of those situations.
- Help them clarify and set limits on what kind of behaviour they will tolerate and at what point they should walk away.
- Encourage them to separate the illness from the person they love and learn to externalize and depersonalize criticisms.
- DO NOT PUSH YOUR PERSONAL OPINIONS ONTO THE PERSON
- Lastly, due to the fact that I have one parent with mental illness, I am 10 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than the general population. Acknowledge that fear but let the person know how UNLIKELY it is that they will develop it,
BEING THERE
BEING THERE is an attempt by a parent to come to terms with the illness of a child. It is an illness which is life threatening and which parents are powerless to influence and of which they are as much victims as the child.
1998
'I can’t do it! I just can’t!' she cries and falls forward on to all fours, weeping. The thick, lustrous curls drop forward, dividing either side of her thin, white neck. Tears drop to the carpet, 'I can’t.' Her despair is palpable.
I stall for time. My response needs care. It won’t work if I push her too hard, but being too sympathetic will not get her anywhere either. 'Here’s a tissue.' I squat and reach under the shining hair and dab clumsily at her hidden face. 'Don’t be so hard on yourself. It doesn’t help.'
She lifts her face with its runnels of tears, sits back on her knees and blindly takes the tissue. Her hand is livid, puce and cold, the nails white and long—claw-like, semi-lifeless—somehow like the feet of dead poultry.
Although she wipes the wetness from her pale cheeks, more tears course down and the tissue is quickly useless. I rise to my feet, knees cracking, and fetch the whole box of tissues. Better to let her sadness run its sobbing course than cut it short, denying her very real pain.
Eventually I kneel and take her in my arms. She does not resist. She rests her cheek against my shoulder. 'I hate to see you unhappy,' I whisper and rock her very gently. We remain that way for a long time and I feel my own tears begin to prickle.
'But you know what will happen…what the consequences will be, don’t you?' I say, when the quiet, brimming grief allows me to speak and when I feel a stillness in her bony body.
She doesn’t reply. I squeeze her gently, vividly aware of the skeleton underneath the layers of clothes she wears to prevent the loss of body heat. The ridge of spine protrudes like a thick rod through the fabric, the shoulder blades are the wings of a plucked chicken.
'I don’t want it. What’s the point? ...There is no point.' I hear these words often. When she utters them, her shoulders droop, she slumps, her eyes lack-lustre.
I feel a sense that if I hold her close, some of my strength and energy will penetrate her limpness and she will be invigorated. It doesn’t happen. My hug runs its course and nothing has changed. I muster some energy. 'Do you want to go back to hospital? Is that what you prefer?' I’m brutal. It is what will happen.
She doesn’t even look at me. Dispiritedly she mutters, 'Of course I don’t. What do you think I am?'
I keep the dialogue alive. 'I’m afraid you’re letting it get you, that you’re convinced you’re not going to win. No-one says you have to like it. You don’t. Quite clearly, you don’t. Just think of it as a means to an end—to keep out of hospital.'
The big, dull eyes fill again, the thin cheeks look sucked in and gather to the lips that seem to be tightly drawn over teeth which, though they do not protrude, appear to do so. It seems to take an effort to stretch her skin in order to close her mouth.
'I’m never going to be better. I know I’m not.' She stares ahead of her, picking at her nails. A small pulse beats in her cheek. She makes no effort to move—a statue of misery.
I stifle an impulse to speak irritably; anger is still lurking, despite the fact that this pattern of behaviour has become a way of life.
'The doctor is confident you will, Dear Heart, and I am too.' Even though I believe it, the words have a hollow ring. I’ve said them so often that they have begun to sound false.
I wonder how long I should persist. At what point does my coaxing or encouragement become badgering? I decide to retreat for now. I’ll make another attempt. As gently as I can, I say, 'I know you know what will happen if you can’t manage it. And I hope you know we’re all on your side here.' But...we don’t win on this occasion. We lose again.
1997
'Why do you always take my sheet away?' she snaps irritably. 'You know I go back to bed when I come in.’ She is busy and purposeful.
'We always wash the sheets on Saturday,' I reply calmly 'It’s the only day of the week we have time to do it.' Then, to placate her, I say, 'I’ve bought you a roll for your lunch. AND a jam tart!'
It’s eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. I have been up since six, but she will have been at the newsagent’s for an hour and a half by then. I go to the market to do the family shopping. She delivers newspapers, leaving her bed at four-thirty each day to roll and pack Ages and Herald-Suns into her bike crate before pedalling off in the sunrise to ensure her customers have news on their doorsteps when they wake.
I have to catch her in the short interval between the time she emerges from her room after her post-paper-round sleep and the time she departs for the athletics field, several suburbs away. Howard, father of another local athlete, collects her every Saturday, reliably tooting his horn at the front of the house. He drives her and his own daughter to the district meet where she joins other athletes who try to run, hurdle, jump, vault and walk their personal bests for themselves and their clubs.
She fills her bread roll, grabs a box drink, washes an apple, and fills a water bottle, ready to run out on Howard’s arrival. She gives me last instructions.
'So you’ll collect me at three-fifty, OK? The things I’ll need for basketball and the party are on my bed. You won’t forget will you?' She is firm and organised.
'No, Dear,' I say obediently, amused at her ability to organise her social and sporting activities which contrasts sharply with her lack of enthusiasm for organising her school or domestic responsibilities. 'I’ll collect you in good time for basketball. But...I want you to assure me that you won’t run in the fifteen hundred, the four hundred, and the eight hundred metres and then expect to put in a proper contribution at basketball today. It’s not fair on the rest of the team when you turn up, half-dead from running, specially if you don’t have time to rest between events. You need to think about this before you choose what you enter.'
She thinks I’m making a big deal of it. She knows she has infinite energy and strength. How could I think she might not be able to do her paper round, run three thousand metres, play basketball and then go to a party, followed by a sleep-over at the home of a friend who is equally indefatigable and exuberant?
She sighs heavily. 'There won’t be time for me to run in the fifteen hundred. Basketball is early today...remember. I have to be at basketball at 4.50 and the fifteen hundred doesn’t start til 4.30. I’ll be fine.'
'Alright, alright!' I say (How could I be so stupid?) and move to the next issue, which I know will aggravate her testiness. 'What time do we expect you home tomorrow? Am I to pick you up? Will Tracey’s dad drop you off, or will you be catching the train?'
'I don’t know,' she retorts, irritated at being pushed into thinking ahead. It’s her standard response.
'Ring me then,' I call as Howard’s horn sounds and she gathers her running gear and dashes off down the hall. 'If you insist,' she returns sullenly. She disappears and I am left in silence, fulminating at the folly of the invincible athlete and the thoughtlessness of the normal teenager.
1998
'I can’t give you any idea how long it will be,' says the doctor, his hazel eyes fixed on my face. 'It’s always slow.' I crave improvement in her condition. I want to be reassured. I need to be told there’s been progress. I can’t see it but, childishly, I expect him to.
'But I am optimistic, very optimistic. She is going to get better.' He says this often—every time I speak with him.
'Just now,' he says gently, 'she’s stuck, very stuck...but, you’ll see, one day she’ll decide she’s had enough and things will change.'
He watches me all the time. ' She’ll find a balance, where she’ll just hold her own and she’ll keep holding her own until, slowly, slowly, she’ll pull herself out of it.'
'Isn’t there anything we can do to help?' I plead.
'All you can do is be there when she needs you,' he repeats. 'You know she is suffering. This is no pretence. She cannot help it. There is no point in your trying to change things. You’ll only irritate her and upset yourself. What she needs is your unconditional love and support.'
'It’s not easy,' he says, stating the obvious.
'Yes,' I choke, unable to speak.
MY EXPERIENCE OF SCHIZOPHRENIA
For me, the development of schizophrenia and my growing awareness of my illness were born out of a time of feeling utterly alone, unlovable and worthless. I was disgusted with myself and honestly did not believe I had the right to be alive. However, I could not recognise that I was depressed. My understanding was that people with mental illnesses DID have the right to be alive, because their problems stemmed out of SUFFERING (which was not their fault), whereas my problems stemmed out of being an inadequate and valueless human being (therefore MY fault). I hated myself enough to believe that people who knew me or met me would marvel that I had not already killed myself. I believed that it was obvious to everyone who encountered me that I should’ve killed myself a long time ago.
Before the onset of my psychotic symptoms, when I was really just depressed, my suicidal thoughts were less to do with putting an end to the suffering or pain that I had experienced, and more to do with embarrassment, or making my behaviour suitable in the eyes of others. When I took overdoses, I was too scared of death to actually genuinely make a concerted attempt to kill myself, but I did want others to see I was making efforts in the general direction. When I stopped eating properly, and began cutting myself, these were for similar reasons.
It all grew out of a massive drop in self-esteem on a social level, and the embarrassment and self-disgust could be found in social situations too. I didn’t believe I had anything funny or interesting enough to say, so I kept quiet, paralysed by the fear of being ridiculed or rejected by my peers. But my silences were a great source of embarrassment to me as well. I would feel that everyone could tell there was something wrong with me because I didn’t speak, and that they were therefore laughing at me, whether silently in my presence, or together when I wasn’t around.
My first psychotic thoughts happened when I would go on long runs around Gisborne, at a time when I was starving myself and cutting myself regularly. A friend of mine had told me that her sister had had repressed memories about sexual abuse by her father which had recently been brought to the surface. Another friend had been on the receiving end of similar counselling techniques, and I’m not sure whether it was suggested to me or whether I started wondering of my own accord, whether I too had been abused as a child and had repressed the memory. This was all in the context of having some initial assessments done in hospital with psychiatrists who were basically scratching their heads as to what was “wrong with me.”
I was very confused myself, as people were starting to require me to understand my “differentness” to others in new ways: I started trying to remember being abused, that is, to remember things which had never happened to me. I developed an attitude of suspicion. On my runs I started to see cars and vans and utes pulled up on the side of the road, where people seemed to be observing me. When I approached them, they would quickly drive away. I couldn’t tell whether this was real or I was imagining it. I started to have thoughts about alternative dimensions, links between parallel worlds. When I would have these thoughts, my running would slow right down, I’d ask myself, “Am I going crazy?” and feel that I couldn’t go on.
In the years between then and now, I’ve had all sorts of experiences. A lot of the times when I’ve been psychotic, the psychosis has served to process stressful situations or feelings in a more detached way. For example, feeling left out and unloved by groups of people, I’ve been able to explain it away in abstract ways, like those people are aliens. Sometimes if people I have been close to become more distant, I could come to the same sort of conclusion.
Apart from psychosis, I have had a lot of experiences of depression and anxiety. I remember being so depressed that I had an appointment to see a GP in Gisborne, and the thought of life going on beyond that appointment was unbearable. I was literally terrified of living. I would try to slit my wrists and kill myself, and the ultimate failure, when I found that I was unable to do even that, was terrifying.
A few times I just curled up in a ball and couldn’t talk or function or move, apart from to scream when anyone touched me.
I’ve struggled my way through uni. I’ve had problems with concentration, endless problems with medication side-effects, endless swappings between different types of medications. For a lot of the years since I first became ill I’ve been basically resigned to the fact that nothing will make me feel better mentally without bothering me physically. For a long time I believed that the medication would neither relieve me of my emotional pain nor fail at this remarkably enough for me to be able to stop trying and give up. Throughout my time at uni I’ve struggled with the belief that I have actually been achieving nothing - I changed directions and courses four or five times while at uni, and then when I did finish my BA I didn’t feel that that was much of an achievement anyway.
I had very little sense of hope as regarded career prospects and even completing one course. The fact that stress, including workplace and academic stress, has often been the trigger for my psychotic episodes, has meant that I have all along had to live with the possibility that I might never be able to cope with a job which was challenging enough to be rewarding.
Developing schizophrenia also meant for me a huge spiritual crisis: I had always been told that God loved me, as much as he loved any other human being, but having virtually no friends and no social skills, along with a past of being bullied and effectively told that I was worthless, meant that I began to find this more and more difficult to believe. I was furious with God for creating me as he had, and all the assurances I had been given about God’s ability and willingness to help me started to seem patently untrue. I felt that I had been abandoned, and my faith almost completely shut down. I despaired.
I knew that my family loved me, but to me this didn’t count. I needed the approval of my peers. But I had lost the ability to trust people, peers and family alike, and so my social problems launched me into a further downward spiral.
When I eventually did start to make progress on the road to some kind of recovery, my inexperience in the area of successful friendships and relationships meant that I quickly found myself in conflict with potential friends. I was needy, and probably quite self-absorbed with my illness, and I destroyed many friendships on the road to understanding how they really worked. (Not that I know everything now!)
I’ve taken overdoses and been hospitalised quite a few times, though never for very long. I’ve had periods where I’ve gone off my medication and wound up in big trouble. This happened most notably about five years ago, when I found myself admitted at Larundel. At that stage I was seen by a different psychiatrist who diagnosed me with schizophrenia, and then consulted my regular psychiatrist who confirmed that this was the diagnosis she had been working with, although she hadn’t yet told me. I remember feeling strangely excited about being told I had schizophrenia; it was a relief for my problems to suddenly have a name, and I guess my reaction harked back to the days when I drew a distinction between myself (as worthless) and psychiatric patients (as unwell).
For a long time I struggled to break the habit of cutting when things got tough. When I began harming myself in the bad old days I suppose it was due to pure unadulterated self-hatred, but then as time wore on it became more of a mechanism for coping with stress. I would crack out a razor blade at the slightest hint of conflict or tension in a friendship or relationship; if someone merely said a cross word to me. And although the triggers became less and less significant, practice meant that the cuts got deeper and deeper. Doctors and family members became understandably weary of the process of sewing up cuts I had deliberately made.
But quite early on I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a community mental health organisation called GROW. GROW was developed out of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement and uses similar principles and literature in its work helping mentally ill and emotionally hurting people to help themselves. I was involved in several GROW groups at different points in time, and there is no way I could overestimate the healing and growth that it has ended up bringing to me. Through the regular contact with the GROW community, made up of people in similar situations to myself, over the six or seven years that I was a committed member, I learned to trust people again. And not only to the degree that I had trusted my school friends before I became unwell; at GROW I learned that there were people around to whom I could tell the most shameful and sick aspects of my life and who would continue to love and support me nevertheless. I also learnt that I could do the same for them. Through some GROW leaders’ recognition of my potential to be a leader myself, and through the regular opportunity to contribute to other peoples’ recovery, I slowly began to rebuild my sense of personal value. I developed good social skills, and came to see myself differently. I also began to learn the art of accepting myself for who I am, warts and all. The GROW program works on the assumption that there are some things only the doctors and professionals can do, and other things only we, the individuals with the illnesses can do, and therefore invites individuals to work hard at making their own irreplaceable contributions to their own recoveries. So that is what I gradually began to do at GROW. At the same time, I was receiving the professional help of my psychiatrist, who I have been seeing since the time of my first psychotic episode (around eight years) and I was started on a new medication. All of these factors have meant that I’ve been gradually becoming more and more stable; more and more mentally healthy.
Once the medication began to sort out my psychotic symptoms, the way was cleared for a lot of “fixing up” to happen. I dropped back down to a healthy weight, having been quite overweight; I quit smoking; I found a share household and began the work of learning how to preserve a healthy environment in which to live. I established myself in a new circle of friends, and found myself working out how to keep these ones. I also embarked on the journey of family counselling at Bouverie.
Up until a couple of years ago, one of the most painful experiences related (however distantly) to my illness has been the tendency for me to become physically violent with members of my family. Understandably, there came a point where this behaviour could not be tolerated by my family any longer, and a split in the family occurred. The guilt and shame I felt about my violence was paralysing, and the circumstances of being cut off from my family were terrible; I’m sure the suffering they experienced as a result of my behaviour was greater still. My doctor at one point suggested doing some family therapy at Bouverie, and ….
