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excerpts
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The way you’ve presented the interview and the way you’ve been very open and accepting and accommodating of people’s experiences and people’s lived traumas is the opposite to our experiences in the everyday world. That’s the reason this book is so important. Our voice, our need to reach out and be part of society is the reason this book needs to be written and the reason people need to hear our stories and listen to our experiences. Our lives are lived so closed. We try to hide our symptoms and present ourselves to society in a certain way. That only compounds our lives with a mental illness. The freedom and the ability to express ourselves is so important. People need to listen to our stories, listen to our points of view and have a different understanding of mental illness … I’ve often said that mental illness is a condition of society. (Sarah) It’s not about diagnoses that separate you from everything you know. It’s not about isolating people even further than they already feel. At the clinic I hear people talking about integrating people with ‘mental illness’ into society, but by definition of what they have done, they have made that impossible. They label you as ‘mentally ill’, and then push you back into a society that thinks, ‘Oh my god, "mental illness"!’ (Cheryl) My discovery that many of the great spiritual writers – including Mother Teresa of Calcutta – say that suffering is a gift was a great joy to me … it hit me between the eyes! It makes it so much easier to accept the road that I’ve travelled down. Suffering can seem to be so negative yet it can, if we allow it, produce in our Being the positive gift of compassion. Compassion doesn’t come out of thin air. (John) Pills certainly help, but on the whole it is just a medical quick fix. It does nothing to fix the core or the cause of the problem. (Glenda)
It is important for me to have a photo of a
tree here. When I was suffering I often sat at the base of a wonderful old
gum tree out in the bush. I called it my 'mother tree'. It had large roots
that cradled me. Sometimes I sat under it for hours. I always came away
feeling that I had taken in something of its strength, solidity and
capacity for growth. (Eva) |
I don’t look on my mental illness as being a negative thing in my life. Without it I would not have had the life I’ve had. I know my life has been enormously up and down, but the fact is, when you pull that curvy line into a straight line then it’s one hell of a lot longer than many others I know! I think I’ve done a hell of a lot with my life ... from the very beginning I’ve done a hell of a lot! (Wayne) ________________________ I first came across something termed ‘mental illness’ in one of my relatives. She was different from the rest of the family. She was a truly wild Irish woman with long flaming red hair and she was involved in witchcraft. I never saw any goat’s heads or black candles around the house, but she did have a cauldron with ladles hanging from the sides and she made little thatched cottages that she put in the garden. I remember in her wildness was an immense creativity and sexuality that even as a small boy I was drawn to. She was true to herself and in that I saw a beauty I didn’t see in the rest of my life. But there was also something that scared me. She’d beat up men. Her behaviour could be unpredictable. And every now and then she’d disappear and she’d wind up in a mental institution. I don’t know to this present day what she suffered from or indeed if she suffered from something. Perhaps it was simply that she was different. If you are different in our society people automatically assume that there is something wrong with you and so they feel a necessity to put you away for a while. The part of Ireland in which I grew up was predominantly Catholic. Everyone had very large families. Religious families. Children everywhere. If you were a couple without children people wondered what was wrong with you. You had to have at least half a dozen to a dozen and my family with nine fitted very comfortably into that zone. I was the eldest and I was responsible for looking after all my brothers and sisters and cousins and whoever else was there. I was a bit like the Pied Piper. At the end of the day I could never sleep until everyone was in the house. It was usually my father who came in last. He worked as a barman and I’d hear his whistle in the distance as he came down the street. Only then could I go to sleep ... but that was the only comfortable and peaceful time I had. Every day was a battle. It was a fight to survive. Something had happened to my mother. It had to do with the pressures of having an illegitimate child in the 1950s in that sort of Catholic environment. She was ostracised. She wanted to put me up for adoption but my grandmother would not allow it. When I was three or four she met and then married my father and he adopted me. But then she started to beat me and I never knew why. I saw such a craziness in her and that craziness scared me. I was never scared of any man as much I was scared of my mother. (Patrick) The media portray the 'mentally ill' as violent. But the truth is that we'd much rather kill ourselves than anybody else. I apologise to an ant or a spider if I kill it. I don't want to hurt anybody or anything. (Linda)
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