Mental Illness. Has the Stigma Gone?

Not far it hasn’t

Through one half of my family's mental illness in the form of severe clinical depression has ravaged its way through and it hasn’t been pretty.

Although my Father thankfully missed its aim his two brothers didn’t. Both had a severe episode of it in their fifties, resulting in in-patient treatment and ECT for the pair of them. It was very difficult for my Father to see his twin brother a mere shell of himself. Luckily both my Uncles recovered but my Father’s twin sadly succumbed again when he was eighty years old and remains ill to this day. He is now ninety years old. Luckily my Father is not on this earth to see his twin’s fate, or does he? One can only wonder.

But what has struck me about all of this is the secrecy. The rampant secrecy that my Father, Uncles, and Aunt kept close to their hearts. And the source of their secrecy was their Mother who herself was struck down with Clinical Depression from her older years to her death. Even my own mother was in on the game. “Oh, Granny had dementia” mother would say. “They didn’t know what dementia was in the 1970s”. Well yes, actually they did Mommie dearest because Dr Alzheimer discovered Alzheimer's disease in the 1930s and Granny certainly didn’t have it. She would lay in her bed for days on end, looked after by my surviving Uncle who ironically is ending his days suffering the very thing that afflicted his Mother.

Uncle now remains looked after by a very devoted wife who although fourteen years younger is in her seventies herself. She had to get Power of Attorney so she could manage his affairs. To get this she had to seek advice from a private psychiatrist and get a tremendous amount of medical information and family history. More secrets came to the fore. Unbeknownst to the wider family, Granny was receiving ECT treatment in London hospitals in the late sixties, early seventies. All kept secret by her children. Keep it quiet and it doesn’t exist was the order of the day. Keep it quiet and there is no stigma. I love my family but the older ones were products of a different time and a different era and I always remember that.

We knew as a family that Granny spent some time in a well-known private psychiatric hospital in our local area where she would throw her pills onto the top of the wardrobe and think she was in a hotel. She would even invite cousins to take tea with her.

Going further back more hidden truths came. Her own Father ended his days in the Prestwich Asylum for the same thing. As did his Grandfather before him, albeit in the Lancaster Asylum in the UK in the 1800s.

Still, the secrecy goes on. Granny’s family is very rarely talked about and it is a very complicated history indeed concerning her early life, being moved in with another family and then discovering her real roots which started in the Jewish Quarter of Cheetham Hill in Manchester, born of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother.

Why am I writing all this down?

I’m writing it because it's about bloody time that we accepted mental illness as readily as we accept someone with a broken leg or a hip replacement.

Mental illness is a mind that needs help and healing just as a hip or leg does.

But we don’t do we?

We shy away from mental illness and many people are suffering devoid of help and support.

Why?

Because it is still stigmatized.

Maybe things are slightly better now, but the stigma remains there in the background.

For those families affected by intergenerational mental illness, it is better to be honest.

Yes, it does exist, be aware of it, and if you feel yourself sinking for God’s sake, get some help quickly.

Don’t wait till you have tipped over into the abyss.

I saw my Uncle just as he turned eighty years old. Just a few months before he ended back up in a psychiatric ward. He was sitting in Granny’s chair. I looked at him and knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what was wrong, but there was something. Something that was tangible, something different. He was not physically ill, but something was amiss. He looked tired, tired of living. And the words that will haunt me forever were what he said to my Aunt some weeks before the depression really hit “I think I’m getting ill, again”.

I’d say to any of you. If you feel you are slipping mentally. Get help. There is no shame. Don’t be another statistic. You are valued and you have a place in the world.

You are you and you are special.

And needed by those around you.

Your mind with its anxieties, depression, or OCD is not a source of shame. It is an illness for which you can get help. Nothing more, nothing less.

And if you have a family member like this, they are not the cuckold in the nest. They need your help, not your shame in hiding it away as did generations before.

If you can throw a lifeline of help and friendship to another human being, you will be a better human for it.

And your help may well make another human feel better able to face each day.

I know I would rather be that human that throws that lifeline.

So throw that line out to a desperate mind.

One day it could be any of us.

With kind thanks to Ntathu Allen for all her help and feedback