Tag: Public Mental Health System

Stone Cold Sane

CW: Sanism, recent news cycle, mention of violence

It’s been nearly a week and I have intentionally held my horses and my tongue.

The news cycle has generated a flurry of hot takes on the horrific events at a Sydney shopping centre last weekend. It stumbled many times in its race for the truth and now appears to have moved on to fresher fodder. 

This week included a first for me. I have wished for a bipolar disorder flare up severe enough to render me unaware of the above-mentioned news cycle.  I have craved the security of being in hospital. Usually when I long for the hospital, I am too unwell to be at home.

Right now? I am stone cold sane.

I imagine anyone with a pulse, access to the news, and a shred of empathy has been devastated by the deaths, injuries and trauma that stained last Saturday afternoon. Me too.

I’ve also wished I could find comfort in plunging my head into the sand. However, for now, I am well enough to find that prospect more unbearable than having word projectiles launched at me.

It is easy for me to sink into the comfortable feather bed of my friends, family, and acquaintances who are supportive, who don’t other me, who see all of me. It is easy to feel complacent, to believe that yes things are getting better out there, that we are reducing stigma surrounding mental illness. But things are not getting better when psychosis is in the picture.

The minute the media spewed out the words ‘mental health issues’ and ‘schizophrenia’ in relation to the knife attacks, I braced myself for what was to come. And it came alright. Those words lit a match to the petrol-soaked kindling held by people paddling around in all of the news outlet and social media comments sections.

If you haven’t lived with what I have, you might think – ‘Don’t read the comments. They are rubbish.’

Yes. But they are also a barometer and thermometer. And if you are someone who walks through the world with a severe mental illness, knowing the temperature and pressure of your surroundings matters.

We all come at the comments sections from the launch pads of our life experience.

As someone who has lived experience of postnatal psychosis and lives with well managed bipolar disorder, here is a snapshot of where I come from:

My experiences of psychosis have been the most terrifying of my life. I have dry retched and screamed with fear in the middle of them. And I have been safe and receiving the best care when they have happened.

I can’t imagine how I would have survived, let alone felt, if I had been experiencing this awful symptom, without care and treatment, while homeless, in the throes of addiction, or without the privilege I live with. If I were still alive, I don’t know what path I’d be on.

Over the last 17 years I have written and talked about not only my experiences but the failures of the public mental health system that are at least partially responsible for thousands of people having a poor quality of life when they don’t need to. I have pointed out many times that these failures almost always contribute when tragedy is the last stop on the derailed train of a poorly managed or unmanaged severe mental illness.

I have gone on ad nauseum about stigma surrounding severe mental illness, and the barrier it forms between people who need good care and their ability to access it.

And I am far from the only one writing and talking about it. Yet here we are.

Here I am feeling punched in the gut by two words that popped up frequently in the comments sections this week. One of my most hated pejoratives used to be ‘psycho bitch’. This week ‘psycho bitch’ was toppled by ‘these people’.

‘These people’ is less in your face than ‘psycho bitch’ – but more sinister. Where ‘psycho bitch’ is aggressive, ‘these people’ drips with contempt. ‘These people’ can be applied to any demographic the speaker or writer has a problem with. When I read ‘these people’. I picture the words tripping out of the mouths of people like Pauline Hanson, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump,

To clarify, this week ‘these people’ in the comments sections was not a descriptor of knife wielding mass murderers. ‘These people’ referred to people – like me – who live with severe mental illness.

And the gist of the recommendations for ‘these people’ was that we should ‘be rounded up and locked away, or burn in hell’ and that we are like ‘vicious dogs who should not be let out in the community.’

While these sentiments frustrate and sicken me, I am not worried about me. I have an accurate diagnosis, access to good care, insight, and know how to look after myself.

I worry about people who are having a first or early experience with symptoms of a severe mental illness, who read this poison when they are alone, who soak it up and believe it to be the truth. This stigmatising language is enough to stop someone who is new to this, or entrenched in a stigma spiral, getting the help they need. This is particularly disheartening knowing that early interventions, especially when it comes to psychosis, give the best outcomes.

Most people who don’t get the help they need will never hurt anyone else, but they are at risk of having a poor quality of life, or not surviving their illness.

And anyone who includes stigmatising language in their vocabulary actively contributes to this cycle of suffering.

Last Saturday’s perpetrator may have been a misogynistic arsehole, capable of violence, regardless of his history of a mental illness.

Or his actions may have resulted wholly from unmanaged or poorly managed long term mental illness featuring psychosis and little help from the public mental health system.

Or it might have been a combination of both.

Most of us will never know.

So, do we need to?

I used to think so.

I used to think that the more detail in reports about a perpetrator’s mental ill health and areas where the mental health system had potentially failed them, the more the public would understand.

But I no longer believe there is any benefit in feeding a baying-for- blood public, click baity snippets or even more detailed information that they don’t appear to have the experience, compassion, or education to process rationally and fairly.

Consistent bad reporting on mental illness and its repercussions hurts vulnerable people. We may as well slide back into that dangerous fertiliser for stigma – silence.

You can report media coverage that stigmatises mental ill health at stigma watch here: https://www.sane.org/get-involved/advocacy/stigmawatch

For further reading about complex mental health conditions and stigma I strongly recommend journalist and author Elfy Scott’s book:

The one thing we’ve never spoken about: Exposing Our Untold Mental Health Crisis

You can find this book here: https://www.elfyscott.com/book

Elfy also wrote this excellent article for Crikey during the week, which I contributed a small quote to: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/04/17/bondi-junction-killer-schizophrenia-mental-health-reporting/

I have written several posts about media reporting and stigma surrounding complex mental ill health over the years. Here are some that you might like to check out:

Media-Made Monsters

Lies Of Omission: What You’re Never Told

Mind Your Language Katy Perry

Guilty Of Postnatal Psychosis

Mental Illness And Humour

2020 Ends In Hospital

I am going into hospital later today.

And I am aching to get there, straining towards the moment I close the door to my hospital room on a world I am the wrong shape for right now.

How did I get here this time?

Fourteen days ago I had a regular appointment with my psychiatrist. Just a Bipolar 1 Disorder monthly maintenance appointment. I was completely asymptomatic.

Thirteen days ago I left for our beach holiday and forgot to pack my swim wear. Subtle. I mean that could happen to anyone. Right? But by the following morning I was symptomatic alright. My short term memory and concentration were dissolving like sugar cubes in boiling water.

A buzzing pressure behind my eyes radiated up my forehead. I knew from bitter experience, if I did nothing, soon that buzzing could make me second guess what was real or not.

That was symptomatic enough to page my psychiatrist on a Saturday morning. It’s only the second time I’ve paged him out of hours in 14 years. He called back in under three minutes.

Over the last nearly two weeks, the first of which I stayed at the beach, he telephone consulted with me every second day, adjusting medications, a little more of this, a little more often of that. I slipped from my bed gratefully into the ocean, timing the most sedating medications for times when I’d be in bed not the ocean. I seemed a little better, maybe? But then not.

Back home we continued every second day phone consults, adjustments. This is by far not the sickest I have ever been (although psychosis and catatonic depression requiring ECT to reverse, do set a very low bar)

So why would I want to go into hospital, rather than continue treatment at home?

Here’s why:

The surface of my brain feels as though it is covered in papercuts and being surrounded by people and noise is like having lemon juice dribbled over the cuts.

Trying to hold in the irritability of being around people and noise (including my close family) is like being intensely nauseous with someone threatening to punish you if you vomit.

One of the parameters I use to assess how close I am to needing to go into hospital is ‘the sandwich test’. Think about the amount of concentration and short term memory it takes to make a sandwich – nothing fancy, just two slices of bread, some butter and one topping. For most healthy, able bodied, able brained adults, this is not a challenging task.

Right now – I can still make a sandwich, but it’s a challenge. I am making a decision, based on past experiences, not to wait with hospitalisation until challenge becomes an impossibility.

As for the seasonal timing – Christmas and New Years celebrations? I am veteran enough in the management of this illness to know it has no knowledge of nor respect for holidays and anniversaries. I could list my tenth and fifteenth wedding anniversaries as times spent in hospital, a longed for trip to Paris cancelled because of recent hospitalisation, and that would be the beginning of a list so long I’ve forgotten most of it. These times are just human constructs. If it swallows them I don’t dwell on them.

Instead I celebrate the unscathed special occasions extra hard, to make up for the times there is nothing.

The final reason for going into hospital now, is because I can access this level of care. I am fortunate to have the option of going into a private psychiatric hospital when I am sick. The standard of hospital care I will receive will be excellent. It will far exceed anything the public psychiatric hospital system has to offer.

I loathe getting sick enough to need hospital support. But perhaps even more than this I loathe the hypocrisy of someone with my privilege not utilising that support because of some misguided stigmatising ideas about what it means to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

I am profoundly grateful I can afford care in a good private psychiatric hospital. And part of my own recovery, once I’ve stabilised medically, is to remember there are many people living with this illness, and other severe mental illnesses, who are learning to live with them with far less support and privilege than I have. When my recovery feels hard I focus on this:

If I access the supports I am fortunate to have, I am more likely to be around for long enough to help raise awareness of the inequality between our private and public mental health hospital systems, and work towards our public mental health hospital system actually supporting some of our most vulnerable when they need it most.

If you are new to Thought Food and would like to know a little bit about who I am when I am well, you may like to check out:

Who Am I ?

Radio And Podcast Interviews

These Fires

 

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Are racking up an invisible bill.

Most would agree that even just seeing the billowing smoke, the hellish glow, buckled tin roofs, smouldering ash, the ghostly silhouettes of dead animals lining the roads into obliterated small towns, even when viewed from the safe parts of the country and the globe, even when the horror is confined to a steady scroll behind a screen, is overwhelming. The helplessness bruises our emotions. We can be forgiven for making a donation, posting something derogatory about our inept prime minister and then switching off our screens for a bit.

For the fire fighters, the people in masks in boats under those bloodied skies there can be no thought other than surviving one hour or minute to the next. The same goes for the emergency services, the army personnel, those with loved ones in the danger zones, those who have lost loved ones.

But what about the rest of us. Yes, we can donate to the Red Cross or Celeste Barber or any of the other funds set up to try and help deal with this unprecedented crisis. We can go shopping and buy things on a list that are needed by the emergency services.

But then what – what to do we do next?

Continue reading “These Fires”

RUOK Day: Full Disclosure

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Doing the talking, not the asking on RUOK day 2019

 

How was everyone’s RUOK day? Did you ask anyone? Did you get asked? Did you post or share something on social media about it, and feel good about participating?

As someone who lives with a severe mental illness I felt as though I should welcome RUOK day with open arms, that I should be thankful that someone was paying attention to ‘us’… for a day.

But I didn’t feel what the day wanted me to.

What did I feel? For starters, a little infantilised. And please before people send me enraged messages that that is not how they felt and that I am spoiling the fun for everyone, hear me out.

Continue reading “RUOK Day: Full Disclosure”

My Sliding Doors Encounter With Our Public Mental Health System

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Have you ever had a moment when your answer to a question determined whether your life imploded?

I have.

It came five days into parenthood. I was lying on the floor in my maternity hospital room crying because I was trying to outrun a jaguar chasing me towards a cliff. Things were starting to go very wrong in my brain.

In the following months, when my mind warped and writhed in the grip of psychosis and later catatonic depression, and when what started out as postnatal psychosis turned out to be a first episode of bipolar 1 disorder, I could not imagine things being worse.

But they could have been.

Continue reading “My Sliding Doors Encounter With Our Public Mental Health System”

Lies Of Omission: What You’re Never Told

‘Psycho Killer Shatters Young Family!’

Thoughts?

I had an interview with a PhD student from Melbourne Uni last week. It was for a study into what can be done to improve media reporting around severe mental illness (SMI) to reduce stigma. The media is largely responsible for the way people like me are perceived by the general public. So, I was delighted to contribute to this study.

Our trusted news sources are slickly practiced at generating gory headlines that draw eyeballs to them like magnets. If SMI is thought to contribute to a crime, it is either ignored or thrown into the story as a cold, hard after thought. Something that can’t be changed and is barely acknowledged as an illness.

The main characters in these horrific accounts may have an undiagnosed, poorly managed, or unmanaged SMI, but the journalist in the by-line doesn’t dig deep enough to expose the reasons for this:

Society does not care about or for us in the same way they do for others with serious, chronic, intermittent potentially fatal illnesses.

Continue reading “Lies Of Omission: What You’re Never Told”

Would You Rather See A Cardiologist Or A Psychiatrist?

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How do you know when and whether you need a psychiatrist or a psychologist?

For many people, stigma is still an obstacle to accessing the right mental health care for them, at the right time. Experiencing psychiatric symptoms is challenging enough. We don’t need the judgement of others or self stigma standing in the way of  getting the correct treatment. So we need to change the way we think and speak about accessing mental health care. And we need to understand the different levels of care we can expect from different professionals.

I saw my psychologist and my psychiatrist a couple of weeks ago. These two professionals are the pillars of management for my Bipolar Disorder. Yet they support me in different ways.

Continue reading “Would You Rather See A Cardiologist Or A Psychiatrist?”