Mental illness |
Edition 35 2020
Words Jordan White Artwork Oliver White
Content warning: This piece discusses suicide and may be triggering for some readers.
M
y father was many things; placid, artistic, caring. But he was also mentally ill. He lived with major depression and borderline personality disorder. These illnesses were a part of him; they didn’t make him. But the sad reality is, in the end, they were internalised enough to break him. During an episode, he sought help at a hospital but was turned away as many people with mental illnesses are. It was summer and I still wonder whether or not the sun was really shining that day. Alone and distressed, he allegedly robbed a video store of $120 with a screwdriver. He died by hanging at the Adelaide Remand Centre six weeks later, still pending trial for an apparent petty crime. I’m not here to point fingers at the cracks in our mental health systems or society. And I know it’s not great to pave the past in ifs and hypotheticals. But maybe that one bad episode could have ended differently, had mental illnesses been less stigmatised. The worst part is my Mum never knew about his illness. Naive, some might say, but mental illnesses were so shameful that Dad couldn’t show that part of himself, even to the people he loved. Society deemed his suffering shameful and so he suffered silently. For far too long, mental illnesses have been stigmatised and hidden by society. In the middle ages, people with mental illnesses were apparently possessed by the devil and therefore burned at the stake. In the nineteenth century, asylums designed to nurse the ‘insane’ back to health gained popularity. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people with schizophrenia were sterilised or killed in Nazi Germany.
