Wednesday 16-03-2022 - 09:00

Step Forward Together is an awareness campaign by Carmarthen Campus President Becky Bush to break the stigma of mental health conditions. An overview of the campaign can be found here.  

 

Schizophrenia  

By: Anonymous 

My mum was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and Bi-Polar disorder when she was thirty - something years old.  While the mental illness is not my own, I thought I’d share a part of her story to try and remove the stigma.   

I’ve never met anyone else with schizophrenia in my life, so I don’t know what it’s like for other people; I can only say what my mother experiences.  

If you ask my mum about her mental illness, she will look at you as if you were making it up. She doesn’t always know she’s ill. Sometimes she’s as self-aware as she can be, but most of the time she thinks everyone else around her is full of sh*t and she’s the only one who can see the truth. If we’re lucky she can recognise sometimes what's unusual, like when she called my dad one evening a few years ago and said, “I think I need to go to hospital, the TV is talking to me”.  

She’s a paranoid schizophrenic which for her, often means she doesn’t trust anyone. And it’s not like she doesn’t trust anyone to keep her secrets. Her trust issues come from voices in her head telling her that her food has been poisoned, or the neighbours are plotting to kill her, or even once she told me that “the man on the mountain is sending a flying drone to spy on me through the window”. It’s hard for her to understand the difference between reality and delusion when she’s unwell. 

My mum suffers from delusions and hallucinations the most. Delusions are a belief of something that’s not true and hallucinations are a manifestation of those delusions. But sometimes the hallucinations come first and then it causes the delusion and then more hallucinations… if that makes sense? I’m NOT a psychologist! For example, if my mum believes that the neighbours are trying to hurt her, that’s the delusion, and the hallucination might be that she hears them talking about her. 

I don’t ever try to convince my mum that what she believes isn’t true, because then she wouldn’t ever trust me and never come to me when she’s struggling. It makes sense though doesn’t it? If you believed something with your whole heart and everyone else kept telling you that what you believe isn’t true, even though you know it is, you wouldn’t trust anyone either.  

I’m my mum's best friend; she only really trusts me, and sometimes my father. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have any friends, she never really has. People don’t understand that she’s ill. And people don’t know how to help her. Because reassuring her by telling her what she believes isn’t true, is not helpful. That approach might work with someone suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder or Anxiety, giving them reassurance that what they believe about themselves or what other people think of them is not true. But for my mum that’s the last approach you’d want to take.  

My mother has been periodically institutionalised for the past 25 years. Sometimes she’ll go years without a big episode, but sometimes she will need to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Most recently she was under a Section 3, which is up to six months institutionalised. It took 6 hours for the police and paramedics to get her out of the house, because she hates going in. You can’t blame her! It’s not the nicest of places to be! But once she’s there, she’s on the mend. 

Public perception of my mum has never really been good. The now-grown-up neighbourhood children knew her as the crazy lady in the street, and often knocked her door and ran away. She usually gets a few eggs thrown at the house on Halloween, because she will never answer the door as she’s too afraid. She knows what people think of her, and because of that doesn’t like to go outside so much or interact with other people. That’s one of the ways I wish she wasn’t so self-aware. If only people understood schizophrenia more. If there was more education out there. Then maybe people like my mum wouldn’t be so afraid of judgment. 

After over 30 years of being on medication, it has taken a great toll on her physical health too. She’s on the maximum dosage possible, and for the past 7 years has had a severe tremor in her hands as a result. She can’t do a lot of things that you and I can do with ease, like get dressed, open tins and bottles. She needs a lot of help now, in spite of only being 64.  

I’ve always known she was different. And yes, growing up with a severely mentally ill mother is difficult. But I always remind myself that however hard it’s been for me, it’s been 10x harder for her. Because she’s the one with the illness. Regardless of her illness, she has been the best mother I could have ever wished for. I still need her as much as she needs me.  

I’ve shared a lot of brief information about my mum, but what I really want you to know is that she’s a person, just like anyone else is. She’s a mum, just like yours. She read me bedtime stories and sung me songs, she threw me up into the air for fun, she took me to the park to feed the birds and she gave me all the wisdom of life that she has ever learnt. She’s not some crazy knife-wielding lunatic like some people and the media/pop culture make sufferers of schizophrenia out to be. She’s massively misunderstood. And I wish more people knew that.  

Thanks for reading – Anonymous