The Blues

The Day I Met the Angel Gabriel

On August 31, 2010, in Barrow Pushing, Life, by Rosie

If you’ve ever been trapped inside your noggin, you know that there’s not many places you can go. Nowhere exists that is free from worry, apathy, sorrow, debilitating thoughts, self doubts. If you’re really ill, it’s like trying to hold a conversation with someone across the table while one person says things in one ear, another does the same in the other ear.

You should try that sometime. It’s extremely unsettling. The voice in your left ear might be saying something like ‘you need to get out of this thing. Run, run, run!’ while the other voice suggests ‘this person wants to lock you up. This person thinks your evil …’

All the while, a third person sits across from you, asking simple questions like ‘how was your day?’

Last post, I wrote about a society which (rightly and justly) provides individual rights for people, protecting them from being committed against their wills. The mentally ill person needs to seek help, something that can be impossible to do when they are on the verge of psychosis or in the midst of a depressive episode.

It’s like a double-edged sword — in years gone by, people might have been institutionalized for the wrong reasons, dispatched to the wrong place, and the canopy of treating the mentally ill threw a shroud over our society. Asylums. Shock treatment. Bedlam.

As psychiatric medicine made inroads, so did treatment, to the point where we’ve gone to the other extreme. We seem to be suffering for it. No beds for emergency care, no intervention when people are struggling and don’t have the insight to ‘seek help’, no medium ground. Although our country has management (and quite effective strategies once someone is critical) we have no way of helping the nearly sick.

So? Where’s the balance? I’ve written the last couple of posts on mental health and have offered no solutions, yet it’s a hot topic in Oz at the moment given The Newton’s interview about Matthew and the recent, drug-based documentary from footballer Ben Cousins.

Not to capitalize on the misfortune of others (or make a statement regarding either case) these recent examples do raise things that are often swept under the Lucky Country carpet. The link between marijuana and schizophrenia, the idea that ‘addiction’ is obsessive and incurable, the notion that mental health requires monitoring, intervention, continual attention for the patient.

And it doesn’t differentiate. Scholar, athlete, blue-collar worker, tradie, musician, attractive, dowdy, dorky, young, old.

Perhaps like anything, it’s one of those ‘nasties’ that we don’t really pay attention to unless it affects someone that we know? Fair enough too! It’s fugly, exhausting, grotesque — a hydra-like monster that never seems to go away, but lurks in the brain until there’s another spot of weakness into which it can plug its tentacles.

Tentacles of low self-esteem, hate, anger, bitterness, depression, mania, hopelessness. And the list goes on.

September 24th is Red for Ruby day. It’s a simple initiative but considering the breadth of Facebook, it’s one that could be really effective. Wear something red on that day and remember young people suffering from mental illness in all parts of the world. Although RfR day focuses on youth, my thoughts will also be with the elderly and ‘more mature youth’. Their fights with the bogeymen of the brain are every bit as real and debilitating.

Thanks to Aimswalsh for the link to Red for Ruby.