I Am NOT Brave!

People paid good money to go and see the inmates of Bedlam.  I'm thinking of charging for personal appearances on the bus, in the shops, etc. (Imagine if we all did that! They'd soon see how many of us there are and be bellowing for Something To Be Done.)

                                 
One of the most common comments people make  since I left The Regency Town House is "You're so brave."

Not, I hasten to add, because I've left the Town House, but because I tell people why I left.

I also hasten to add, to anyone who has said those words to me, that I appreciate what you're saying, and the spirit in which it was said. But it just isn't true. I never have been.

Oh, I don't deny that I've done things which might seem brave: dragging my kids from one continent to another with a couple of private detectives one step behind might seem brave - but it wasn't. I was petrified the whole time. It took nearly a year 'till we were safe, and for all that time my stomach churned, my legs got wobbly, I could rarely sleep ... I was scared stiff.

Some people said I was brave to have survived 17 years of violent and sexual abuse from my husband; others that I was brave to have left him. Are you kidding me? Terror consumed me the whole time: there were times I even wet myself, when we were together.

 I'd stand there, dribbling and snotting and tearful, while hot urine gushed down my legs - and feel such shame at my feebleness I'd feel devoid of all hope. And then a child would cry out from their bedroom...and you wipe yourself down, go in and whisper comfort because, if you didn't, then who would? It's not bravery.

And neither should it be considered "brave" to tell co-workers and friends why you're leaving them. I've lived with having a mental illness since I was 12 and no bravery's involved there, either. It's just the cards you were dealt: for some it's diabetes or a tendency towards carbuncles, for others it's a slight malfunction in a couple of synapses.

There definitely is something wrong with how a culture deals with the whole subject of mental illness if bravery is a prerequisite for coping.

Y'know. Australia was at about the same stage as in England is now in regard to Mental Health - and that includes the funding - in the late '90s and early 2,000s. Yet now, practitioners in the Mental Health sector here in UK adapt some of the strategies Oz (Australia) practises, and speak longingly of how the Australian system works.

And how did it get turned around?  Certainly not (initially) through  Government support and initiatives. Or more funding. Or Referendums.Nope - it was through putting the loonies in charge of the asylum!

I was originally approached by Rotary to  speak on the radio about Mental Illness, as they had taken up the cause of doing something about the fact that Oz had the highest suicide rate of young men in the world. From then on I travelled up and down my coastline talking to schools, women's groups, Service Clubs, businesses...and gathering up more and more people into the fold.  People formed Support Groups facilitated by people who had lived experience with mental illness, then whole groups run by people with lived experience...and by god, things got moving.

It frustrates me, it maddens me (dangerous thing to do to a loonie!), and it makes me unbelievably sad that in England, where millions more people have lived experience, bringing with them skills and expertise in every occupation from Psychiatry, to Office Management,to the Arts to practical fields, could get behind a concerted effort to do something - but it isn't happening.

 Struggling futilely through acres of red tape, ingrained class structures, asinine H & S protocols, a lack of knowledge about how to treat people with mental illness; a few disparate and struggling initiatives manage to surface.  Most of their programmes finish when the meagre funding runs out at the end of the financial year. Nothing unites them, they disappear in a welter of budgets, acres of bumf, and complete invisibility.

So look - I am NOT brave.  Not in the least.  I've talked about the unseen activity in my brain to thousands of people. And it isn't bravery that fuels me. It's all the people that don't know what to say when someone mentions the illness from which they suffer. It's the many people who have told me they've been struggling for years but can't tell anybody.  It's those whose careers get cut short once they've suffered some sort of mental breakdown. It's the families that fall apart in the face of mental illness. It's those who are convinced their lives are over when they get diagnosed.

So not only do I not have a brave bone left in my body, but I feel such a loss of hope that anything will change, that I don't feel I shall ever come right again. And that's very, very frightening.