Dealing with those with mental health issues

Previously I mentioned to you that my father had contracted poliomyelitis when young and as a result was left with a noticeable limp. Whether poliomyelitis, other of life’s encounters, familial tendency or a combination of all or some of these, caused his depression, I’m not sure. However I do know that I lived knowingly with my father’s clinical depression for around eight years until I left home.

 Actually the effect on me as a child was probably indirect. For instance I thought his melancholy, sometimes-introverted behaviour was just his type of personality, not part of a mental problem.

When I was around fourteen I recall my dad standing up, dropping a tray of food and bursting into a cascade of tears when Johnny Young sang an old Beatle’s number, “All my loving” on television on “Young talent time”. Something about this lovely song for him triggered an emotional breakdown.

Naturally I was clueless as to what was happening as I a young teen was totally focused on myself and suffering my own “normal” teenage breakdown with its usual consequences of melancholy poetry, mood swings without rhyme or reason, dark paintings, outrageous music, anti-establishment protests, weird clothing and holding to a belief that I had been adopted because I was nothing like my non-understanding parents.

It was a miracle that my poor mother survived those years with any sanity. Although she had endured her own private hell at around thirty-five years of age (before my time) when she experienced a nervous breakdown and lost her voice for nearly three years as a result.

You see we are all in some way shape or form mentally imbalanced. In fact some form of diagnosed mental illness affects one in five people during their lifetime. I recall my first verbal communication with my father regarding my knowledge of his depression.

I asked him what medication he was taking and he reacted with a horrified denial of having clinical melancholic depression until the following day when he asked me how I knew he had it. I told him that it was obvious i.e.: he seemed always sad, didn’t show much interest in anything, kept saying things were hopeless, didn’t seem to sleep normally and he ate very little.

He was shocked. You see stigma had taken its toll. It got in the way of acceptance and understanding and therefore, early diagnosis which could have made all of our lives a lot more livable.