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ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Jo Buchanan
has been a primary school teacher, high school teacher to teenagers with special
needs, counsellor and psychotherapist and is the mother of the theatre, film and
television actors Beth, Simone and Miles Buchanan. Jo has worked
in a voluntary capacity for ARAFMI (Association for the Relatives and Friends of
the Mentally Ill) in Sydney, the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross and inside Mulawa
maximum-security prison and the former minimum-security Norma Parker Women’s
prison in N.S.W., teaching meditation and creative writing. Jo’s first
book, Wings of Madness (New Holland,
2004) told the story of her family and how she dealt with her sister and nephew
developing schizophrenia in the 1970s, her nephew’s suicide in the 1980s and
her son’s battle with clinical depression throughout the 1990s until the
present time. Since the
publication of Wings of Madness, Jo
has undergone training with SANE FOREWORD Copping it Sweet looks at one of the most important issues in mental health care today
– providing reassurance, support and education for the 2.3 million family
members and others who care for and about someone with a long-term mental
illness. Jo Buchanan’s reason
for writing Copping it Sweet is to
offer the support and information she wishes had been available to her many
years ago. Drawing on her own, often painful personal experiences of caring for
her sister, nephew and son as they each in turn developed a disabling mental
illness, she has put together a sensitive, practical and long overdue book for
helping carers in this situation. Jo shares with readers the strategies she has
found particularly valuable in maintaining her own mental health along the way
– writing a journal and meditation. Throughout the book she also reinforces
one of the most important messages for carers – to look after yourself as
well. Caring for people with mental illness places new
challenges on family and other carers who face a range of undue pressures due to
significant gaps or inadequate practice in mental health services. This is an
unacceptable position. Family and other carers play a major part in supporting
those affected by mental illness, yet practical support and training for them in
this role is inadequate or non-existent. Callers to the SANE Helpline
remind us every day about the enormous pressures carers carry when this training
and support is not available. Providing information
and support for families and others who care for people with a mental illness
makes perfect sense. The evidence is very clear that when we provide support and
education for carers, involve them in treatment plans whenever appropriate,
train and resource mental health professionals to involve carers, then outcomes
are much better for everyone concerned. So what are we waiting for? Barbara Hocking Executive Director SANE INTRODUCTION A
carer is someone who provides care and support for a parent, partner, child or
friend who has a disability, is frail aged, or who has a chronic mental or
physical illness. This book is targeted mainly at people caring for those with
mental illness because it is in this area that my own personal experience lies. In a recent survey of
the 2.3 million carers in Carers become so used
to supporting the vulnerability of others, we find it hard to allow others to
see and support the vulnerabilities in ourselves. We often experience feelings
of loss associated with our caring role, grieving for ‘what could have been’
or ‘what once was’. Mental illness is not like cancer, diabetes, or M.S.
With mental illness, people don’t know what to say, or how to respond. They
are usually embarrassed or fearful. Unlike patients hospitalised with a physical
ailment, those suffering mental illness never receive visitors. They never
receive phone calls, cards or flowers. There are no Red Nose or Daffodil Days
for those living with mental illness. Carers constantly feel
out of our depth, as if we have lost control of our lives. We fight never-ending
battles with officialdom and lose hope easily. § My
experiences in coping with someone suffering mental illness began in 1975 when
my sister Christine, who lived next door with her five-year-old son Joel, first
showed signs of schizophrenia. Back then, I had no idea what was wrong and I
felt frightened. I had never had any experience with mental illness. There was
no real public awareness of it as there is today. I kept visiting her – up to
twenty times a day – in and out of her house – mystified, terrified, angry
and shocked at her bizarre behaviour. For example, Christine, who was an artist,
was obsessed with painting a true masterpiece, but all she painted was black on
black on black. At night she anointed my nephew with peanut oil and they both
prayed to the canvas of thick black paint for hours. It took months for me to
get her the help needed. My GP eventually sent
me to a psychiatrist. When I explained everything to him, he said it sounded
like schizophrenia but he would need to see my sister personally. This was
impossible because Christine didn’t believe she was ill. When matters
worsened, I was forced to organise her involuntary hospitalisation with the aid
of a doctor and a policeman. From this point on, I took on the care of my nephew
along with my three children. I was a single mother. My sister spent a lot
of time in hospital and during the time spent at home, would often refuse to
take her medication. Life was chaotic. When Joel turned
fifteen, he was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. When he was nineteen, he took
his life in a violent way. My sister was offered no counselling or support at
any stage, even though she was suffering schizophrenia and had breast cancer.
Until this time, her cancer had been in remission but Joel’s suicide had a
devastating effect on her and she died eight weeks later from the cancer. Some years later, my
son was ‘self-medicating’ with alcohol and marijuana to numb a debilitating
depression that he had not told anybody about. He was a lead actor with the
Sydney Theatre Company. By night he would perform at the Sydney Opera House and
by day he would be rehearsing their next production. In his mind, he just had to
keep going no matter how he felt. Nobody had any idea he was suffering
depression. He gave the impression that he was ‘on top of the world’. After
an opening night, everything caught up with him and he disappeared. His career
and life as he had known it until then, ceased. He remained missing for weeks. In the sixteen years
since then, he has been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and
endogenous depression. He has tried to kill himself numerous times and, to date,
has had 500 ECTs (once called ‘shock treatment’). Our mental health
system is not only letting down those who live with a mental illness, but also
those who care for them. Patients are often discharged from hospital too soon.
Often the hospital fails to notify community services that a patient is in need
of follow-up care. Never do they
suggest follow-up care for the carer. As a carer/mum, I have had to stay strong
for my son and also for other family members. I have ‘stayed strong’ for
decades. Most carers are the same. Their resilience is extraordinary and they
save the community and Australian government over $18.3 billion
per year. On one occasion, before
my son attempted to take his life with an overdose, I took him to the Emergency
Department of the closest hospital. He had not got out of bed, showered or
changed his clothes for two weeks and was eating only cereal. Although he had a
history of suicide attempts, on this occasion he hadn’t voiced the intention
to take his life so he wasn’t admitted. But he was obviously seriously
depressed. The person who interviewed him at the hospital rebuked him for ‘catastrophising’.
I knew my son was deeply troubled and
capable of anything but nobody listened to me. What would I know? I was only his
‘Mum’. I drove him home and
went to the shops for food. On my return, I looked into his room and saw pills
scattered everywhere and a suicide note. He was hardly breathing. I rang the
ambulance. My son was close to death on that occasion and remained on a heart
machine in the cardiac ward for a couple of days. After a prolonged
period of coping with dramas I was unprepared and untrained for, I discovered I
had developed a coping mechanism albeit one that was neither healthy nor safe. I
wasn’t aware of developing it. I simply noticed it one day – as if observing
something about somebody else. It always happened at the time of an acute
episode with my son. I noticed I would slip into a numbed, dream-like state, yet
still be capable of going about my work as usual. I was ‘there’ and aware
and doing my work, but at the same time, I ‘wasn’t there’. I realised that
I had been like this before, at times of crisis. I then noticed that I was
driving through red lights without thinking. After several similar
incidents, I became worried. I looked up a textbook that described psychiatric
illnesses and discovered descriptions of de-personalisation and disassociation.
Anne Deveson describes a similar experience in her book Tell Me I’m Here. Instead of driving through red lights, she once
drove on the wrong side of the road. De-personalisation is a detached state of
being that enables someone enduring relentless, never-ending stress to simply
keep going. Most long-term carers
experience either aberrations of behaviour, physical or emotional illness, loss
of jobs or marriage breakdowns but we don’t seek help for fear of being
admitted to hospital ourselves. Who then, would look after the ones for whom we
are responsible? It is now 2006, over
thirty years since my sister was first diagnosed with schizophrenia. Although I
am not a medical doctor or even a nurse, I have three decades of experience as a
sister, an aunt and a mother of loved ones living with mental illness. I have
made mountains of mistakes but I have had plenty of time to learn from them. After the publication
of my book Wings of Madness, I was
approached by SANE At a crucial turning
point in my struggles as a carer, I created some simple strategies to help me
cope that cost little or no money. Copping it Sweet contains those strategies. I collated them for you, the carer. They
won’t wave a magic wand and miraculously change your circumstances but
hopefully, what they will do, is help
to change the way you feel about yourself and consequently the way you
experience your circumstances. The other purpose of
this book is to assure you, especially if you live in an isolated area of rural Click on the cart below to purchase this book:
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