On Stigma

One of the things that I wish to address is the alienation, rejection, social isolation and the longing to belong that the mental patient has to suffer from and endure.

I want to talk about psychosis, my personal experience, my lived experience, my thoughts and feelings about genetic predisposition. I want to talk about being genetically predisposed to mental illness. I believe the root cause of mental illness stems from and originates in childhood. There are underlying causes and factors that I wish to discuss with you. I believe we have it all wrong.

It is not genetic predisposition; it is intergenerational trauma. It is our collective trauma that we carry within the blueprint of our consciousness and our cells, deep inside our mitochondria.

I believe that psychosis and mental illness differ from person to person. It is based on the individual’s upbringing and their parents. As Tyler Perry says, he was raised by two wounded children; his parents were deeply wounded and scarred since childhood. As I said in my interview with Wesley Pepper, I told him that my parents were two wounded children raising a wounded child.

My own psychosis originated from maternal estrangement and bullying.

I was bullied from an early age by my mother.

Then, at school, I was bullied by fellow learners in primary school, sometimes in standards above me, and then teachers. In high school, I was excluded from my peer group. I didn’t have any friends. I was a mute. The only outlet I had in Standard 6 was to do well academically and to perform on the stage. I loved acting. Since a very young age, since I was four and a half years old I went to Speech and Drama classes. My teacher was called Miss Marjorie Gilbey. She came from England and was a progressive thinker, a kind of Helen Suzman. I went to a predominantly white school in high school for a year. It was hell. It nearly destroyed me. It was the Coloured girls with straight hair who picked on me. Not that they could pass for white or were in a better position financially than I was.

It was really tough. By the end of the year, I was mentally unwell. I could not cope; I was not coping academically. But I still found the time to take part in after-school activities and my love for the stage. I landed the lead role in a house play, but when I went onstage on opening night, the audience was a white audience, and I was laughed at. It was very, very difficult, and it soon took its emotional toll on me. I was only sixteen years old. I had never been faced with racism before. I will never forget my years at Hill College, a school for high school dropouts, and people who wanted to complete their matric; I only lasted there a few months. Again, it was difficult to adjust. The other students came from wealthy white families. My mother has had her own fair share of problems growing up. She had problems falling pregnant. It was five years before my parents had me.

My mother had a younger brother who died in a car accident, so you can probably imagine the pain and the anguish of that loss, and how that impacted my mother’s psychological framework. My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was a functioning alcoholic. He was also a Coloured policeman during apartheid.

I always felt my mother never loved me. My father tried to protect me from my mother’s mood swings. He would take me out for ice cream during the week. He would read his newspaper while I ate ice cream in a fancy white restaurant. This was post-1994, after the democratic elections, but we would sometimes get looks. My father never paid any attention, so neither did I. I was oblivious to racism until Collegiate. Until I was 16 years old. I had my first episode of major depression in childhood. It began before I was eight years old, and after I turned eight, I started writing. It not only offered me escape from the burdens of what I was experiencing at home, it offered me psychological repair, healing, restoration, and release.

I don’t think that my mother treated my brother and sister as harshly as she has treated me. My sister passes for white now. My mother can pass for an Afrikaner. This is what people did during apartheid: if they were light-complexioned, they classified themselves as white and moved to the white area. I remember Seth. He was white of complexion. One day he announced to me and another boy that his family was moving to the white area and they were now white.

Yes, at times I do dislike my mother. I don’t like how she speaks to me. I don’t. It hurts that I do not have a relationship with her and that oftentimes, she rejects me. But it was my mother who bought me my first typewriter, and it was my mother who took me to Speech and Drama classes. I love my mother. I will always love my mother. It is the behaviour I don’t agree with. I dislike the behaviour. When one understands the psychological framework of the person, one can understand where the person is coming from, and then there is room to forgive. I understand my mother’s history, her upbringing, her wounds, and that is why I regard the women of Africa, not just mothers, but daughters too, as the treasures of the continent. To me, my mother is that treasure. As all the women on the continent have faced challenges and difficulty, as all women have had to practice emotional restraint in the face of unfathomable adversity, that is how I see my mother. Pain is universal.

All pain is universal, all pains of motherhood are universal.

As Elton John sings, “I’m still standing. Yeah, yeah, yeah…”

After centuries of colonialism, and then independence, and now collective weakness on the continent, Africa is still standing.

Yes, I am still standing because of my mother’s bittersweetness, and her acts of devotion, because whatever she felt for me, call it love, my mother’s love, it was unwavering during the recovery periods of my bipolar mood disorder. It was my mother who fetched me from the psychiatric hospital when I was discharged. Can you imagine what a mother goes through when she discovers her child, her daughter, is disabled, that perhaps her daughter will not be able to marry and have children because they are mentally ill or suffer from mood swings?

My father has always told me that everyone suffers from mood swings, and it is my belief that many, many are undiagnosed. Yes, the “walking wounded” are undiagnosed. They have never been hospitalized, never taken medication, and are unmedicated. This is a very dangerous situation that we are in. When we look at the social ills that we face in society today, from the church, from stigma, from the mental patient being rejected by maternal and paternal family, being rejected from the family unit that is supposed to offer emotional stability, emotional security, loyal support, food on the table, a roof over the head of the child predisposed to mental illness and unconditional love, then, yes, the family unit is supposed to be nurturing and positive; it is supposed to offer safety and protection, a nurturing and loving space and environment for personal growth and development, for self-improvement.

The mental patient is a vulnerable individual. The mental patient is misunderstood. We need to treat, as a society, as the church, as individuals, we need to treat the mental patient with care, with concern and with kindness, and not with fear and suspicion.

Perhaps mental illness is not a disability, perhaps it is the weight of emotional pain carried for far too long?

And when I speak of mental illness, here I am speaking of major depression, clinical depression, adverse childhood experience, the experience of trauma that the body hasn’t resolved or come to terms with. One has to understand mental disability and physical disability. There is a difference. There is a spectrum. Yes, bipolar mood disorder can disrupt daily life, but people from all walks of life must be treated kindly. When they display an erratic mood or mood swings, they must be treated with kindness, not derision or anger.