Diagnosis, psychosis and hospital life in the modern-day mental hospital

Once upon a time, I landed in a mental hospital after having a nervous breakdown in my early twenties when I lived in Johannesburg, and my brother who longed to belong found a new group of friends and started to experiment with drugs. I had been living on my own for nearly a year in Johannesburg, at a shelter for abandoned women and children in Hillbrow, then later I moved to the Salvation Army in Simmonds Street. The Salvation Army was situated in the central business district of Johannesburg close to the banking quarter. The Star newspaper and the ANC offices were just down the road.

When I still lived with my paternal aunt Babs, in my mother’s childhood home, in the evenings when I came home, my aunt would fix me a hot plate of food and we would watch television. She and her son would simply just ignore me. I longed to talk to them about my day but they were totally indifferent to me. My cousin had his own life, a girlfriend who lived in Lenasia, a poor Indian community. He would visit her often. In the evenings, it would just be my aunt and I. She never spoke to me as she to my other female cousins. They had straight hair. My curls never behaved, and the cousins who never spoke to me, their skin colouring was lighter than my own complexion.

Sometimes they would laugh at me, and I also would laugh and smile, trying to get the joke, but I knew the joke was me. They were not kind to me. No, none of them were. My maternal Uncle Davy had the same attitude towards me, as did his sons. It has now been over two decades. I have never seen my cousins, never spoken to them on the phone, they never wish me happy birthday.

I have tried to stay in touch with them with regular texts and messages about my life, but to no avail. They have made it crystal clear that they do not want to be in my life. My sister has done the same. For example, I do not know where she lives. Somewhere in Europe, came the clipped response. You don’t need to know more than that, Abigail. She tells me she is lonely and homesick. I begin to speak, she cuts me off and says she hasn’t eaten, she must go on now. We say our goodbyes. My sister has deleted me off all her social media. That is how much she is embarrassed by me. The sister who is a mental patient, who has been hospitalised countless times, who has relapsed repeatedly, who has tried valiantly to recover.

My sister and I don’t speak. We haven’t spoken for years. This is stigma.

Stigma is estrangement from family.

At the time, it hurt me a great deal. I was confused.  I knew it was my fault. That I had been a mental patient. The labels that people have used, “Crazy,” “Mal”, “Insane”.

When I want to talk to my sister, or attempt to ask her about her, she will then begin to talk and behave very strangely towards me.

She will ask, “Did you take your blood tests,” and not ask, “how are you, are you coping?”

Even though she can afford to get fulltime care for my father who is recovering from radiation therapy, she expects me to do everything. Cook, clean, run the household, wash, dress my father, help him to the bathroom and wipe him, cut his nails. She never sends any money, so we are at the mercy of the kindness of strangers and my mother’s ingenuity. My life has come to a standstill. I want my sister to be more involved in our family, but she has rejected my brother, he is not white enough for her, my brother cannot pass for white, and she doesn’t speak to me because I am a mental patient.

My sister passes for white, so now in the environment she finds herself in she plays white, and she doesn’t want the people in her life to know that she is Coloured. In fact, I would go as far to say that she is ashamed of her brown-skinned father. This same, brown-skinned father put her through a very expensive university, the University of Cape Town.

All I wanted was for my mother to tell me that she loved me and that she was proud of me, but that never came. I have always had difficult relationships with the women in my family. These are the types of women who think that if you are unmarried and you don’t have children at my age, that you must be a lesbian.

I witnessed domestic violence in my maternal aunt’s home and alcoholism. I would never have left home to go and live there if I knew the extent of the family problems in their household. My aunt was an alcoholic and a drug addict. She abused sleeping tablets and over the counter medication. So, it exists on both sides of the maternal and paternal family in my life.

My maternal grandfather was a policeman and a functioning alcoholic.

There were many functioning alcoholics in my family.

My paternal grandfather was in the Second World War. He received four medals. The medals are lost now, somewhere in my childhood home. When he returned from the war, I think most certainly that that experience had traumatised him very deeply, like so many other young men, and he began to display the traits of chronic post traumatic stress disorder. He developed epilepsy and began to have seizures. The community had a cruel nickname for him. They used to call him, “Fitzy.” This was because of the fits he used to have. No respect was given to him because he was a veteran and that he had a brain injury because of the war.

I suppose people forget.

When they call a mental patient mad, is it fear or ignorance or not being educated enough to understand the dynamics of the brain when it is faced with being abandoned by the same gender parent.  I have forgiven my mother. She was the only one who came to visit me in the mental hospital. Whenever I was discharged, she was the one waiting for me outside of the nurse’s office. I would be carrying my things, my behaviour corrected, I was now deemed fit to enter the domain of society to make a positive contribution to society. I don’t think my doctor’s helped me, maybe the psychiatrist, maybe the Muslim clinical psychologist but I don’t think the doctors were treating it with a holistic approach. They were treating the signs and the symptoms, and there is a pill for every sign and symptom under the sun.

How do you treat suicidal ideation for one? They will answer that the medical fraternity will answer, for every sign and symptom we will give you a pill, if you misbehave, we will give you an injection that is filled with a sedative so that you can sleep. So, little is understood about brain health and mood disorders and learning and intellectual disabilities. Not enough. Not enough.

It is a painful thing to air your family’s dirty laundry in public, but someone had to do it. Someone had to do it for us to survive the pains and tribulations of our past. My father’s humiliation at the hands of the Secret Police, my mother’s shame at my mental illness, her sacrifice. I sent myself. I started writing poetry at an early age. I was eight years old when I started to write. Putting pen to paper, penning my thoughts. My work, my literary contributions were published in The Weekend Post, in the children’s section. To this day, I hope that Uncle Frank and Aunt Betty were proud of me in some way. There is still a part of me that still wants to believe that these two individuals existed. In some small way, they existed for me.

I had no way out of my home situation. My father was manic depressive, and my mother found solace in the community she found at church, her friends that she gossiped with. I will never have any knowledge how much of my father’s life and activities outside the home she disclosed. They were two separate individuals living past each other. They had myself and my siblings in common. I think that is why they are still married to this day.

They were caught up in a turbulent time, it was the heyday of a brutal and violent regime, apartheid. My upbringing was sheltered one. Our parents were overtly protective.

My brother and I were inseparable early on. But things began to change when he turned to drugs and the druggie lifestyle. He was a credit risk analyst at Nedbank but lost his job. He went to three rehab facilities. The drug addict is more vulnerable, than dangerous, they say, but I don’t know about that. There was often domestic violence in the home. I am frightened of my brother, and so I walk on eggshells around him. This experience has also let me become aware of the signs and symptoms of what to expect when someone knocks at the door and they are obviously high but need something to eat to curb their withdrawal symptoms

Black youth in high school wish to excel and change the world but in the area in which I live there is gunfire, night and day. The brown child has become invisible and there is no safety net for them.

This is the poor legacy of apartheid.

Not just the memory of bulldozers, demolished homes and buildings, but apartheid affected the psychological framework of every individual, during that regime, and now even in a post-covid world, even now, in a post-apartheid dispensation we need psychological healing, psychological release, and psychological repair.                     

It was a long ride to freedom at the back a car of a church sister and brother from the Gospel Hall to St. George’s Hospital. I was being escorted to a mental hospital by the police that my brother had telephoned. My brother a high functioning drug addict had me certified for the second time. I had not been hypomanic, manic or psychotic. My brother wanted revenge. I thought to myself, who would look after my father who was in a wheelchair? It was still the time of stigma, when the mental patient was despised and ridiculed from the benches of a church pew.

I try and understand that time but find that I cannot.

I only see my mother’s face now in memory. What could she do but handle me, this difficult child that she knew, that she had to face daily in her home? She had to face my daily exploits bravely. Food had to be prepared, and delicious meals had to be cooked quietly into perfection. I believe if I had been born to a different mother, my life would have been completely different. I would have married and had children, left a different kind of legacy.

What needs to be discussed at length is the child of the parents who fought in the liberatory struggle, and what needs to be defined is their psychological framework, their economic upbringing and social setting, the environment they find themselves in today, in every page of their lives, every chapter that is a product of their imagination and creativity, by the book.

The virulent aftermath of the promulgation of the forced removals, black and brown families being unceremoniously dumped in low-lying, easily flooded areas with poor soil. Schools were built, libraries, shops, a police station, a hospital that began to lack resources.

Now we must look to the future, and not to our past but to understand the future and its direction, we must look to the past and build monuments for the slain heroes who went to war for the colonialists. Freedom is coming, sang Leleti Khumalo but we are still waiting for change, transformation and the economic design of the infrastructure of South Africa.

We must understand what stigma is and how we can combat it, how we can fight it, by understanding that having a mental illness, is like heart disease. It is like having diabetes. Psychosis can be likened to having a chest cold. Rest, recovery and healing must take place before the individual who is experiencing psychosis recovers completely.

The origins of my psychoses have always been maternal estrangement and being severely bullied in primary school, at Alpha Primary School, and then later at the High Schools I attended, Collegiate, which was a Model C school, Intec, Damelin, Hill College, St. Marks, and the Writing School. There are still today racialistic tendencies in the manner of how one is addressed in the classroom. Unfortunately, it didn’t just stop with the learners in the classroom, the educators bullied me to.

At home, I didn’t have anyone to speak to about my emotional pain. I became a student leader involved in politics and was Chairperson of Students Representative Council and then later Secretary. I was also Chairperson of the student representatives who served on the Governing Board.

A depression sufferer can always wear a mask, but life is a drama. In my early twenties while working at a top television production company in Johannesburg, I had a nervous breakdown, and there are times I still grieve the young woman I was at that time, she was so innocent, so full of life, still waiting to become beautiful.

I am not that woman anymore.

I haven’t been back to Johannesburg in a little over two decades. I have no wish to go back there and confront my past. It is a mental illness to live in the past.

We all know someone who has a mental illness. Alcoholism and drug addiction is also a mental illness. Stigma means “disgrace”.

I have learned that one must be happy and virtuous and be the best possible version of themselves.

Today, my brother and I are writing about our experiences. He is working on his memoirs, and I write poems, trying to push adversity and negativity aside, just trying to make sense of the health of the brain. The mind, after all, is the final frontier.

In this write-up, I am only getting started on explaining how painful stigma and the ignorance around mental illness is concerned.

My own psychosis originated from maternal estrangement, abandonment and neglect issues from the same-gender parent and bullying. I was systematically bullied from my primary school days, at mental hospitals, in high schools, and by educators, but especially my mother, and siblings.

Next, I will talk about bipolar mood disorder and how it has affected me to the extent that I have never been able to hold down a nine to five job and achieve to live independently from my family.