Alice - Interview 03

Age at interview: 55

Age at diagnosis: 54

Brief Outline: Alice was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with severe depression a year ago. She has suffered from anxiety for most of her life, and depression since her mid to late thirties. She has managed her mental health with the aid of anti-depressants, counseling, and support from friends and family (previously her mother and now her children) as well as various health professionals over time. Alice currently takes antidepressant medication (venlafaxine) which she finds to be helpful.

Background: Alice is a qualified lawyer who works as an academic. She has five children and a close group of friends. Her main pastimes are reading and fishing. Alice is separated from her husband. Ethnic background' Anglo-Australian.

More about me...

Alice experienced anxiety and fear throughout her often precarious childhood and adolescence, feelings that would haunt her throughout her life. This was largely a result of the stress associated with growing up in New Guinea with a severely disabled brother whose needs eclipsed her own, an absent father (away working) and a mother who survived three bouts of melanoma. Alice’s mother also had to cope with the death of one baby daughter and a stillbirth as well as a disabled child.

 

In addition, despite Alice’s mother’s encouragement and support, her father repeatedly tried to dampen his daughter’s academic ambitions suggesting she aim for vocations such as teaching or nursing, and discouraging any pride in her achievements. In Alice’s view, this together with her own efforts to not further burden her parents by misbehaving led to a tendency as an adult to set herself impossibly high standards, and to routinely place the needs and interests of others ahead of herself.

 

In addition, she had to grapple with the significant challenge of single motherhood (of five children) after her marriage broke down, while completing her tertiary studies and trying to establish her career. Throughout her life, Alice’s mother had been her greatest supporter, and so her death when Alice was 40 came as a great blow. In her words, it forced her to ‘grow up’. However, the journey has not been an easy one. Initially she felt incapable of processing the loss of her mother, let alone confronting the anxiety, depression and anger that was gradually undermining any sense of happiness or stability. For a decade or more, Alice continued working and mothering, managing to maintain her job and her social network, and propping herself up with a series of different antidepressants, counsellors, alcohol, and a voracious reading habit. A new relationship begun during this period had little prospect of surviving, and brought with it fresh unhappiness. It was not until issues at work a year ago finally prompted her to seek a formal diagnosis of and treatment for her mental health problems.

 

This has proven an enormously positive step for Alice. She has stuck with the process of trying to sort out her medication regimen, and is now on a medication and dosage that work well. She is consciously trying to become more assertive, confident and accepting of herself, enjoys mature and supportive relationships with her friends and children, and is able to turn to them for honest advice and help when needed. She doesn’t believe one is able to ever recover from depression, however now knows that with the right support, it is still possible to enjoy life.

 

Alice was angry at her father for putting her down instead of supporting her academic endeavours.

I’m angry at, you know, my father, for his sort of, you know...’ I mean he, he, his message to me all my life was, you know, good, average, mind you there’s nothing wrong with being good and average either, but when it’s told to you in that way there is, you know, comparing me to other people who were much smarter and brighter and who would end up as, you know, fabulous academics or lawyers, doctors, Indian chiefs, and I was the, you know, good average, you know, go and do nursing because that’s what, you know, girls who aren’t academic do, or did in those days, that kind of rave, so I was angry at that, angry at whole lot of things and after Mum died of course the anger started coming up more and more in different ways… 

Alice felt relief when she was diagnosed by a psychiatrist, as had experienced long-term...

So…yeah, and I needed to hear what he had to say ‘cause he didn’t - I said something to him and he said, ‘I’m not, I – save that for the counsellor’. I thought, ‘Ooh, lots of empathy here, come on’, but I know what you know, he, he was after diagnosis, a diagnosis not , not to listen to the sad story kind of thing, so, ah, and that was good ‘cause that was the approach I favoured anyway by that stage… and I was able to walk out saying, ‘Well OK, no I’m not this, I’m not that, I’m, you know, basically I’m, as he said, severely depressed’. And he said, ‘You suffer severe depression, it’s been getting worse since your mother died, you probably had the foundations for it long ago in your childhood but it’s come, it’s built up, you know, since she, she died and , and, and it’s severe depression,’ and he said, which I found at the same time as challenging, also reassuring, he said, ‘You do know it cost you your career,’…and I thought, ‘Yes, you know, it did’. I resigned a few years ago, …and I resigned from tenure…So, yeah, it did…It – and that, that, it was challenging to hear that but it was also an enormous, it was also an enormous relief because I felt, I felt someone had now diagnosed what it is I can actually now deal with it. I don’t have to, you know, take a medication that I don’t know anything about or don’t know what it’s for or you know, so it was the best thing I’ve ever done. 

Alice went to counselling for many years, but never found an approach that really worked, and...

Everyone says go to counselling, you know, I did, I did ten years of counselling to the point where a counsellor once said it was enjoyable counselling me because he found it challenging because I was teaching him something. So that’s the day I decided counselling wasn’t challenging me and it was time to go now, so I’m, I don’t do that, but ten years, I gave it a fair shot. Ah, but you get tired saying the same thing over and over again, you know, it’s not in the viewing of it necessarily that helps, it’s, there’s got to be something that can shift... your patterns and you know that people would say, ‘Oh, and have you tried cognitive behavioural...?’, ‘Yes, yes, I have’, ‘Have you tried...?’, ‘Yes, yes I have’. You know? And it was just frustrating me that nothing would work. So I thought, well that’s it, you know, nothing will work, I’ll go on that premise.

Alice's mother was her main support, noticing when things were ‘not quite right'. Her experiences...

However, having said that, when I look back to my younger years I’d say anxiety was probably a theme rather than depression… ah, a lot of anxiety, anxiety about whether, you know, I’d done something right or whether it could’ve been better or, you know, wasn’t good enough or things like that and then as I got older, ah, and as, as I say, my late thirties or mid thirties I think, I probably would’ve started to get a bit depressed but at that time my mum was still alive and she - ‘cause she lived fairly close and we were all very close as a family, she was pretty good at noticing it and not labelling it - so she would make me laugh, she would pick me up, she would change the scene that we were in, she would do something that would change the whole mood. So rather than sit around and feel glum or anything like that or worry too much, ah, I always had her around to, I don’t know, lift things, and, and you know, help with the kids and things like that, because mum, when mum was around my marriage at that time was not great for various reasons and yeah, because I was studying so hard I needed her to help and to do, you know, things. 

 

 

But I think all these sort of, you know, threads of anxiety somehow and fear have just threaded their way through my life. And my mum was always the, ‘Yes you can do it, you can do whatever you want in life, you can do it, you can do it’, my father was always that ah… ‘You’re just a good average girl, nice personality’, so you know, it’d be, ‘You’d make a nice little nurse or a nice little teacher or something like that,’ whereas mum would be, ‘Whatever you want to be is fine’. So when I chose law, fine you choose law, that’s, you know, how it goes. So when she died I was floored. In fact I couldn’t actually take it in. I couldn’t seriously take it in. I did the eulogy at the funeral… I can’t, I can only, only vaguely remember that…and basically I just…yeah, just kind of went on as if, not as if nothing had happened, but I couldn’t allow it to process properly.

 

Alice described feelings of guilt and hopelessness while on sick leave for depression. However,...

So, I had that time off, I felt guilty the whole time' the place couldn’t cope without me, oh my, I’d left my subject up in the air, those poor students, this was yet another, yet another example of how hopeless I was, you know, I couldn’t even hang it together, ah, so really I don’t know that the leave, the time off did much good…the antidepressants helped a bit, and then I went back to work. 

 

Well, nowadays if you go, if this happens, if you have those sorts of episodes where you’re medically given time off, when you return you’ve got to go on a return to work plan. You know what I mean? So you’d, you’ll only go back half time or part time or. I wouldn’t allow that to happen, for the simple reason that… for the first couple of years at uni I was on short term contracts, 12 month contracts, and then I’d gone for the big permanency and I’d only just gotten it, I just gotten tenure. Well, I didn’t want to take stress leave off because…well, I’m - makes me useless, doesn’t it, it makes me look, you know, we shouldn’t have given it to her. So I kept trying to stitch it together, stitch it together. 

 

Alice believed her depression stemmed from growing up in the shadow of her disabled brother and...

And then I thought, ‘But the reason people don’t understand, oh well they might, that I was so good is when you live in a family where there’s so many tragedies happening I was the only normal child…you know, one died, or two died, one’s disabled, I’m normal’. I felt guilty that I was normal. I felt the stress of being normal because I had to be better than normal, and I couldn’t misbehave because what would be the point in me misbehaving when my brother’s about to have grand mal seizure? I mean, how do you weigh that up, you know, who are they going to listen to? The person is having a tantrum and wants to be heard or the child that actually needs medical attention? And see, I lived 18 years with my brother, so that’s 18 years. Mum said to me once before she died, ‘Are you angry? Do you resent him? Do you resent him?’ And I said at that time, ‘No, I don’t, we had great life’. But then, you know, not long after that I sat down I thought, ‘Yes I bloody well do…I do.’ Because we couldn’t have dinner parties, we couldn’t have many friends over, we couldn’t go places, we couldn’t, we didn’t do anything because it was all about that and I think…I think that depression stuff is really, has come from a lot of factors - ah, low self-esteem, the you know, I always felt seen and not heard because as soon I was seen and heard, I was directly told by my father that it was ungracious to boast, or ungracious to say that how well, how well you do things, or, ‘People don’t want to hear people boast’. So, I learned straight away if I won something or I did something then no, and my father told me when I was in first class, when I didn’t topped the class, that academically I wasn’t very talented. 

 

So, I took that on board and so when I did do something good and tried to say, ‘Well look what I...’, well no, you, it’s, you don’t do that, that’s not right, so I really learnt that. So when people said to me later on in life, ‘Gee that was well done’, no, like, ‘No, we don’t talk about that’. So you feed that along, you know and yeah I sort of felt that I was nothing, I was invisible and nothing and all I had to rely on was my personality which I did rely on. I relied on being nice so that everybody would get on with me. I was nice. I was good…