Suzi - Interview 10

Age at interview: 50

Age at diagnosis: 21

Brief Outline: Suzi has struggled with depression since childhood, and believes this stemmed from the effects of the way her family dealt with her mother's schizophrenia. She has attempted suicide and self-harmed a few times, however now feels she can deal with her depression. She sees a psychiatrist regularly and takes antidepressants (fluoxetine).

Background: Suzi works part-time as a nurse, and lives with her dog. She is a Christian, attends church regularly, and enjoys keeping fit by going to the gym. Ethnic background' Anglo Australian.

More about me...

Suzi has experienced depression for most of her life and remembers first having suicidal thoughts around the age of eight. Her emotional distress first became evident to others when she had a sudden episode of not being able to speak in her final year of primary school. She relates this and her subsequent mental health problems to her experience of growing up with a mother who had paranoid schizophrenia, and a father who failed to protect their two children from his wife’s illness. As the focus of her mother’s delusions, obsessions, and verbal abusiveness, Suzi was particularly affected. Her father never explained his wife’s illness to his daughter, and compounded her confusion by becoming over-reliant on her for the emotional support his wife could not provide. As well, the family was socially isolated and Suzi was unable to discuss her upbringing or her mother with other people, having internalised her parents’ secrecy.

 

At 21, the disordered eating patterns which had started during Suzi’s adolescence developed into anorexia severe enough for her to require hospitalisation. She thinks anorexia was both a coping mechanism and a nonverbal cry for help, and it was around this time that Suzi’s GP diagnosed her with depression. During her five-month hospital stay she began to open up about her family with her psychiatrist, which led to the decision to leave home when she was discharged. After leaving hospital she began a short-lived relationship with one of her nurses, which led her to stop seeing her psychiatrist as she felt obliged to conceal the relationship from him. With no new coping mechanisms in place of her anorexia, Suzi struggled to cope with the ‘mountains of fear and anguish and hurt’ facing her.

 

In the years that followed Suzi graduated from university, found employment, lived in various share houses before moving into her own place, kept up her fitness (long-distance running), and maintained a network of friends. However this was all a ‘façade’ and behind it, Suzi coped with her pain by self-harming. Throughout this period she was voluntarily hospitalised a number of times when she was suicidal, and saw a psychiatrist intermittently. She is amazed now that she survived these years.

 

Things became marginally easier for Suzi in her 30s, when she found an antidepressant that 'suited her’, and was referred by her GP to a psychiatrist whom she liked and respected. She also became a Christian which provided her with a strong motivation to stay alive despite her suffering. Although medication eased her symptoms it didn’t ‘take away what was underneath’ and Suzi continued to be hospitalised from time to time.

 

After many years of therapy and working through the legacy of her family history, Suzi now thinks that her depression may also be related to her ‘particular brain chemistry’. She has tried stopping her medication but found it too difficult to cope without it. She now regards herself as having ‘chronic depression’, and accepts that she may need antidepressants for the rest of her life. At 50, Suzi feels that her situation has stabilised somewhat and she has the 'tools' she needs to be able to manage her mental health. She continues to see her psychiatrist regularly and take her medication, works part-time as a nurse as well as doing volunteer work, exercises regularly, attends church, and cares for her dog. She has more ‘good days' and fewer 'bad days’ than ever before, and says that the fact that she counts among her friends several ‘well’ people as a good sign.

 

Suzi grew up in what she described as a 'toxic family', which had serious emotional and other...

And it was, we were a very secretive sort of family, we were never allowed to talk about what happened in the family. But – I didn’t know, and that’s probably why it was as bad as it was, but my mother had paranoid schizophrenia.

 

But I was never, ever told that she was sick. I had no indication that she was sick. Unfortunately as I was growing up all her delusions focused around me, and I don’t know - it also seems like she never actually bonded with me at all. 

 

But I know that she thought I was wicked and evil and I remember her telling me that at age of four, and… She was really quite bizarre, my life was bizarre. She didn’t like me being away from her so I, you know, she was very protective, and so, you know, you can’t go out and play, you can’t do this, and you can’t do that. So I was with her a lot but she didn’t like my presence. And I got the full brunt of her craziness really. And if Dad had ever given me any indication that she was not well, things might have been a bit different.

 

I think that was the worst thing, is that I grew up not having an inkling that she was sick and thinking that everything she told me was the advice of a normal mum. And it wasn’t.

 

My dad he seemed to care about me. As I grew older I realised that it was a selfish thing. ‘Cause he didn’t care enough to take me away from my mother, which would have been… put my life in a whole different thing. He didn’t care enough that he would even explain to me or tell me that what she said was wrong. He heard what she said and he never, you know. And – even when I got older, when I started to realise and when I was anorexic and when I got out of hospital from the anorexia and they were, we don’t want you go back to that home situation, you will just get sick, the home situation is completely toxic.

 

And he just started pleading with me to come back, and when I first went into hospital, I only put on about half a kilogram and he was pleading with me to leave the hospital because he couldn’t cope with my mother without me.

 

And then when I’d put the weight on he was, ‘I wish, I wish you’d never gone there. I wish you’d never, I just wanted a fatter old you, and I don’t want this person who is going to move out.’ You know, and I think he would have preferred me to stay there and even perhaps die of the anorexia than actually leave. So...

 

Well, for my father I became like a partner in all but sexual things.

 

I used to think Dad was so wonderful because he never got angry. I used to get angry with my Mum. We used to fight something shocking. We used to get so angry and ah, you know, Dad would say to me, ‘There’s nothing worth getting angry about. You know, you’ve got to go and apologise.’

 

But when I went into hospital for the anorexic and I wasn’t in the situation, he and Mum fought, started to fight all the time. And I realised that he could get by without it, because I was doing it for him.

 

And he could sit back and say, you know, being angry is bad and feel self-righteous about not being angry. But in fact he was using me to do it for him. And then, yeah so, I didn’t realise. So the whole family was really just messed up.

 

What people, what you saw was very much not what you got. 

 

Suzi described her respect for her GP as instrumental in her not acting on her suicidal thoughts...

Yeah, I did back then. I can’t even remember now what the, what the plan was then but… yes this GP sports medicine doctor that had been so absolutely wonderful to me and even let me ring him at home and stuff, he wanted me to see someone, a psychiatrist and I was so much against it. And… but when I was so sure that I was going to take my life, I thought about him and I thought, gee people are going to turn round when I kill myself and say, ‘How arrogant were you that you were looking after her and didn’t send her to a psychiatrist’. And I didn’t want him to wear all that. And I didn’t know who to go to. I eventually said, ‘Yes all right I’ll go’. And he said, ‘Well who do you want to go to?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know anyone’, so I let him choose someone.

Returning to her Christian beliefs helped give Suzi strength.

Yeah. I became a Christian. I was brought up a Christian and then I lapsed as an adult. And I became a Christian about 15 years ago. And it is, it is a big help in my life. I remember passing - lots of churches have these billboards out front and have these terrible sayings or things on it, you think, oh, you know.

 

But I remember going past one that had the most amazing effect on me. I went past and it said, “Jesus would rather die than live without you.” And it just struck me, I think I had to pull over at the time. It was just really strange.

 

I went home and I knew my Bible well enough to know that that’s actually consistent, in that they do say that Jesus would have died if you had been the only person in the world. So I went home and I put on the computer and I typed, “Jesus would rather die than live without me.” And I stuck it on the wall and looked at it.

 

I think that’s the first time I ever felt the slightest bit of, ‘I might be okay’, you know. I’d always hated myself. I’d always thought that I was this terrible person and at that moment, I just thought, well, maybe I’m worth something? 

 

So yeah. Religion can have a lot of positives and a lot of negatives. I don’t find Christians always very supportive of people with psych illnesses.

 

So I just don’t go to a church that says that. I go to one that is more enlightened. I find it really, really helpful. I find going to a good service on a Sunday can refill me enough to kind of, you know, you get beaten down by the world and it fills me up again. And I feel stronger to kind of go out and face the world again. 

 

It had a lot to do with me still being alive and my doctors know that. Sometimes I get cross with them and say that they use it. But I feel very much that I gave my life to Christ, it’s not my life to take. If I wasn’t a Christian I don’t know if I’d be here and my psychiatrist doesn’t think I’d be here either.

 

Suzi appreciated her GP, but 'hated' psychiatrists. This view was transformed when she found one...

I became so - I hated psychiatrists! I developed this sort of, – it seemed really intellectual, but it wasn’t that – I really developed this hatred for psychiatry and what they did, and… And I was seeing a GP who was actually more a sports medicine person than anything else. So I was still running and doing a lot of sport. And he was fantastic but he could see that mentally I was going downhill. 

 

And I went to see this guy and I was so aggressive towards him. 

 

And I told him right from the start, I said, you know I only came to you because, I was going to kill myself and I didn’t want my psychiatrist – my GP to get, you know, and I said to him that he was a psychiatrist so he must be used to people killing themselves, so I didn’t care that he would be upset, and that that was the reason I’d come to him. 

 

Seventeen years later we still joke about that! Ah… Yeah.

 

Yeah my psychiatrist is a rather unique person, I think. You know, he took me on when no one else wanted to touch me. No one wanted to look after me, I had a – you know, and he took me on and he stuck in there all the way through all the bad stuff.

 

He’s always respected me. He’s always, treated me with the utmost respect. He’s always, um… had a mind to my abilities and stuff and so, you know, there’s times when - there was a time recently where he produced a, a book to be given to healthcare professionals about how to diagnose and initiate treatment and everything of people who have a mental illness, and he kind of gave me a copy of it and asked me to go home and read it and see what I thought. When I came back I kind of said, oh look, you know, I thought this was, you know, page 4 was this and he, you know, kind of looked at it, ‘Oh you’re right, we’ll have to change that’. And stuff like that. So it is nice, I know that he appreciates the skills that I have. We have a mutual respect of each other. He’s quite a remarkable person. 

 

The first dog I had my psychiatrist got me to have because I was so unwell I shouldn’t live alone. He was so scared I was going to kill myself and he thought that if I had a dog with me, I might think again before killing myself and having the dog locked in the dead – in the house with a dead person.

 

That was very good thinking on his behalf. Because there was quite a few times when I very strongly resented that little puppy sleeping next to me because I just wanted to end my life, and I thought of doing all sorts of things like going out to a motel and doing it in a motel and leaving a message for someone to go and get the dog out of the house and all this sort of stuff.

 

But I just couldn’t bring myself ever to do it when the dog was there. So, so it was very smart thinking from my doctor and it worked a real treat, yeah.

 

Suzi contrasted her behaviour when hospitalised for anorexia with when she was hospitalised for...

But then when I became suicidal the sort of way you were treated was a lot different. 

 

It’s almost like when you’re anorexic you seen as so good, you know, the perfect little perfect person and all you need to do is eat and you’re sort of an easy person for them to look after you. You just, you know, you just sat there and you just put the weight on, and you know, you didn’t have any outbursts of difficult behaviour and no one absconded and it was very nice. And once I’d been stripped away of that maladaptive coping mechanism of the weight loss, I became a lot more angry, a lot more volatile.

 

And I was never aggressive like some of, some patients I was in with. But it, there was a lot more sort of… antagonism… 

 

For Suzi, recovery meant having more good than bad days and having friends who are well.

Recovery means… having more good days than bad, being able to engage with well people. I know when I’m in hospital – initially when I used to go into hospital you’d meet these wonderful people and you’d want to keep friendships going afterwards. And no, that doesn’t work. That’s not a good idea, you know. I find, yes, you’re nice to people and you help the people when you’re in there and then when you finish you go your separate ways. Because those people you sort of know because for whatever reason you both were in a crisis at the same time, which I don’t think is a good basis for a friendship, so I want to be relating to well people when I’m out of hospital. I think, the more friends that I have who are well, I think that’s a sign of wellness. I think you can have a lot of unwell people, but in fact earlier years, like back with the anorexia, I made some really good friends with some of the people I was in hospital with then. 

 

Very important, one of the most - you know, there’s certain things that you learn along the way that help you, and when things start to go down and you start to feel like you’re falling back into the depression all you can do is just pull out the things that have helped in the past. 

 

So when you’re getting, when I’m getting down, I think, you know, no I won’t just roll over and go back to sleep. I will force myself to go to the gym or to go out and do something because nine times out of ten that will help, and I will force myself to interact with the dog. There are certain things, you know, and you just grab on to those and, you know, sort of pull yourself along with those. The dog is one of those.