In 1990, I was born into a family with a long history of emotional distress from convict resettlement in England, to the potato famine in Ireland, and ending with both families converging and settling in Australia. In 1996, at the age of six, I was removed from my mother’s care and began living with a foster family. We were removed from my mother’s and father’s care proceeding my parent’s divorce, resulting in my single mother’s deteriorating maternal mental health. She expressed her desire to end her life with her three children including myself, alongside my father’s violence at the time, and an unstable family income with limited support from my grandparents. 

In 1999, at age nine, I lost my mother to suicide. I still remember the day I was told by my foster carers that she passed away, of which I had four foster carers within the space of four years. We were kept back from school by our foster carers, who requested we play arts and crafts in the dining room. I knew something was immediately wrong as were we taken by the social worker every morning for the one-hour long drive to primary school. The social worker closed the sliding door facing the kitchen to speak with my foster carers, and I could sense, and almost knew what was going to be shared with me. My foster carers and the social worker, who was a younger English woman, expressed their sadness in that our mother had passed away. I do not recall the detail of what was communicated, but I do remember crying for hours, maybe even days, there was a part of me that was relieved for her, as the last time I saw her was in a psychiatric hospital where she told me how much she loved me and would miss me. I knew deep down this was her saying goodbye, and to this day I wish I had that moment with her again. 

I reread child protection case notes some years later, which identified I was an over parent-ified child and quite resentful at my mother’s lack of presence. Through my hyper-vigilance of responding to the trauma I began to behave out of survival and safety, socially engineering leadership skills and qualities necessary to protect myself and my younger siblings who I viewed as my children. I cared for them alongside with my father and grew up in significant poverty due to a lack of income security from the government, and the immense task of being a single parent. My father did an amazing job, and I hold no resentment towards him as he has transformed his life and become a family carer peer worker in a psychiatric hospital. In addition, after my mother’s suicide, I lost all contact with my maternal grandparents, due to the shame that they expressed over losing a daughter to suicide. The complexity of this situation was confounded in the fact that they blamed my father for my mother’s death. We bear too much pain for their own complex grief, loss and trauma as they lost their daughter many years prior to her passing. My grandmother had told my mother she did not want children, and to this day I question the circumstances from a feminist perspective to understand and forgive her behaviour in contribution of my mother’s mental health issues prior to meeting my father. I even question my grandmother’s sexuality and desire for having children, having felt forced like many women to have children in the early seventies. This picture paints an intergenerational and intersectional story resulting in a childhood littered with abandonment, abuse, neglect, complex trauma and grief. No wonder we developed mental health ‘dis’orders, it appears to be a healthy adaptation to consistent adversity.

The grief, loss and trauma I experienced were two-fold, as my brother lives with ‘Schizophrenia’ as defined by psychiatry and my sister lives with ‘Bipolar Disorder’ and ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ as defined by psychiatry. They are both beautiful, but sometimes their challenges overwhelm me, so I support them from a distance for self-care. Much of my adolescence and young adulthood involved advocating for their care, treatment and support with psychiatric hospitals and services, alongside other intersecting service systems that are broken, disjointed and uncommunicative. It appears intersectoral service systems such as housing and income security, are designed to entrench us in ‘dis’ability or diverse ability and disadvantage.

In 2020, I am living with what Psychiatry defines as ‘Bipolar Affective Disorder’ which has enabled transformative personal insight. I am a suicide survivor and almost took the path my mother had at a similar age. I thought I was going home to be with her. I now fear to live, I do not fear death. Severe and enduring mental distress often results in deep critical self-reflection, advanced empathy and spiritual enlightenment. I found myself through my adversity, I found my purpose, I found self-love, and I found out that I did not have to take the same path as my mother. At other times, my diagnosis caused distress for me and others. The medications adversely impacted weight gain, lethargy, tiredness and poor sexual libido, which are ironically all essential to gaining a sense of recovery. Then there were the hospitalisations. I have spent over six months of my life in and out of psychiatric hospitals and many more as a service user in the community accessing clinical community mental health services and psychosocial disability services. Although distressing and unpleasant, without the treatment I am sure I would not be alive. I view medication as training wheels on a bike and utilise them as needed when acutely distressed, where I know biomedical interventions are necessary. Through my diagnosis, I learned the importance of human connection and belonging, as this instils hope and purpose for living a meaningful life. Most of all through my lived experience I found my voice, I felt empowered and somewhat enraged by the system designed to address the genesis of distress – trauma – with an unfounded focus almost solely on the biomedical perspective. I thought this to be an epistemological injustice in how we privilege particular knowledge over others based on how effective we perceive objectivity to be in collecting social phenomena, which is a flawed hierarchy much like biomarkers in Psychiatry. Through my lived experience I developed leadership skills and a deep purpose characterized by a drive to be there for others in the pursuit of bettering humanity.

I applied this desire through study. Through my university studies, I enrolled in social work, as I was passionate about social justice and human rights. I graduated into forensic mental health supporting lived experience consultants for the forensic hospital and forensic community mental health service program. The consultants advocated for service users in a systemic advocacy role providing feedback to the executive and board who administered the forensic state-wide service. This work led to an interest in the lived experience profession and survivor movement, and the beginning of my passion for partnering alongside persons experiencing mental distress through my own journey.