Talking about mental illness helped mum understand her depression and unify our family. How to start that conversation
Anthea Rowan’s mother has battled depression for decades. From a young age, her family had an open dialogue about mental health. She explains how best to open up and talks to doctors about why it is beneficial
“We need to talk about mental illness the way we talk about the kitchen sink, in normal language that will carry it beyond a clinical view,” novelist-turned-psychologist Carolyn Slaughter once said to me.
I learned this early on. The madness that descends with mental illness was, ironically, part of my normality. My mother became ill when I was 12. There was no way of avoiding it when your mum is admitted to a psychiatric ward. You just need to sit down and address the elephant in the room: the enormous gap her illness gouges.
You especially have to talk about it when you’re the eldest of three, and when it’s the 1970s and nobody else wants to talk to your dad about it – especially when he wants to talk.
Whether he was too afraid to do so himself, or because it was a smart way to involve his eldest child in a conversation about her mother – I also found myself talking about mum’s mental illness to her friends after dad encouraged me to call them and ask them to please visit her in hospital.
“Of course darling,” they said, and then, confused, they asked, “But why? What’s the matter with her?”
She has depression, I said. Dad had given it a name, this peculiar, invisible illness and that was a really good thing – giving it a real name, made it a real illness.