Recovery Journey...

EnRico* is South American and has been a consumer for over ten years: Recovery, it’s a journey and the journey only will end when your life ends. The quality that you can bring to your own journey is going to be fundamentally based on your own understanding of yourself.

You learn to come to terms with the fact that you might have to take medication for the rest of your life…or that you are going to have limitations in the sense that you cannot work 9am to 5pm, seven days a week or five days a week.

Lena is from mainlaid China and suffers depression: I find the hard thing about recovery is the isolation. It has limited my access to a lot of services. The isolation from my family is really difficult. When you come from other countries, there are a lot of complications; my qualifications weren’t recognised, you can’t get a job. You don’t know who or where to seek help.

Theresa lives with depression. She is from El Salvador and came to Australia 19 years ago, she is also visually impaired: Coming to Australia was a very big change in my life especially because when I came, I didn’t have any English and facing that was very hard for me because I also have a visual impairment. Trying to accept my visual impairment was hard and because of that, I recently have been diagnosed with chronic depression. It’s been a very big change and a long experience of recovery.

Kerryn is 23 years old. She is from a Samoan and Australian background and migrated from New Zealand three months ago: Isolation for me was the biggest issue. When I lived in NZ by myself just flatting for 6 years, the nights were the hardest time for me. Because during the days I could keep myself occupied but when night-time came it got really depressing and I got really lonely and felt really isolated, it was like I would be just sitting there and the room would like just start to spin.
Fortunately for me I found a place to stay at a rehab location home and community - Stepping Stone Trust in Christchurch, NZ, and that was good. Because I was in the home in the community I was able to make friends because I lived with a whole bunch of people like me with all these illnesses and so that built my social skills.

Dealing with the health system…

Carmen is recovering from schizophrenia. She migrated as a refugee from Guatemala: My family has a political background, that’s why we are here. When I got sick, my doctor had to sign a paper for me to go in [to hospital]. I was not allowing anybody to take care of me. I was by myself and she has to sign the papers and they regulated me in the hospital. I spend 23 days in the hospital. We have a lot of bad experiences in my country and I was telling them and the nurses were telling me, ‘If you keep going on telling your stories, we won’t believe you any more, because they aren’t true.’ But they are true. The people from Centrelink who were dealing with me, had to explain to the doctor in ‘the hospital what kind of background I had.

Kerryn: Yeah I didn’t actually tell the Psychiatrist anything about me but she wasn’t very sympathetic anyway. When a person is meeting a Psychiatrist for the first time its not like you are going to trust them straight away.

Katrina is Kerryn’s mother. She is from a Samoan background and has been caring for Kerryn for three months: I felt that some of these Psychiatrists and Psychologists must have dealt with all these different people from different backgrounds...I really do feel they should take up a course in understanding ethnic cultures.

Stigma…

Carmen: I grew up with the stigma of mental illness and I was very afraid of the other people in hospital… Now, I have my pills. I haven’t been back to the hospital since 1999. Now I am having a treatment with my doctor.

I was afraid to tell other Latin Americans about my mental illness because of the stigma in the community. I went to Harmony Place and my counsellor, she is Latin American too and she understood me. Now I am looking for a job because I am an architect.

Katrina: In the village where I was growing up, people make fun of people that had a mental illness. If there are relatives that are coming from town that are healthy, you hide your ill person away and that kind of stuff. But now when Kerryn first came to live with me I knew that I’m going to have problems with my own people. So when they ask me how come your daughter is not working I just say my daughter has got an illness and I tell them straight out and all they go is ‘Ohh’ and I don’t get any more response.

There are people, a lot of people with mental health problems but no one talks about it. Nobody talks about it.

Lena: I am involved with a lot of people who suffer from mental illness and they say they are scared to tell anyone because they are looked down upon by the society, looked down upon by their friends, or they are looked upon as though they want to benefit from Centrelink you might be cheating, or you don’t want to work or something like that.

Kurt is a CALD consumer and educator from Canberra: The mental illness educations and the groups I work with are Tongan, Finnish and Chinese communities. And what came out of the Tongan community was the stigma that happens to your family. ‘Don’t marry that family, they’ve got mental illness in that family.’ We don’t say don’t marry that family, they’ve got heart problems, we don’t do that.

Caring...

Katrina: It is important for a carer to have the understanding. I think it was the biggest burden for me because I have no prior knowledge of what’s going to happen. I’ve attended all these workshops on mental health but when she came, she would go out and then come home and want to talk to me. I did not have the understanding nor the empathy. She wanted to talk to me and I’m already in bed but I already offered ‘anytime you come home come and talk to me’. But you know as a carer I need to have that kind of understanding to put up with anything but it’s hard.

Christine is a carer from an Anglo-Australian background. She joined the group out of interest in the issues: My very best friend who is first-generation Italian, suffers from mental illness and watching the impact of her culture on her - is very interesting from my perspective and I often don’t know how to help her because I don’t understand her culture well enough.

Change and support needed…

Jean is a multicultural mental health worker: Change is needed at those big levels at the educational level. I had to throw out everything I know, because my tendency is to see things in a very western frame. My clients said: ‘No, you know if I show up 15 minutes late that doesn’t mean I’m being resistant, or 2 hours late that means something completely different in my culture.’ We have to start at these macro levels, we can’t expect the consumers to come in and do all the changing but unfortunately to some degree I think that’s what happening.

Lena: I think the consumers need to support each other, I found that after I divorced with my husband, I mixed with the other consumers that suffered mental illness. From 8.30am to 5pm you are covered but the problems that happened to me occur after that period. After 5pm you’ve got the Lifeline but when you talk to the Lifeline the person doesn’t know you.

I need for myself to have the telephone calls back to my friends in China, sometimes I need to talk to them, I just needed to have the mother tongue. I want to speak in my own language instead of English.

Kerryn: I find that I don’t really like talking on the phone unless I’m just getting to know people very slowly and once you start initiating actual contact and seeing them, then its really good [on the phone]. It is not personal, you can’t see the person, you can’t communicate non-verbally, you can’t look at body language and mannerisms.

Kurt: There is one guy that suffers schizophrenia who loves cricket and when he plays cricket there ain’t no voices, he’s just immersed in his cricket. The guy who visits him, they do that a lot, they play cricket in the driveway so when he visits he’s getting that distraction for an hour.

Things that would help…

Carmen: The medicines. Understanding the medicines. How they work, the side-effects and understanding your illness.
Information has to be in Spanish – not all the people speak English. It has to be on the radio and then by writing. Make some leaflets or some gatherings, presentations…

Carlos: I’ve been a consumer for more than 10 years and I think that it would be a good opportunity to use people like ourselves to go into the community and spread the word, because at the end of the day, it’s about communication and education.

Boris is a consumer from various ethnic backgrounds, he is an experienced educator and advocate: Provide an education to the kids, the students. There are a lot of ethnic oriented kids in the schools that I go to and you’d be surprised as to how interested they are.

Carlos: I also think that when you make changes at that level of education you might be able to help themselves understand their whole family. My father suffered from chronic depression for many years in South America but he was sort of left behind, he was there and lived with us and all that, but we didn’t know what was going on with him, we didn’t know about depression.

* All names have been changed.