0:00

ABC Listen, podcasts,

0:02

radio, news, music

0:05

and more. Hey,

0:08

Sana here from All in the Mind. In

0:10

the last couple of weeks, mental illness and

0:13

violence have been in the headlines after

0:15

two separate stabbing attacks in Sydney. In

0:18

the Bondi Junction attack, a lot

0:20

of the reporting has focused on

0:22

Attacker Joel Couchy's diagnosis of schizophrenia

0:25

as a teenager. Now, schizophrenia is

0:27

a complex mental illness, and one that

0:29

has shrouded in so much stigma. So

0:32

we thought it would be a good time to

0:34

replay an episode from our archives on

0:36

one family's experience living with the illness

0:39

and the stigma. So here

0:41

it is. Growing

0:44

up, Elfie Scott knew something wasn't quite

0:47

right with her mother. But

0:49

she didn't know what, and she never

0:51

asked because no one in her family

0:54

ever spoke about it or acknowledged it.

0:57

And that silence coloured everything.

1:00

I think that it's kind of a feeling that

1:02

you can probably relate to if you have any

1:04

secret in your family, really, any sort of like

1:06

open secret that nobody's willing to discuss.

1:09

And I knew that there

1:11

was something that I didn't understand,

1:14

something strange happening in the house,

1:16

something inherently different about my family

1:18

that I couldn't express. Elfie

1:21

is a journalist and writer now,

1:23

and she's expressing the unspoken in

1:25

her book called The One Thing

1:28

We've Never Spoken About, exposing our

1:30

untold mental health crisis. But

1:33

I want to backtrack a bit here and

1:35

tell you a little bit about her family

1:38

first, beyond the illness that affected them. Because

1:40

in many ways, Elfie's childhood

1:42

was wonderful. So

1:45

my family consists of my dad, who

1:47

worked as a banker for many years.

1:49

I also have an older

1:52

sister. She works in Canberra.

1:55

And my brother lives in

1:57

London, and we're all incredibly

1:59

nerdy. people I think is fair

2:01

to say. And what did your mum do for

2:03

work growing up? My mum worked

2:05

as a flight attendant for a while

2:07

and that's how she met my dad

2:10

and then while we were growing up

2:12

she used to work for very random

2:14

companies she worked for a while for

2:16

Unilever and the only reason I know

2:18

that that's the company she worked for is

2:20

because she used to bring home like cases

2:22

of lip than I'd say. Amazing. I never

2:24

drank water until I was like eight years

2:27

old. It's like a kid's dream. I know

2:29

right? But this is

2:31

also what Elfie remembers. My

2:34

mum's hallucinations got so intrusive

2:36

to the point that she would

2:39

call police to come to the

2:41

house because she thought that people were trying

2:43

to break into the house. She would believe

2:45

that people were trying to break in to

2:48

try and steal our identities and rifle

2:50

through our papers so everything was always locked. I always

2:52

remember the house is just like kept

2:54

like a safe basically and like deadlocked

2:56

at night and things and

2:58

yeah I mean the the

3:01

terror that she must

3:03

have experienced would have been

3:05

appalling. The more I learned

3:07

about my mum's experience

3:09

the less I understood

3:11

how she survived it

3:13

really. This is All in the

3:15

Mind, I'm Sana Kedar. What Elfie

3:18

didn't know until she was a teenager

3:20

was that her mother had schizophrenia and

3:22

stigma is a big part of why her

3:24

family never spoke about it. I

3:27

wanted to write the book because I

3:29

started to see more and more social media

3:31

dialogue and commentary around mental health

3:34

around anxiety and increasingly

3:36

ADHD but I

3:38

also noticed that in that there

3:40

was a dearth of information or

3:43

dialogue around schizophrenia and other complex

3:45

mental health conditions. Today

3:47

the silence and stigma around

3:50

schizophrenia. So

3:56

my mum is Indonesian,

3:59

she is an Indonesian. and Muslim

4:01

immigrant. She is very

4:04

funny and fun-loving and she's like

4:06

hugely social. She has this tendency

4:08

to go out with friends for

4:10

like five-hour long lunches and things

4:12

like that. Lovely. Yeah, so she's

4:14

always out and about and yeah,

4:16

she's just a really lovely, kind,

4:19

empathetic person. And so

4:21

how old was she when she

4:23

started developing schizophrenia? She

4:26

would have been in her late 30s

4:28

after she'd had two children. So she had my

4:31

sister who would have been a toddler at the

4:33

time and my brother who was a baby. So

4:37

she'd sort of started to experience

4:39

auditory hallucinations when my brother was

4:41

a baby and then

4:44

I was born maybe five years or

4:46

so after that and I think that

4:48

what happened was she became pregnant and

4:51

that intensified the symptoms for her, it

4:53

intensified the stress that she was experiencing.

4:56

And yeah, so by the time that I

4:58

was born she had experienced a

5:01

full-blown psychotic episode that

5:03

had to be managed through medication whereas

5:05

she hadn't been medicated up to that

5:07

point. Oh wow, gosh. And so from

5:09

your own childhood, what's your earliest

5:12

memory of having a sense that something wasn't

5:14

quite right with your mum? It's

5:16

really hard to put a finger on it. I think

5:18

that having grown up in

5:20

what I would call like a

5:22

fairly average, very happy middle-class suburban

5:25

household, it's really difficult to say

5:27

if there was any definitive moment

5:29

where I felt like something was

5:31

wrong or off. But you

5:33

know, there were absolutely signs from a

5:35

young age now looking back retrospectively where

5:37

I can say, you know, mum was

5:40

talking to people that weren't there, mum

5:42

was using a broom to like hit

5:44

walls at times when she

5:46

felt a bit aggravated or thought that maybe

5:48

there was somebody in the house because of

5:50

her hallucinations. And there were

5:53

absolutely other things like delusions and

5:55

paranoia that she experienced in

5:58

the sense that she thought that... there were

6:00

intruders coming into the house all the time and things

6:02

like that. You

6:04

know, she would say things like, shut up,

6:06

you're mean, stop talking to me, things like

6:09

that, responses to the

6:11

auditory hallucinations. So

6:13

there wasn't one single moment that really tipped

6:15

me off to it, but it was more

6:17

of an accumulation of this information.

6:20

And I mean, I

6:22

was a fairly ignorant child. So it did

6:24

take a while for me to actually clue

6:26

into anything that was really happening. And

6:28

so did you just for the longest time, I guess, think mum was

6:31

a bit funny or, you know, like that,

6:33

or that was normal? Totally. Yeah. And I

6:35

think when you're a child, like you can

6:38

normalize so much that's going on in the

6:40

household around you. And I guess

6:42

for the longest time, I really just thought

6:44

she was a slightly eccentric person, which she

6:46

is as well. Like that's another complication to

6:48

this story is that she is quite like

6:51

an eccentric out there kind of funny person,

6:53

but I just didn't understand that there was

6:56

a diagnosis behind this.

6:59

And so did you talk to your siblings

7:01

about some of this strange behavior at all? Or did

7:03

you talk about it at all? Not at

7:05

all. No, which is so

7:07

strange to say now, because we are

7:09

incredibly close as a family, you know,

7:11

we, we were always together when we

7:14

were kids, we were always hanging out,

7:17

but it just wasn't a conversation or a

7:19

topic that we were willing to aboat, really.

7:22

That's pretty remarkable because when she's speaking to herself

7:24

or speaking to people who weren't in

7:26

the room to not even have a

7:28

remark to your siblings is really surprising. Like what

7:30

do you think was holding you

7:33

back from talking to each other? Yeah, it's

7:35

a really good question. And, you

7:37

know, we would talk about it in the sense

7:39

that we would say euphemistic phrases to each other,

7:41

like, you know, oh, mum, those

7:43

are just your voices or things like that, or

7:45

it's just your illness, it's not real, it's in

7:48

your head, stuff like that. And

7:51

the reason that we never spoke to each other

7:53

about it, it kind of eludes me, I think

7:56

that part of it must have been stigma to

7:58

some extent, part of it must have

8:00

been because we were uncomfortable talking about it

8:02

and we didn't want to

8:04

say the word schizophrenia out loud. And

8:07

then I also think that another

8:09

part of it would have just been like

8:11

the culture of our household. We grew up

8:13

in quite an emotionally repressed British household, which

8:15

I'm sure a lot of people can relate

8:17

to. And yeah, it was

8:19

just kind of an uncomfortable topic that

8:22

we didn't really want to tackle. You

8:29

have a really powerful line in the book where you

8:31

say, you know, at this point where your, where your

8:33

mum is hearing voices, but you're none of you are

8:35

talking about it. You say everything's

8:37

filled 30 degrees off center. Yeah,

8:40

it's, it's a very sort of nebulous

8:43

failing, but it was

8:45

just this concept where like, I

8:47

knew that there was something that I

8:49

didn't understand and I just

8:51

felt like slightly wonky for it. Like

8:53

I felt like I couldn't totally relate

8:55

to other people because of it. I

8:57

felt like it did have

8:59

an impact on my social skills when

9:02

I was a kid as well. Like

9:04

something strange happening in the house, something

9:06

inherently different about my family that I

9:08

couldn't express. And I think that's kind

9:10

of what I was getting at with

9:12

that part. This

9:16

was how Elsie's mum initially dealt with

9:18

her symptoms too, back when they first

9:20

started developing before Elsie was born. The

9:24

terror that she must have

9:26

experienced would have been appalling, especially

9:29

for those years between when she

9:31

first started experiencing symptoms and when

9:33

she came out to my dad

9:35

saying that she was experiencing them because there

9:37

were several years between when

9:40

she had the onset and when she went

9:42

to a psychiatrist. So she must

9:44

have just been living with this incredible

9:46

fear around the house and a huge

9:49

amount of loneliness I'm sure as well. Yeah.

9:51

Wow. So for many years she actually didn't

9:53

even speak about it at all to anyone.

9:55

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That would have been awful. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

9:57

I do think part of it was just like, I don't know, I don't

9:59

know. of that is because she's an

10:02

incredibly private person, but I also

10:04

think that maybe she was

10:06

just confused and she would have felt like

10:08

she couldn't reach out to anybody because she

10:11

hadn't established her social groups yet at that

10:13

point either. It would have been really hard.

10:16

And throughout all of this, your

10:18

mom continued to live at home to raise

10:20

three children, which also is incredible that she

10:23

managed to do that while hearing voices,

10:25

you know, and pretty terrifying voices.

10:28

Tell me about that. How did she

10:30

manage that? That's a very good question.

10:33

I have no idea. The more I

10:35

learned about my mom's experience, the less

10:37

I understood how she survived it really,

10:39

because, you know, she spoke about the

10:42

burden of trying to find the

10:44

right mental health care, find the right

10:46

medication, looking after three small children. It

10:49

just sounded like an immense amount

10:51

to deal with. And there

10:54

was a part in her diary that kind

10:56

of illuminated this for me a little bit

10:58

in that she wrote that

11:01

she felt very motivated to recover and

11:06

to get by because she knew

11:08

she had three small children to look after.

11:10

And I think that that was a big

11:12

part of her motivation towards recovery was having

11:15

us to look after. And that's, yeah,

11:17

it's pretty remarkable. Even with that, I'm

11:19

baffled by her. Yeah, it is amazing.

11:21

And also amazing that you she gave

11:23

you her diaries, as you mentioned, to

11:26

access while writing this book, like, that's incredible.

11:28

What did you learn about your mom? What

11:30

new perspective did you gain on her through

11:32

reading her diaries from this time? Yeah, I

11:34

think that was a pretty remarkable moment, especially

11:37

because she had been so private for her

11:39

entire life with me, like, never really divulging

11:41

huge amounts of detail about her mental health

11:43

condition at all. And so

11:46

she'd had this international lifestyle beforehand, she'd

11:48

met my father in Hong Kong, she

11:50

had traveled around the world with him

11:52

to New Zealand and to London. And

11:55

yet when she came to Australia, she

11:57

felt deeply uncomfortable, both culturally and culturally.

12:00

really and even just geographically I think that

12:02

she felt really disconnected from a lot of

12:04

people in that move and that

12:06

was really surprising and it was actually honestly quite

12:08

sad to read. Yeah. So you didn't know that

12:10

at all before? No, not at all. And

12:13

so after a lifetime of not having talked about

12:15

it with you, the kids, why do

12:17

you think she handed you her diary? I think

12:20

that she really wanted

12:22

me to understand and I

12:24

think that is something that

12:27

kind of came across very suddenly when we

12:29

started talking about her schizophrenia is

12:32

that she had been obviously hiding this

12:34

part of her life from us as well. Like

12:36

in the fact that it was a secret, she

12:38

was burdened by that secret and she couldn't talk

12:40

to the people that she was really close to

12:43

and I think that she was

12:45

really keen to share this part of her

12:47

life really. So

12:51

this not talking about it, this extended beyond your

12:53

home as well. You write in the book how

12:55

like in your 20s you were struggling with your

12:57

own mental health issues and you

12:59

would talk pretty freely about that with

13:01

your friends but not schizophrenia. Yeah,

13:04

so I mean I had

13:06

issues with mental health from quite a young age.

13:09

So I was diagnosed with depression when I was

13:11

14 and then I had several

13:14

successive depressive episodes up into

13:16

my mid-20s and

13:18

also experienced disordered eating and

13:20

those were things that I could speak

13:22

quite openly about within my friendship group. I

13:24

don't think that there was a huge amount

13:26

of stigma around those conditions especially because we

13:28

knew so many other people who were living

13:31

with those mental health conditions and

13:33

yet I also

13:36

saw in that that I couldn't speak about

13:38

schizophrenia. I could never tell my best friends

13:40

about it in high school. I

13:43

could never really yeah just

13:46

divulge that information to them and when

13:49

I did eventually there's a part in

13:51

the book and I remember this so

13:53

clearly I told my best friend about

13:55

it and she said oh

13:57

but I've never seen your mum's multiple person.

14:00

Personalities before and I I think that

14:02

was a really clear indication to me

14:04

that you know my friends weren't

14:06

equipped to have those conversations and That

14:09

was just something that I kind of had

14:12

to live with because they didn't actually understand

14:14

what schizophrenia was. Yeah, totally I think we'd

14:16

received, you know some amount of education about

14:19

Depression and other common mental health conditions,

14:21

but we'd never heard about schizophrenia in

14:24

school and even through university I did

14:26

a psychology degree and yet I didn't feel like people

14:29

were equipped to talk about it. Wow Gosh

14:31

this whole growing up and not

14:33

talking about it with anyone like it all it

14:35

feels very lonely. Was it lonely? Ah Yeah,

14:39

just pure normal. I think

14:42

so I think it I think it must have

14:44

been lonely, but maybe not in a way that

14:46

I like consciously realize. Yeah You're

14:52

listening to all in the mind.

14:54

I'm Sana Kedar. Today the silence

14:56

around schizophrenia Journalist

14:58

Elfie Scott is the author of a book

15:00

called the one thing we've never spoken about

15:03

exposing our untold mental health crisis

15:06

and part of

15:08

the reason her family never spoke openly

15:10

about what was going on with their

15:12

mother was because of stigma and That's

15:15

a story. Elsie saw replicated over and

15:18

over as she was researching her book.

15:20

I Did reach

15:22

out to a lot of different people and

15:24

I had so many conversations with people who

15:26

were living with schizophrenia and other complex mental

15:28

health conditions and I think one of

15:30

the most fascinating jarring

15:34

horrifying parts of that stigma discussion

15:37

Was the idea that a lot of them told

15:40

me that honestly like the stigma was the worst

15:42

part of living with that condition So

15:44

the symptoms were one thing they could deal

15:47

with that a lot of them were living

15:49

on medication and that was fine but

15:51

the most Tangible impact on their life

15:54

was the fact that they had to

15:56

walk around with this label that made

15:58

people withdraw from them or

16:00

people do know about it and you're treated

16:02

incredibly differently in the workplace and you miss

16:04

out on promotions and you never know why,

16:06

things like that. But then it can manifest

16:09

in people's personal lives as well. So

16:11

a lot of the people that I spoke

16:14

to felt that they'd had friends beforehand, they'd

16:17

lived perfectly social lives, but

16:20

when their diagnosis came out, it became

16:22

very hard for people to see them

16:24

as a whole person beyond their diagnosis.

16:28

One person you did speak to

16:30

was Gabe, who talked about disclosing

16:33

his condition in his workplace and having a

16:35

really appalling experience. Can you tell me

16:37

about Gabe? Yeah, so Gabe Howard is

16:40

a man living with a complex mental

16:42

health condition in the US. He is

16:44

a podcast host. I'm not sure if

16:46

I'm allowed to plug other podcasts on this, but he is the host of

16:48

Inside Schizophrenia

16:50

that's run by Psych Central in the

16:52

US. He

16:55

told a story on a

16:57

podcast about a workplace experience

16:59

where basically he was hospitalized

17:02

for a short period of time. When

17:04

he re-entered the workplace and told his

17:06

colleagues about it, basically they criticized him.

17:09

They said he was lying to try and

17:11

get holiday pay, things like that, to the

17:13

point that he was so ostracized by his

17:15

workplace that his managers let him go and

17:18

fire him. I

17:21

think that that is a really harrowing

17:24

but also a good example

17:26

of how stigma can manifest.

17:28

It's not like people are

17:31

being taunted in the streets.

17:34

It's more that stigma is like

17:36

this quiet thing that can creep up

17:38

and can lead to you losing your

17:40

job in those kinds of situations. Explain

17:44

why you think there is so much

17:47

stigma around schizophrenia in particular compared to

17:49

depression or anxiety where we talk about

17:51

that heaps now. Yeah, it's a really

17:53

complex story and I think that for

17:56

a start, depression and anxiety are fairly

17:58

common mental health conditions. statistically,

18:00

a lot of us would

18:02

have been in contact with people who live

18:04

with those conditions. So, you know,

18:06

any sort of stigma or stereotypes

18:08

around that can be quickly disbanded

18:11

by our interactions with people who

18:13

we know. But then

18:15

I also think that it has a

18:17

lot to do with the mental health

18:19

care system and the framework that wraps

18:21

around people. So with depression,

18:23

you know, it's, it

18:26

is for many people a low level condition. So

18:28

it means that you can have, you

18:30

know, frequent interactions with psychologists and things

18:32

like that. It's something that can be

18:34

managed. Whereas for schizophrenia and

18:36

other complex mental health conditions, often people

18:38

who live with them will fall into

18:41

something called the missing middle. The

18:44

missing middle, this is a huge issue in

18:46

mental health care in Australia. And if you've

18:49

been lucky enough to never have had to

18:51

interact with the mental health system, you

18:53

might not appreciate how big a

18:56

problem this is. So the missing

18:58

middle refers to the huge amount of people

19:00

out there who live with a mental health

19:02

condition, but are not at the

19:05

level where they can be successfully treated

19:07

by those 10 subsidised

19:09

Medicare mental health care sessions.

19:12

And they are also not at the severity

19:14

that they need to be hospitalised. So there

19:17

are people out there who are struggling,

19:19

who aren't provided with a

19:22

huge amount of resources to look after their

19:24

mental health condition, who basically just have to

19:26

live with this ongoing struggle and are

19:28

ignored by the mental health care system.

19:31

And unless you can afford to cover

19:33

the cost of private psychiatry yourself, you're

19:36

pretty much out of luck. Really,

19:38

at that point in the mental

19:40

health care system, there's very little care. There's

19:42

no sort of community care to make sure

19:44

that people are staying well, getting dressed, going

19:47

to their jobs, going out

19:49

to socialise. And that kind

19:51

of means that a lot of people fall through

19:53

the cracks. It means that a lot of people

19:55

end up on the streets and our stereotypes of

19:57

stigma are kind of defined by those people. Yeah.

20:00

I was going to ask, how much do you

20:02

think the stigma around schizophrenia in particular comes

20:04

from the fact that often when we hear it,

20:06

it's in the context of crime reporting, you

20:09

know, really horrible stories. We

20:12

don't really hear about it in a more neutral

20:14

context. Yeah, absolutely. And that

20:16

is like a huge part that contributes

20:18

to the stigma around those conditions. So

20:20

there was a study that came out

20:23

in Australia a few years ago that

20:25

looked at the media around schizophrenia specifically,

20:27

and it found that over 50% of

20:31

news articles that referred to schizophrenia

20:33

were in the context of crime

20:35

reporting. And then I

20:38

also think that a lot of people

20:40

have a lot of stereotypes about schizophrenia

20:42

because in a way it is a

20:44

condition that is defined to us as

20:46

the public by the people who are

20:48

experiencing the most conspicuous symptoms of it.

20:52

So we're terrified of schizophrenia because we

20:54

see people who are so

20:56

burdened by their illness that they're shouting in

20:58

the streets at people who aren't there who

21:01

are displaying quite erratic behaviour.

21:04

And those are the people who have slipped

21:06

through the cracks of mental health care. And

21:09

that's kind of our perception of schizophrenia

21:11

as a whole. Whereas if

21:14

we started to hear success stories about schizophrenia,

21:16

then we would come to have our perception

21:18

very readily changed by that. But the stigma

21:20

is so bad that we won't hear those

21:23

stories. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. It's

21:26

like the opposite of a virtuous cycle.

21:28

Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is a

21:30

cycle of stigma that I would love

21:33

to see broken. And

21:35

there are some more reports coming

21:37

out about people who live successfully

21:39

with schizophrenia. And I have seen a

21:41

few more of those narratives in the media, but it's

21:43

just nowhere near the scale of the crime reporting. Were

21:48

there any other myths in particular you were hoping

21:50

to dispel as part of writing this book? Yeah,

21:53

yeah, for sure. So a big thing

21:55

that came up for me while I

21:57

was studying psychology is that when...

22:00

schizophrenia came up in a lecture and we'd

22:02

be talking about it. It was basically to

22:04

say that, you know, a person would be

22:06

diagnosed with schizophrenia. And then the implication that

22:08

we were given was that there was no

22:10

coming back from that. Like that was it.

22:13

As soon as a person is

22:15

diagnosed, then they're sort of given

22:17

a life sentence of psychosis and

22:19

they won't be returning to normalcy.

22:21

And that's absolutely untrue for

22:23

many, many people who live with this

22:25

diagnosis. There are many, many people out

22:28

there who work jobs

22:30

like my mum did for decades

22:32

while she was living with schizophrenia.

22:34

There are people who raise families

22:36

and have loving relationships and friendships.

22:39

And I just think that there is still

22:41

this inherent myth attached

22:43

to schizophrenia that once you have

22:45

it, you aren't coming back.

22:47

And that's the rest of your life.

22:49

And I just want people to understand

22:51

that I've met incredible people who live

22:53

with schizophrenia now. And I've

22:56

come to have that myth dispelled

22:58

completely. And your mum is a

23:00

success story. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Like

23:02

my mum is just my mum.

23:04

She's very much like anybody else's

23:06

mum who lives in suburbia and

23:08

like goes out to coffees with her friends and

23:11

has lunches and does charity

23:13

work. Yeah, she's amazing. Elsie

23:19

is clear, though, and honest, that

23:22

several factors and privileges have enabled

23:25

her mother to live successfully with

23:27

schizophrenia. My

23:29

mum has been incredibly lucky.

23:32

She has the resources to access

23:34

the mental health care she needs

23:36

because of her socioeconomic standing, you

23:38

know, we're extremely middle class, and

23:40

she's always been able to afford

23:42

private psychiatry. In fact, when she

23:45

first became acutely unwell,

23:47

she had access

23:49

to psychiatry sessions three

23:51

times a week for

23:54

months on end, which I would imagine

23:56

would be ridiculously expensive

23:58

for the average person. And she

24:00

actually was able to do that. So,

24:03

yeah, there are factors that have

24:05

allowed her to attain that success

24:07

and, you know, walk that

24:09

pathway towards recovery. And she has a

24:11

pretty solid group of friends as well that have stuck

24:13

with her throughout all of this, right? Yeah. So

24:16

she's had exactly the same friendship group since she was

24:18

diagnosed. She has a group of around, like, I think

24:20

it's about 30 Indonesian women who

24:22

just show up at the house

24:24

all the time and who have just

24:26

always been around and part of our

24:29

universe. And they have always wrapped around

24:31

her and treated her exactly the same.

24:33

So she's remarkably lucky in

24:35

that sense. That's interesting because often there

24:38

can be like an additional angle of

24:40

stigma from migrant communities. Why

24:42

do you think her friends have been so accepting

24:44

and totally fine and supportive? Yeah. So

24:47

stigma is a funny thing.

24:49

Stigma can change quite markedly

24:51

across different cultures and contexts.

24:54

And I don't want to speculate

24:57

too wildly on this, but I do

24:59

think that there is an aspect of

25:01

their shared Islamic belief system that comes

25:04

into this. I do think that there

25:07

is a part of their

25:09

culture that leads them to

25:12

more willingly accept phenomena around

25:14

spirituality and unusual

25:16

psychological experiences. You

25:19

know, ghosts are very much a

25:22

part of their culture and spirits and

25:24

things like that. So I

25:26

think that there is more willingness

25:28

to accept what mum's experience has

25:30

been psychologically in that way. Do

25:35

you know anything about why your mum

25:37

develops schizophrenia? Does your family know anything

25:40

about genetic factors or, you know, why? So

25:43

I believe that there must have

25:46

been some genetic loading factor. I

25:49

say this because my aunt actually had a

25:51

complex mental health condition as well. We don't

25:53

know what her diagnosis would have been had

25:55

she had access to

25:58

psychiatry in Indonesia. But

26:00

yeah, she lived her entire life with the

26:03

obvious symptoms of a complex mental health condition.

26:05

So I think there is some genetic element to it. I

26:08

also understand now looking

26:11

back at her story that there

26:13

must have been some aspects of

26:15

trauma that led to the manifestation

26:17

of these symptoms. So when

26:19

I spoke to a wonderful professor in

26:22

Melbourne who explained to me how trauma

26:24

can actually affect the brain and the

26:26

ways that it can lead to the

26:29

onset of psychotic

26:31

diagnoses. And

26:33

she said that immigration is a big part

26:35

of it, feeling culturally at odds with the

26:37

world around you. That can be a huge

26:39

factor in leading towards a complex

26:41

mental health condition. But

26:43

yeah, there are no hard and fast answers here.

26:45

It's not like I can say for sure. It

26:47

might have been some of those factors or none

26:49

of them. Yeah. Yeah. So

26:52

your mum was in her 30s, I think,

26:54

when her schizophrenia developed. When you're in your

26:57

early 30s now, how much do you worry

26:59

about your susceptibility to schizophrenia? I

27:02

do think about it. And I've thought about it for

27:06

many years. It's an anxiety that I

27:08

absolutely carry with me and my sister

27:10

has told me that she carries as

27:12

well. And

27:15

I think that it's a

27:17

possibility. I just have to

27:19

accept that if it does

27:21

eventually, I will have access

27:23

to exactly the right kind of care. I'll

27:26

have the exact right type of family to look after

27:28

me because they understand. And

27:31

those are privileges, ultimately.

27:34

And I am not terrified in

27:36

the sense that I know I'll be looked after.

27:39

And that's just something that I'll live with now.

27:43

So schizophrenia was the one thing your family never

27:45

talked about growing up, hence the title of the

27:48

book. Is that still the case now? No.

27:51

No. It's

27:53

not something we talk about frequently,

27:55

but it's absolutely something that we

27:58

feel more comfortable talking about. now.

28:00

And actually, my mum is

28:03

very sweet in the way that she brings it

28:05

up and she'll tell stories now. And she's much

28:07

more willing to talk about her inner life

28:10

and her emotional life. And yeah,

28:12

it is something that we do feel quite

28:14

a bit more open discussing now, which is

28:17

nice, actually, I think in a way the

28:19

book helped us to break through a little bit of

28:21

that. Yeah, I was going to say, what do you think changed?

28:24

We got older and

28:27

I agree to write a book. So I think that's

28:29

most of it. Yeah. That

28:34

is Elphie Scott, journalist and author

28:36

of the book, The One Thing

28:38

We've Never Spoken About, Exposing Our

28:41

Untold Mental Health Crisis. That's

28:44

it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks

28:47

to producer Rose Kerr and sound

28:50

engineer Russell Stapleton. I'm

28:52

Sana Kedar. Thanks for listening. I'll

28:54

catch you next time. You've

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