The Hidden Children

Imagine… a five year old caring for her sister two years younger and their mother who has schizophrenia.

 My mum was first hospitalized when she was 23 years old, when I was 2, and my sister was on the way. The next recollection was when I was 5 years old and my sister was 3. My father was physically abusive towards my mother because she wasn’t coping and eventually my sister and I were sent to an orphanage that was about an hour away from where Mum was. We visited our mum in hospital but we didn’t know what was going on.

This is one of the earliest memories I have of our family.

When Mum got out of hospital we went to live with her. The hospital did not follow up with my mother’s care or enquire into our emotional difficulties. So from that point on my sister and I became two of the ‘hidden children’.

When I was 7, I remember keeping a journal at school. One day my teacher told me that what I had been writing was worrying him and asked me what was happening to make me feel so scared. Being all of 7 years old, I could not articulate what was happening at home. I knew that something wasn’t right but I didn’t know how to explain it. I was also scared that they would take my sister and me away from my mum, and I knew that I wouldn’t have coped with my life then, without my family, so I didn’t tell him.

During the times that Mum was unwell we were quite neglected. My father paid weekly visits, and during this time he said there were some occasions when our hair hadn’t been brushed since the last time he had seen us. He would take us to the hairdressers occasionally to get our hair ‘fixed up’. We would say, ‘Mum is on strike again!'.

We started refusing to go to school, partly because we were teased because we didn’t have very good social skills, and partly I think because we wanted to make sure Mum was O.K. we were afraid of the dark and I had many nightmares (in fact I could never sleep well until I was 21 years old). When I was 9, I had to enroll my sister and myself in a new school because Mum had refused (or run out of money) to pay the school fees. My sister was bawling her eyes out and I realised from that point on, I would have to look after both of us.

Between the ages of 8 and 14, my mother used to tell us that we were involved in plots against her with the extended family or with the neighbours. It seemed as though nothing I could do could make her like me or trust me. She couldn’t show any interest in our lives or achievements. She told us our father was the ‘backpacker murderer’ and was going to kidnap us; our house was haunted with visions that only Mum could see and hear. If someone had escaped from jail, they would definitely be looking for us first. If a plane flew over our house she would tell us that they were going to drop bombs on us, and that we were going to have an earthquake soon, so we had better stock up on tins of food. Everyone was having affairs, and somehow she knew all about it. She told us how she had been involved in wars and saving the lives of famous people, and more importantly, the ‘Royal Family’ were head hunting us.

When I was 12, I would call my father every afternoon crying and asking him to take me away. My father knew nothing about mental illness and felt guilty that he had been the cause. So every day he would tell me that she was just ‘different’ and nothing would change. The most painful ‘help seeking’ memory I have is when crying, I burst into a classroom to ask a teacher for help. I was 14. The teacher said that it was just a phase I was going through and that all teenagers go through this sort of thing with their parents. So, in seeking help I stumbled across avoidance, stigma and lack of understanding.

I ran away from home when I was 14 and didn’t seek help again until I was 21 years old. Another family took me in for 2 years and all that time my sister was at home with Mum on her own. She used to give me letters at school begging me to come back home. I harboured an enormous sense of guilt about leaving my 12 year old sister; I felt I had left her struggling and drowning.

When I look back at all those memories, I remember at some point I crossed over the line from believing in my mother, to eventually being able to distinguish what was a delusion and what was not. The younger you are, the harder it is to work out.

It’s hard for me to understand how my sister and I made it through childhood without developing a mental health problem ourselves. Sometimes I wish we had led different lives but you cant’ choose that sort of thing. At this point I think its’ important to mention that when our mother was well, she was a fantastic mother and cared for us greatly, and I would never have wanted to be taken away from her, even when I look back now. My mum was not an ‘unfit’ mother, she was unwell and our family needed support.

Growing up in any family can be challenging at times, but for children in a family with mental illness, they have to be able to deal with the unpredictable nature of their parent’s illness. In these situations where the family is not receiving help, children do not always receive the parental care that they need, often they feel scared to talk about it and may withdraw from people who could help them. Often unable to articulate their needs, these children feel alone.

As an adult child of someone with a mental health issue I have begun to see that the parent I depended on was feeling more fear and confusion than I was. I am the one who calms, supports and reassures my parent. What I sacrifice is the right to feel and express a whole range of human emotions: fear, anger, even love. Most adult children of someone with a mental illness agree that ‘in some way or another we have to psychologically amputate parts of ourselves in order to survive’.

Growing up with a parent with schizophrenia presented me with 3 basic problems: 1) I felt unsafe in the world because I was being brought up with so much paranoia and because I hadn’t learnt proper social skills. 2) I had a deep feeling of aloneness. 3) I felt that I was not worthy of love. In the midst of this, there was little room to be a playful, light-hearted child.

It wasn’t until I was about 17 years old that I could talk about my life with other people. It wasn’t until then that my father finally realised how difficult it had been for my sister and me to live at home with no help. My father then explained to me that Mum went to hospital because of a ‘nervous breakdown’ and he spoke of her behaviour leading up to her going into hospital.

A couple of years ago I finished my degree in Psychology. Where my interest came from is hardly surprising! After gathering as much information as I could about schizophrenia and working with and talking to carers and consumers from all over Australia, I can now separate the illness I hate from the mother I love, I think it’s very hard for any family member to get to that point.

All of these things that happened are not my mother’s fault, and it took me so much anger to work through to be able to say that. I believe it is a failed duty of care by the health system to protect our family from the impact of mental illness, because schizophrenia, like other mental illnesses, is a biological illness just like cancer.

One thing that helped me the most is just being able to talk about what my life was like then and how that affects me now. I discovered this by becoming involved with ARAFMI. Being around people who understood my experiences was an alien phenomenon for me. I still remember the shock of hearing similar experiences to mine at the first support group meeting I attended. I felt then and still feel extremely supported by people from ARAFMI. My mother and I get along really well now; I visit her often. I now realise that her pain was probably much worse than mine.

Tina