250,000 people are currently suffering from some form of mental illness in the UK. Prescriptions have risen by 54 percent since 2005 and Britain now has the second highest number of children on depression medication in Europe. I speak with conviction about the issues surrounding mental illness as my Mother who is from an ethnic background, has been in and out of mental hospitals since I was a child. Like Tennessee William’s tragic character, Blanche du Bois, I relied on” The kindness of strangers” whilst her brain was being fried and her body pumped full of drugs. Her mental illness robbed me of my Mother and left me a legacy of depression. Many people from ethnic backgrounds suffer from mental illness, coming from a different country to a county that alienated them through racism, they were forced to congregate in ghettos. Dorothy Rowe has said “mental illness/depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer”. In my opinion, the most insightful words relating to mental illness.
Australian psychologist and author, Dorothy Rowe
Written by Sadie Fisher
Read more in our Spring/Summer 19 issue
