Bringing The Darkness into the Light During Mental Health Month
The aim of declaring October as Mental Health Awareness Month is to educate the public about mental health and reduce the stigma and discrimination that people with mental illness often face.
Having grown up in a family challenged by bipolar and neurodiversity, I am keenly aware of how hard it can be.
As I wrote in my book “Belonging”, my father’s constant threats of suicide triggered paths of emotional eating for me. I literally ate my pain and swallowed my anguish as he drove away into the night, tyres squealing. The threat was always the same. He was going to drive off Sir Lowry’s Pass, a mountain close to Cape Town.
In a time when bipolar had not yet been named, my father fought against the stigma of having a mental health condition. He was a highly functioning, successful entrepreneur and an esteemed District Governor of Rotary International. No one knew of the private battles he faced. It was a torment we kept hidden from the world. At school, I was sometimes the class clown. It masked the pain I kept hidden. Not a soul at school knew my secret sadness, my deep desperation.
My emotional eating mirrored the roller coaster of emotions I felt at home too afraid to speak out. It was the stigma of the disease that almost killed my father.
When I became a parent, the stigma of neurodiversity revisited me. When our children were both diagnosed with neurodivergent learning challenges, my journey with mental health awareness deepened. By then, there was far more awareness and strategies to assist them. But even so, it was hard watching them struggle.
Despite these challenges, they went on to be recognised as Golden Key Students at University, an accolade awarded to the top ten percent of students. Once they found their respective passions in Organisational Psychology and Engineering, they soared.
It was a heartening evolution seeing them fly. However, it revealed the deeper truth of how much the educational system did not cater to children who battled neurodivergent challenges. It did not celebrate their brilliance.
The same held for my husband’s journey with severe dyslexia at school. My father-in-law apologised to me one day that he had handled his son so poorly in his utter frustration as a highly academic engineer himself. But he never apologised directly to his son himself. And I understood how the shame of his lack of understanding had clouded his judgement.
So, in all these instances, what made it difficult was not talking about it. What made it easier was being able to talk about it. I have realised as a speaker and a writer the power of words to change lives. It is what drives my legacy work.
Now, as an ambassador for integrated health and what I call Identity Intelligence, I believe it is time to lift the lid on hidden conversations and the secret challenges so many are facing. That is why I am so passionate about speaking openly and vulnerably, even about my own challenges with anxiety, depression and eating disorders.
