Lesbos – Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven while her two children slept in the next room. She was 30 years old. She had suffered from severe depression since her teens and had been treated with sleeping pills and ECG. She was an insomniac. Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. Sylvia struggled to care for their two young children, and to earn enough money, while continuing to write.  She was not close to her mother, and her father died when she was eight. During the early stages of her treatment, she was advised not to have any contact with her mother. Ted Hughes remarried, and his second wife also committed suicide, four years after their marriage.

Sylvia Plath’s son, Nicholas, killed himself in 2009 following a history of depression.

><

Rear cover of The Bell Jar (click on image to enlarge)

><><

Semi-autobiographical, The Bell Jar  is well worth reading,  if you wish to know more about Sylvia Plath. It also features some of her pen and ink drawings.

LESBOS

Viciousness in the kitchen!

The potatoes hiss!

It is all Hollywood, windowless,

The flourescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,

Coy paper strips for doors -

Stage curtains – a widow’s frizz.

And, I, love, am a pathological liar,

And my child, look at her, face down on the floor,

Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear -

Why she is schizophrenic,

Her face red and white, a panic,

You have stuck her kittens outside your window

In a sort of cement well

Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.

You say you can’t stand her,

the bastards a girl.

You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio

Clear of voices and history, the staticky

Noise of the new.

You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!

You say I should drown my girl.

She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.

The baby smiles, fat snail,

From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

You could eat him. He’s a boy.

You say your husband is just no good to you.

His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.

You have one baby, I have two.

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

Me and you.

><

Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.

I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

The smog of cooking, the smog of hell.

Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,

Our bones, our hair.

I call you Orphan, orphan.  You are ill.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.

Once you were beautiful.

In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: ‘Through?

Gee baby, you are rare.’

You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.

The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.

I try to keep him in,

An old pole for he lightning,

The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.

He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,

Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.

The blue sparks spill,

Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel! O valuable!

That night the moon

Dragged its blood bag, sick

Animal

Up over the harbor lights.

And then grew normal,

Hard and apart and white.

The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.

We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,

Working it like dough, a mulatto body,

The silk grits.

A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

><

Now I am silent, hate

Up to my neck,

Thick, thick.

I do not speak.

><

I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,

I am packing the babies,

I am packing the sick cats.

O vase of acid,

It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.

He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate

That opens to the sea

Where it drives in, white and black,

The spews it back.

Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.

You are so exhausted.

Your voice, my ear-ring,

Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.

That is that. That is that.

You peer from the door,

Sad hag, ‘Every woman’s a whore.

I can’t communicate’.

><

I see your cute décor

Close on you like the fist of a baby

Or an anemone, that sea

Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.

I am still raw.

I say I may be back.

You know what lies are for.

><

Even in your Zen heaven we shant meet.

><

Plath's pen & ink drawings from 'The Bell Jar'

No Place to Fit, No Place To Belong

Whatever Happened To Ishtar? (Excerpt 4)

My father never forgave me for abandoning him for another man, and turned his affections to his dog, Tim. As he often told me, dogs never let you down. He also told me more times than I care to remember that Kevin never let him down either. But the crushing blow came when it filtered down through the Coory grapevine that ‘Joe is more concerned about his dog than his own daughter!’ This was particularly evident after my car crashed into the swollen Waitaki River. I was hospitalised and the dog went missing for two weeks or so. Being the brunt of The Family’s cruel derision was nothing new and this titillating piece of information spread quickly through The Family ranks in Dunedin and Wellington. I’m sure it was dined on for many years. But I dealt with it the way I usually did – I buried it in order not to have to face the awful humiliating truth. I didn’t realise at the time that my father, at sixty-four years of age, was showing the early signs of the dementia which would eventually drag him into a kind of spiritual terror. Only with the benefit of hindsight do I now see that my father always behaved oddly and was immature, but I didn’t have a good yardstick with which to measure his behaviour against other fathers. I saw the terror in his eyes near the end but of what I didn’t really know.

I know that my father never wanted me to grow up and become a woman. Look what happened with my mother – she broke his heart. The night I asked my father not to come into my room any more after I had got into bed, was a milestone for both of us. When we were living together, he would come in to take the clips out of my long hair and dolls out of my bed. He used to worry that the clips would dig into my scalp and that the dolls didn’t give me enough room to sleep properly. I could sense his hurt on that last night, although he didn’t utter a word. His movements slowed right down. My momentous leap into this forerunner of maturity took several nights of thought about the kindest way to let my father down. I was fourteen years old. It was as though a line had been drawn in the sand. I would continue to grow and mature while my father would remain childlike, stuck within the confines of his extremely narrow and dogmatic thought processes.

There would never be a place or a family for me to fit into but eventually I learned to live with that, at least until I had my own children. After that I felt as though I belonged somewhere. I never really felt at home in any particular country or city – I still don’t. As a child and young adult, I couldn’t vocalise my feeling of displacement or disconnectedness. I knew I was different, but as hard as I tried to educate myself and learn the social mores of those around me, I never seemed to catch up or find my own niche. I was in my forties when I realised that it wasn’t my imagination playing tricks on me and that I wasn’t going ‘mad’ like my mother. I even asked a psychologist if I would one day go mad or have a nervous breakdown.  He replied, “If you were going to go mad, you would have by now.’

I understand now that The Family treated me as an imbecile because they truly believed me to be of subnormal intelligence, and, because of my odd behaviours, I was a difficult child to love.

><

Joseph Coory (He was 46 when I was born)

Crying Out For Help

Worn Out - Van Gogh (May 1890)

Van Gogh spent his life fighting to keep his sanity.  His paintings and letters to his brother Theo give us an insight into his lifelong suffering.

But in Adelaide this week,  an inquest recounted the last hours of a desperate father’s life as his sanity slipped away from him.  The inquest  heard a recording  of David Wyatt’s call to Mental Health Triage Services and the operator advising him to “take a warm shower, a warm drink, and relax”.    A few hours after the call Mr Wyatt stabbed his partner and severed his 15 day-old daughter’s ear before killing himself and his two-year old son Jakob in March 2009.

One of the things Mr Wyatt told the health services’ operator was that he had just smoked cannabis and believed he was going to die.

State agencies obviously failed Mr Wyatt, who was a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic,  after he was released into the community in 2006 on a four-year supervised release licence after being found not guilty of robbing a woman due to mental incompetence.

“Everybody involved in the matter knew Mr Wyatt was taking drugs. He presented to emergency departments in psychotic rages and nothing was done about it,” counsel assisting said.  It is difficult to understand the lack of action by various agencies especially in light of the fact that children were involved.  What came out of this inquest, was that none of the agencies consulted with each other and there was no risk assessment of the children’s safety.  The fact that Mr Wyatt suffered hallucinations, heard voices, and believed he was receiving messages from the Television set, should have set off alarm bells and alerted the services to the danger the children were in, not to mention the children’s mother.

This man repeatedly breached his supervised licence, which led to stints in the James Nash House mental facility, but his licence was never revoked.  Severely mentally  ill people are  abandoned within the community, posing a danger to themselves and others.  Surely Mr Wyatt should have been institutionalised; the answer to this question is always that there aren’t enough beds available.  Apparently this is the reason his licence was not revoked.  It’s like playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.

The truth of the matter is that mental health issues in Australia have been neglected for too long.

><

More… Mothers With Mental Illness

&       Mental Illness & Asylum

Budget 2011 Good For Mothers With Mental Illness

Lunatic Asylums in the bad old days: Seacliff Asylum built on the Otago peninsula c. 1876

><

The 2011 Federal Budget is especially good news for mothers with severe mental illnesses such as  bipolar disorder and depression.

More money has been allocated for early intervention, so that mothers and their children are not separated.  Mothers with severe mental illness who can’t care for their children, often lose them to social welfare.  This causes so much grief and despair for those mothers, heaped on top of whatever mental illness they are already suffering.  Not only that, the children taken from their mothers can suffer from the separation trauma for the rest of their lives.  I have lived through this because my mother suffered from a severe bipolar disorder and lost her children.  None of us fared well at all and our mother had the added burden of deep seated guilt which she never overcame.  (See ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’)  Far better to offer help before the situation reaches crisis point.

In the dark ages of the past, mentally ill mothers were confined to lunatic asylums (as they were then called) with their babies, and all spent the rest of their lives locked up.  Thank goodness those days have gone, at least in modern western countries.  At the other end of the scale, after asylums were closed down, the mentally ill were all but forgotten.

The Richmond Fellowship of NSW, runs the residential and treatment program at Charmian Clift Cottages, which is one of a kind, supporting some of that state’s most vulnerable women and their children.   A cluster of individual villas house women, suffering severe mental illness, with their children.  The women receive 24 hour emotional and psychiatric support on site as well as ongoing training in parenting skills.   Of course, there are not enough villas available, but the money allocated in the latest budget will help.

><

Philip Boyce, Psychiatry Sydney Medical School, Westmead,  says this is a godsend for some of these women who will in other circumstances have had their baby taken away from them or placed into care.

><

See:  Mental Illness & Asylum

Separation; The Wound That Never Heals

Bipolar Disorder – Letter To Francine

Doreen Frandi during WWll. Photo: afcoory

Dear *Francine

I finished reading *Virginia’s story last night.  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it in the first place – I feel it was meant to be, like a chance encounter!

While taking in Virginia’s words, I had a little cry, because so much of what she is crying out for – dignity, personhood – is what I so wanted for my mother, Doreen.  She never did receive much of that respect in her life; not from hospitals, men, or from family.  This was my chief motivation for writing ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest To Find Answers For Generations of Defeated Mothers’.

By the time I had the chance to really know my mother, it was too late; the drugs and ECT had taken their toll.  Much of what she had experienced in psychiatric wards and throughout the manic, psychotic,  and depressive phases of her life, was passed on to me by my brother, Kevin, who lived with her until he was married.  After that, he spent time with her either at his home or at her council flat in Wellington, otherwise he spoke to her daily by phone.  I tried to obtain her records from Porirua Psychiatric Hospital, but they would not release them to me because I was not listed as her next of kin.  However, as I reveal in ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?‘, Doreen’s psychiatrist did phone me and answered most of the questions I asked of her regarding Doreen’s psychiatric history.  Obviously, she did not volunteer information, so I only have knowledge of a small section of my mother’s official records of the times she was confined at the hospital.

Even though I was never admitted to a psychiatric ward, I came close to a mental breakdown when I was a young woman and my marriage was failing.  I can well understand, therefore, Virginia’s desire to leave her marriage, which was draining her physical and mental strength.   I also experienced what it was like to be denied personhood and dignity, when I was a child and teenager. I was branded and often humiliated by my Lebanese extended family because of who my mother was; her bipolar disorder and her Italian descent.  What I hated most was the way they branded her a “sharmuta” (prostitute) when she was nothing of the sort and could not defend herself.  There are many parallels in my, Doreen’s,  and Virginia’s stories.  I regret so much that Doreen only took Kevin with her when she left Dunedin for Wellington,  and abandoned me.  I believe that as her daughter, I may have been able to empathise more with her, and given support to my brother.  Sadly, I will never know for sure what the outcome would have been in that scenario.  Thank goodness Virginia at least had a loving daughter to look after her welfare.

I was very interested in what you had to say in your article about biographies vs autobiographies; about creativity and whether or not bipolar disorder is actually a mental illness.  Many brilliant artists as you know, exhibit facets of the disorder.  I read a medical paper recently which suggested that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are symptoms brought about through the brain evolving, which of course it has been doing for thousands of years.  An interesting theory.

I intend to contact Bipolar networks in Australia, and perhaps give talks about my and my brother’s experiences with Doreen and her disorder.  If you have any contacts here, I would be grateful if you could pass their name or names on to me.  Alternatively, members of bipolar networks can contact me via this blog and request a copy of the book .

At your suggestion, I called at the  office of the  Bipolar Network after our meeting and donated a copy of ‘Ishtar?‘ which they were very pleased to receive. I told them they could purchase more copies at  University Book Shops. Although the Public Library acquisitions officer requested to buy copies directly from me when I met with her to promote my book, I told her the normal process was that the library purchase copies through  University Book Shops.

Thank you once again for taking the time to meet with me, and for buying copies of my book.

Kind regards

Anne Frandi-Coory

><

Bipolar Disorder Blog   (The Crazy Rambler)

Bipolar Disorder; The Little We Know

><

*Names have been changed

Mental Illness & Asylum

Mental health expert Patrick McGorry has just been voted Australian of the Year.  It is so good to see such a prevalent disorder as mental illness in the news and highlighted.  Mr McGorry  is also concerned with the plight of refugees, including women and children,  held for years in detention centres or ‘Asylums’.  It has been well documented how detrimental an effect long periods of  institutionalisation has on a person’s  mental health.

Xenophobia is alive and well but not just in Australia.  Western countries as well as developing countries are suspicious of, and fear those from different ethnic groups.  Throw in religion and it becomes a volatile mix which is evident in  the bloodshed in many countries around the world at the present time.

‘Unfortunate Folk; Essays on Mental Health Treatment 1863-1992′ is an  Otago University publication  researched and edited by postgraduate history students at University of Otago between 1972 and 2000.  Attitudes to mental illness in Australasia haven’t really changed that much I don’t think; political correctness has intervened and made the way we speak about mentally ill patients a little less hostile, that’s all.

My mother had a severe bi-polar disorder and spent many years in and out of a mental hospital where she often received Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) in the 1950s and 1960s which eventually left her in a state of permanent mental lethargy.  Apparently it was important to keep her emotions tightly controlled in order to level out her mood swings, but in the process killed off all her creativity.  The right drugs were not available then.  My mother’s traumatic childhood and adolescence probably brought on the disorder and I am sure her stint in a Catholic convent trying unsuccessfully to outrun life in the natural world and become a nun,  added to the intensity of her affliction.  As I write in my book, ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar?’ mental illness and its attendant prejudices has had a lasting effect on subsequent generations of her family. The fact that she was Italian certainly played its part in other people’s perception of her displays of emotion.

ECT was introduced into mental hospitals in 1943 in Australasia and considerable experimentation with this method of treatment, and new drugs, was carried out on patients.  ECT  was first used without anaesthetic on patients who were suffering from “over excitability” and depression, both of which my mother “suffered” from.

A personal account from a medical student shown around Seacliff Mental Asylum in NZ in 1943:

“A consultant…brought them onto the stage and asked them about things and showed off how tragic they were, but I mean, it was a show and I think they were used to showing off as they were expected to. That was part of it, but the really awful thing was when we went around the wards.  One particular one that I remember…there was this great big ward and there were a whole lot of what looked like old and bedraggled women with white hair all over everywhere and they were all dressed the same, in white hospital things like you put on when you go for a  x-ray and they all came crowding round the trolley, clattering their spoons and tin plates and it was just like feeding the animals, it was absolutely horrendous.  That would have been around 1943 …it was just at the very earliest stages of shock treatment …it was certainly the first time of using unmodified ECT, and no anaesthetic, it was horrific”.

These places were worse than the prisons in which  criminals were incarcerated.  The sad thing is that many people still believe that the mentally ill should be locked away somewhere out of sight and out of mind.

Unfortunate Folk; The Mentally Ill

The above book quotes many interesting statistics:  In 1874,  of in-patients in mental institutions in Otago NZ there were twice as many men as women (mostly gold miners) and the majority of the women were married.  “Most religious denominations were represented but the three major groups were Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic. The numbers of Presbyterian and Anglican patients roughly mirrored their ratios to the general Otago population”…  “However, there were nearly twice as many Catholic patients as there should have been”… “The Irish, who made up the majority of Catholics,were over-represented to the same degree”.

The married women often had their children incarcerated with them in the mental institution.

In 1903, New Zealand’s then Prime Minister, Richard Seddon reported his genuine concern:

“To see the children in the asylum was heartbreaking.  Children of tender years were to be found with the adults, and, in some cases sitting on the floor. In any of the asylums they would find little boys and girls hopelessly and helplessly insane, and to keep them here with such surroundings as they had was not, to his mind, the right thing to do”.

The next significant group incarcerated in mental institutions were Chinese gold miners and they aroused strongly racist sentiment among some of the authorities.   The following is an inspector’s report which defies belief that it could be written by a government Health Official inspecting the institutions:

“There are seven Chinese lunatic patients in the Asylum [it is interesting that the term asylum is still being used in relation to refugees today] and considering the racial antipathy of the European to the leprous Mongolian, I am of the opinion that it is injurious to the European Lunatic being brought into daily contact with the Chinese, and that an additional ward and airing court should be provided for the latter without delay”

The last paragraph in the book is a summary regarding the boundaries between “madness and reason”:

“Patients, families, the public, politicians, and health professionals all upheld the boundaries between madness and reason. Progress in the decade under question was slow and fragmentary, although the seeds for more radical change were soon being laid. From the later 1950s, de-institutionalisation became the focus of mental health policy, and has remained in controversial favour ever since. Large and isolated mental hospitals became a thing of the past. But although this achieved some alteration in the social status of the mentally ill it has not completely destroyed the boundary between madness and reason. The legacy of madness as a separate world remains. In essence, the psychiatrist is still an ‘alienist’ treating those designated as ‘foreigners’ by their families, the public, and the medical profession”. Mr McGorry  might add here, “and the Australian Government’s  health system”.