I can't remember how old I was the first time I asked: "Mama, what does my name mean?" Maybe I was 7 or 8 years old. And my mother answered that it meant "Bitter". That Marike is a derivative of the Latin, Mara, which means bitter.
"But why did you choose that?" I asked, somewhat crestfallen that it had not meant Treasured Rose Petal or Angel of Light or something equally poetic and, well, loving. My then best friend, Dorothea, told me proudly that her German name meant Gift of God.
"I named you after my Tante Marike, who was taken away when she was a girl." And that was then end of that. My mother clammed up.
It was many years later that the discussion arose again, and I learned that my mother's Tante Marike has been institutionalized in a "lunatic asylum" at the age of 13, in Den Haag, Holland. Why? "She had fantasies about what men had done to her and lost her grasp on reality."
"And what happened to her then?" I remember asking cautiously.
"She took her own life." And my mother bustled from the room. Suicide was the ultimate sin against hope & faith in our very catholic home.
It was quite some years later as I was curled in a foetal position in the Red Room at the Wainer Clinic's Rape & Incest Clinic that I wondered if my mother had named me prophetically, out of guilt. I wondered how much of Tante Marike's karma I carried.
Somewhere in my being from early childhood I absorbed the idea that mental illness was something proclaimed by others, and that it had terrible consequences that people couldn't speak about.
It was an unconscious belief hammered home by the tragic suicide of my friend, Deanna Young.
Dee had what is now called Manic Depressive Bipolar Disorder, and was heavily medicated with a drug called Largactyl. Back then, she was termed schizophrenic. She was not-quite-homeless but almost and lived in a rooming house in Dalgety Street, St Kilda with her heroin addicted boyfriend, Ron, and another mentally ill woman named Kylie. They came regularly to the Drop In Center that my then husband, Nathan, managed. It was after months and months of talking with and hanging out with Dee that it was discovered she was pregnant. She didn't know how pregnancy happened, and so it was I who explained ow babies were made, took her to the doctor, sewed maternity clothes for her and helped her prepare for the birth. She moved into a small room on her own and was doing GREAT until the month before the birth, when she became frightened and obsessed with the idea of her baby girl needing a father. So she went back to the squat in Dalgety Street 3 weeks before the birth, and dropped off the radar. I was called by friends 2 days after Dee delivered and had been sent home from the hospital. Her boyfriend in a fit of what I presume was drug induced rage, threw the newborn little girl across the room and injured her badly. The baby was taken away in an ambulance and removed into state care. Dee LOST IT completely and was committed to Larundal - a maximum security psychiatric facility.
I visited her a few times, endured the strip searches and was devastated to see her almost zombie like from medication. She drooled and could barely speak. She had gained a massive amount of weight, was slow moving and looked only at the floor. She was on suicide watch. I tried to give my contact details to the staff in the event something happened or she might be released, but since I was not next of kin and had no court order, my request was denied. Her official parents disowned her. The case manager at Larundal asked me to stop visiting since I seemed to make Dee less content to stay there, and she always asked about the baby after my visits.
It was maybe 7 months later that I was in the local corner store on a Sunday morning, buying milk. I saw on the front of the local tits-&-ass newspaper a sordid & graphic story about a young woman who had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital and, having no one to collect her on discharge, had tried to hitchhike to Adelaide. A truck driver had picked her up, raped her and dumped her by the roadside somewhere in Western Victoria. Too tired to fight anymore, she simply rolled onto the dark lonely highway for the next big roadtrain to finish her off.
And thus my friend Dee succumbed to her mental illness and took her own life - drowning in grief, loss and the dark places of her mind which had not a glimmer of hope. She was failed by everyone - including me.
I have experienced mental illness as a mostly fatal condition, a taboo subject and a diagnosis apparently often wrongly pronounced by medical officials in white lab coats.
When my American lover, Christopher, committed suicide in 2004 just months after I had sold everything and left Australia to live with him here in Thailand, the ultimate ruling from the autopsy-inquest (apart from suicide) was "he must have been depressed."
My beliefs about mental illness have been formed through my experiences, and have involved deep, personal tragedies.
I have to say in my life, now, here in Thailand, I am not aware of knowing anyone who is currently mentally ill. It is not talked about and the culture here also absorbs varying levels of difference and "oddities" far more easily.
It's been hard for me to respond to this question set down by @abundance.tribe, "What Has Shaped Your Attitude And Belief About Mental Health And Mental Ill Health?" And yet I appreciated the question so very much, and the chance to wander through the quiet corridors of my memory today.
Two important things I wanted to add in closing;
(1) I HAVE formally visited the Victorian Department of Health & Community Services and made an official report & statement about my relationship to Dee, on the off chance that her daughter may still miraculously be alive and may one day want to know more about her mother: it has been appended to her file, I understand. I have kept that old news clipping with Dee's picture all these years and it was still too raw to pull it out this evening to look at it. My big dream? To be contacted by this girl (she'd now be in her mid 30s) and to be able to tell her what a delightful person her mother was and how very much she was wanted and anticipated as a baby.
(2) I deliberated so carefully and so long about the official Sanskrit name my Thai daughter was to be given by the monks to fit her astrology at birth. In the end, I chose the name Kawisaraa which, in the Pali-Sanskrit, means both The Poet and Wise & Clever of Heart. I have become so very aware of the power of a name, and the karma it invokes.
Feeling a little sad and off to gaze at the stars on a hot tropical night whilst the cicadas and the frogs sing to the spirits of those who couldn't cope in our harsh world and left us - left me - all too soon.
Flying Free.
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