Noeline Kuru
Noeline Kuru began to experience anxiety and depression following a horrific birth that nearly killed her, and her son. The changes in her behaviour were sadly not well understood by the people around her.
Through her long periods of unwellness, people would see she was fine for part of the day and crying during other parts of the day.
“Some suggestions were made that I should pull myself together and get on with it,” she says, “which made me feel worse and more useless, as I could not pull myself together.”
Instead she spiraled down into a deeper depression.
“I lost so much confidence in myself and no-one knew what to do,” she recalls.
“I hid in my house for a long time, and didn’t seek the right help. I tried to stay away from medication and all those clinical things because I didn’t want to be tagged with a mental illness. I remembered how people had talked about my mother when she had episodes.”
Noeline finally chose to accept medical help and the next eight years were spent utilising mental health services, a period that Noeline says was far too long.
“I was in and out of hospitals because I never really received the right help, or the right support groups. The focus should not only have been on the clinical, but also on the recovery journey - how you can live with depression.”
Fortunately, Noeline was able to find the support she needed from tangata whaiora, other people with experience of mental illness.
“I talked to others who had experienced long periods of unwellness, and from them I learnt how I could manage my own illness," she says. “I started to have hope that I did fit in somewhere.”
Judged on her diagnosis
However, Noeline says she felt she was still being judged on her diagnosis.
“I became quite institutionalised, because I didn’t want to live in the community. I actually wanted to live in hospital. I wanted to live in places with other people who experience mental illness, because nobody judged you. The patients didn’t judge you,” she says.
Noeline feels the stigma around mental illness in society had a direct impact on the attitudes displayed from the people around her.
“There’s a lot of shame attached to having a mental illness, especially in a small town.”
“I also have a physical disability, and when I went to my school ball, my father put a cardigan over my arm to hide it, because he didn’t want anyone to tease me,” she says.
“We shouldn’t have to hide our differences and disabilities, but there are still people in this world who are unable to accept those differences.
“People have got to understand that ‘mental’ is not a bad word,” she says. “It’s just society’s made it a bad word. Because when I become unwell, how do I know to seek help if I have a stigma attached to that?"
(first published in Issue 38, September 2009, Like Minds Like Mine newsletter)
