User and Carer Perspectives on Mental Distress – causes or contributory factors

Duration: 5.23 mins

Speakers: 

S1       - Interviewer, Tracey Holley
S2       - Pat Caplen

S1       Hello, my name’s Tracey Holley, I’m a Mental Health survivor educator. 

S2       Hi, I’m Pat Caplen, I’ve been my husband’s carer for 45 years. 

S1       Right, we’re going to tackle these three questions that we’ve got here, Pat, and we’ve been asked from our perspectives what do we see as causing or contributing to mental distress? 

S2       Well in my case, I think my mental distress started at a very early age. I don’t really know when. I was a head-banger and according to my father, I was on morphine at the age of 3 and I know I was on phenobarbitone at the age of 10. So I was dyslexic, I had problems with school and I really found it very difficult. 

S1       OK, you say you had problems at school. What kind of problems were you having? 

S2       Well, because people couldn’t understand me because I was obviously intelligent but I couldn’t learn to read or write.  I was 12 before I taught myself to read. 

S1       Right. I had a similar experience about negative experiences in my sort of history which really began from school age. I had a small deformity which grew bigger and bigger, to me, and would form part of my eventual depression and anxiety and I was slightly bullied as well.  But what I also found interesting, I had what you could call dyscalculia. I was OK at every other subject but I felt a failure at that and then sort of my beliefs about myself started to form and my mother was always criticising as well. I know that you’ve had experiences like that too. 

S2       Yeah. My mother brought me up to be a failure.  She decided that we were female, what was the point in trying, you wouldn’t succeed, so I really had no idea of how to go about things but I just knew somehow that if I didn’t do it, nobody else would. 

S1       Right. So really you took it upon yourself to help yourself. 

S2       Yeah, at a very early age I took it upon myself to help myself. I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t do it, nobody else would. 

S1       So you became stronger in your helplessness would you say? 

S2       Erm, I really didn’t think about it because when you’re in the centre of something like that, it’s survival, that’s all it comes down to, it’s sheer survival. 

S1       Right.  Well for me, the way I survived was just I was depending on other people’s help and when I didn’t get that help, I sort of hung my head down with my tail between my legs and just thought right, this is my lot, I’m not worth anything else.  And that’s how I went and I think that’s how my sort of thinking was from then on. 

S2       Yes, it’s difficult to know why one of us went one way and one went the other. 

S1       Yes. 

S2       I don’t know.  I just know that I had to do it myself but it doesn’t mean to say that I don’t get mental distress even now because as a carer I get extremely frustrated at not being heard when, if anybody knows about my husband’s case history, it’s me.  But nobody would ever see, believe what I said when I could see there were things wrong and it went on and on for so many years and nothing improved. 

S1       So when you use that term, ‘mental distress’, that’s been used widely in a question in here. Do you see it as a mental health continuum? 

S2       Oh yeah.  I mean it’s always there.  I think I learnt a lot of coping mechanisms over many years. 

S1       I’m really interested in your take on how your identity or sense of self was within all this. 

S2       I didn’t exist and I still don’t. I don’t see myself as a person at all. I find myself, I’m always having to think about my own self and my own perspective because I’m hiding behind my husband. I’m always thinking about his identity and not mine. 

S1       Right, OK.  But hopefully when we’re talking now we’re going to find a little bit about your identity.  I know identity for me was a big thing with depression because I kind of lost myself and through most of my life really, finding out who I was and then gathering through therapeutic intervention and just the experience of what was for me, mental distress.  I gradually found out who I was and that was a real big thing for my recovery, but how was it for you then? 

S2       I think this is why some people have often said perhaps I need to become a service user, because then the focus comes on you and you do. There’s a lot of people who won’t know who they are because they don’t have time to think about themselves.        

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