As it’s #worldmentalhealthday I thought I’d share my story of growing up with a parent with schizophrenia.

I remember it must of been around 2004 and my sister (aged 12) told me (aged 9) why my mum wasn’t ‘well’. Throughout my whole life I didn’t understand why I...

(A thread)

visited my mum in the hospital and to me she seemed absolutely fine. I didn’t understand why I had to move to different families to live with them. I simply didn’t understand.

To 9 year old me, when my sister said that my mum had schizophrenia I didn’t get it but I knew that...

I didn’t like the word. After that, it was something that I bottled in because who talked about mental health back then?

When I was younger my mum would say things like “Don’t step on the grid! You’ll fall down it!” and she meant it.

She’d say “Don’t go out after dark, it’s not safe.” and she meant it. Me and my siblings would laugh at her and say stuff like “Don’t be crazy.”, “Stop being paranoid.” Those things that she would say are just the tip of the iceberg of how she was feeling. And for her...

‘hallucinations’ and ‘delusions’ were part of her daily life at the peak times of her ilness. We as her children didn’t know how to deal with it, and still now I struggle with the right response when she says things that I A) know not to be true or B) hope to never come true.

In school people would joke around and use the word ‘schizo’ and I had a rush of panic. Do they know? Do they know about my mum being unwell? Are they going to laugh at me? It was something that I kept under wraps with mostly everyone new in my life until I was around 23 years...

old. For me it felt so personal. It wasn’t my ilness to share. But now as a 25 year old, I wanted to share to help other people and also help myself. Keeping it bottled in has never helped me. And sometimes we all need a little (or a lot of) help.

This thread was just a reminder that #WorldMentalHealthDay has never been just a day for any of us. But it is a good time to have those conversations and remind ourselves that it’s ok to not be ok.