Emotional Desperation

By Diane Froggatt

Imagine you had a son or daughter in their late teens or twenties. Little by little you realize that things are not right, in fact they are very wrong. He is talking to himself; she is staying in her room curled up in the blankets. He won't go out in the day because he thinks people are threatening him. She refuses to eat because she thinks you are poisoning her. He doesn't seem able to think straight; she habitually gets up in the middle of the night and turns the radio on loud to try and drown out the voices. Everyone in the family is uneasy, then alarmed at what they hardly dare to acknowledge - a fearsome possibility of schizophrenia, of mental illness.

You stand at a crossroads. Will you seek treatment for your loved one? Is the stigma so entrenched that you won't? Will you get treatment if you seek it? If you get it, will you be able to get help for yourself to enable you to manage the new reality. Will there be any help in coping with a person with a disturbed mind in the bosom of the family?

You are educated. You understand about such conditions, or think you do, but can you come to terms with the emotional desperation that will reveal itself as a physical sense of unease, even a physical pain in your heart? You will never have experienced anything like this before and you will rarely have felt so uncertain of what to do. You even feel helpless and ill equipped. And this feeling is of long duration, maybe for many months or years. Read the whole address . . .

. . . . So I will tell you that, yes, times are good for a family who measures success in millimeters. We enjoy each other's company; we joke, we laugh, we accept life as it is and continue to hope that we are valued and that we can continue to nurture love, happiness, health and serenity in our lives.

At least once a week I say the Serenity Prayer to myself:

Lord, grant me the strength
To change the things I can,
To accept the things I cannot change
And the wisdom to know the difference.

By Diane Froggatt, Executive Director,
World Fellowship for Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders.
Opening Day Keynote Address to Ministers of Health