Caged minds

Culture Matters

SHE CAME out of her house brushing her teeth, holding a glass of water in one hand. Without warning, she smashed the glass on the ground and started walking towards me. I walked behind the car and casually reached for the water hose. My door was open and the keys were inside. There was not enough time to get inside and lock the door. She tried to go past me.

“No Jillian, you don’t live here.” She stepped closer. “No Jillian,” I said again. “You don’t live here.” Understanding flickered back into her eyes and just as abruptly she turned and walked off. I put down the hose and resumed breathing.

Afterwards I saw Jillian (not her real name) walking to get a taxi. I offered her a lift, admittedly somewhat petrified. I complimented her on her dress and we chatted about dangerous driving in our neighbourhood. I dropped her off to get her taxi, relieved when she got out of the car.

Sometimes I would see her, completely coherent, going to the supermarket. Other times she would calmly destroy the property of a neighbour she disliked. Or she would simply disappear for months on end.

Like many of my peers, I grew up observing mental illness as something outside of my regular life experience. I considered the famous artists who flowed through my life to be simply eccentric, as artists are supposed to be.

On the other hand, people like Jillian were just “mad,” glitches in the social matrix. At best they were an unexplainable phenomenon that drifted in and out of St Ann’s Hospital, occasionally encountered on the streets of the city. We even made jokes about which one of us belonged in St Ann’s.

Today, it is more difficult to keep people like Jillian at a distance. Increasingly, she is part of our reality. Worse, mental illness is now being diagnosed in a larger number of young people and children, from developmental disorders to childhood depression.

The numbers tell us everything we need to know. One, the number of people who commit suicide every 40 seconds. Sixty-nine, the number of people in Trinidad found in cages ostensibly for safety reasons. One hundred, the number of new cases of mental health registered every month at the San Fernando General Hospital in 2018. Three hundred million, the number of people who suffer from depression globally. US$1 trillion, the value of lost productivity in the global economy due to mental illness in the workforce.

This week, we commemorated World Mental Health Day with a focus on suicide prevention, in particular its growing prevalence among young people. Alarmingly, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified suicide as the second leading cause of death for 15-29-year-olds.

Locally, it is acknowledged that thousands of young people within the education system are “suffering from mental illness and are in need of targeted therapy.” So what are we going to do about it?

Our culture of silence runs deep, so much so that even people working for the Arouca facility deny any wrongdoing by the owners. The fact is, as some family members pointed out, the cages and general conditions were a well-known secret; people knew.

As such, talk of improving monitoring systems, implementing laws for non-governmental organisations or conducting raids with impressive looking military personnel are only a small part of the solution.

The cage is an interesting metaphor for our increasingly stressful lifestyles. We wake small children at 5 am to leave home in time to beat the traffic, spend hours getting to work and school, face bullies in the education system and the office, eat food cooked and grown by someone else and then head back out in the afternoon to do everything in reverse. Then repeat it all the following day.

The large number of creative people in our society means that we can actively use the creative sector to reduce the stress levels in our lives. Calypsoes in schools is a positive step, but as the numbers tell us, we need to ramp up what WHO calls school-based interventions for mental health. Our workplaces would also benefit from artistic approaches to getting the job done, and help improve TT’s position on global mental health rankings.

Many of us need help managing someone like Jillian in our lives. However, for me, it is more important to develop a society where her condition is considered unusual and not so common that a cage becomes a normalised aspect of our mental health strategy.

Dara E Healy is a performance artist, communications specialist and founder of the NGO, the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN