Memories of a Mad Aunt

The generational legacy of a psychiatric diagnosis

Photo by Cosmin Gurau on Unsplash

Beyond the Label:

The first time my aunt tried to end her life was on the day before I was born. When my father told me this a few months ago, it was like coming home to a lost part of myself, as if the context surrounding my birth suddenly explained the loss I had felt from my first moments in the world.

Six years later, when she finally succeeded, her death sent shock waves through my family. But the colour of those waves, the character and the frequency of them, was determined by the way my aunt was held—by her culture, her family, and most of all by the psychiatric wards, which held her against her will. 

In her mid twenties, the relationship she was in ended. Her dependence on cannabis for emotional regulation increased, and she began to hear voices. By the time she received intervention from mental health services, the voices were threatening, echoes of her past reliving themselves in her newfound isolation. She was given a label of paranoid schizophrenia—my family were told she had a degenerative brain disease, brought on by drug abuse. Through this framing, she would need to be periodically tranquilized and incarcerated for the rest of her life. 

My father reports that she never received a single session of counselling. No one thought to look beyond the symptoms, to investigate the dynamics in a household which gave rise to rampant alcoholism, deep narcissism, and was characterised by a void of emotional literacy. For my family, the message from the psychiatric authority was clear—where the human suffers, bury the pain with drugs, lock it away in a dark room, don’t engage. 

This was precisely what my family had been doing for years. Validated by the status quo, they had no reason to change. I didn't know about my aunt's madness until after I'd left home, but this message filtered through to my young self, and I learned to hide my suffering from the world—to keep it locked away.

Intergenerational Echoes:

The medication, her illness, and the total lack of understanding in my aunt's environment, all turned her life into a prison. Soon enough she managed to break free. But something of her spirit remained trapped.

Fast forward another fifteen years, and I found myself descending into the trenches, a space she might well have recognised. Emotionally and psychologically isolated, my ever growing dependence on cannabis mirrored hers all the way through to the paranoia it was inducing, the growing sense in my mind that nothing was real. 

In my early twenties, the relationship I'd been clinging to disintegrated, and only the darkness was left. My reality started to feel thin, my boundaries weak, and I started to feel like I was slipping away, becoming imperceptible. I’d long been dissociating—a protective technique developed during years of bullying at school. The outer reaches of this dislocation became populated by images of a dark angel. A lifelong feeling of anticipation was growing into the sense that I was being hunted, and the sky became the setting for these terrifying scenes, where black and haggard wings would descend and consume me.

Unlike my aunt, I was lucky to have some good people in my life at the time, and I managed to cling on to reality even as it slipped through my fingers. I was terrified of being labelled, of being locked up, so I told no one. Some days I could engage with the world, so I went to work and climbed in the Peak District near Sheffield where I lived. But on the days when reality felt loose I became stuck in destructive cycles of self medication with alcohol, cannabis, and pornography. I used anything and everything to keep the torment at bay.

I first started using cannabis when I was 13, and when my parents discovered this they didn't know what to do with me. To them, this could mean only one thing—brain disease brought on by drug abuse. Instead of questioning why I was using, they doubled down on the dynamics which had caused me to use in the first place, pushing me away and isolating me further. Had I understood then that they were only scared, I might have understood. But at that age I knew nothing of my aunt and her troubles.

In their desire to stop me from turning into her, they poured the foundations of that precise becoming. There were times later on when I wondered if I was actually her, dreaming a new reality into existence, from one of the wards where she was kept. I was becoming the thing I was never supposed to become, and the shame I felt about this penetrated every cell in my body.

The most intense phase lasted for about three months. At the height of it all, the world turned to plastic, its inhabitants plastic people. I can vividly remember wandering dark streets whilst muttering my discontent, the rain barely felt on my cold and clamouring skin. Sometimes I wanted to hurt people, to see if they were any more real than I was. I wanted to know if my actions had consequences.

This feeling that nothing was real was especially pronounced in the city—the countryside felt different, and I soon discovered that climbing ropeless high above boulders brought the world into sharp focus. 

Like my aunt, I started to make attempts on my life. But I chose a sideways approach, which provided the opportunity to turn back towards life when I reached the threshold. Sheffield is known for its proximity to the Peak District, and the production of steel—it feels like little more than luck that I chose gritstone edges over steel ones. Had the choice been different, who knows what might have happened to me.

Even through climbing, I was lucky to survive my recklessness. On multiple occasions I was saved by little more than the cement binding silicates, or a couple of points in the relative humidity. The cuts gained from stuffing my hands into cracks provided a perfect mask for the imprints of brick beaten on my way home from the pub. The scars on my knuckles still remind of the time I woke up in hospital, fingers lacerated from broken glass.

Climbing provided an outlet for my madness, a place where my unusual relationship with self preservation was tolerated. It also provided contact with nature, and more importantly a community, both fundamental aspects of my healing which were denied from my aunt. Climbers are an odd bunch, and so my eccentricities felt less pronounced, even while I spent years trying to work out whether or not to be scared of the sound of their laughter. Echoes of my own past, reliving themselves. 

Out of the plasticity which the world had descended into, a new one began to emerge. In some ways it was the same as before, but in this new place I was much less reliant on external validation, less anxious about how I was perceived. My sense of self started to be built internally, and I gradually let go of needing to be the thing that was expected by my family and culture. I started to forge my own path.

I started to find ways of communicating what had happened, and played with demonic imagery in my writing. This was a deeply honest mode of communication, the boundaries between the subjective and real having been quite blurred for a long time. Still though, it took many years before I could sidestep the shame, and be honest about how alienated I'd felt. 

When I eventually realised that people in my circle at that time had experienced similar things, I was simultaneously relieved, and shocked at how different things might have been if our cultural sanism had not prevented me from talking to them about what was happening. 

Whether or not a person experiencing madness is locked up, the cultural paradigms surrounding such experiences ensure that those having them do everything they can to keep them quiet, a splitting which can only exacerbate the symptoms, as it did for me. The solution is to talk more, to be honest about what we have seen and felt and heard, to make such conversations commonplace. 

As I navigate these experiences, doing my best to remember, I still have to weave my way through some shame. There is a fear that I will not be believed. The power of psychiatry is such that I sometimes do not feel worthy of my experiences, without the label and validation that diagnosis provides. But increasingly I am learning to own what happened to me, and as I come to terms with it all, sharing becomes of increasing importance. 

This article forms part of an increasing personal effort to be honest about my experience of madness, and I hope that someone out there will be able to relate. Look after yourselves.