The journey into self

Senior writer Lara Pickford-Gordon wrote this fictional story based on real events. This Sunday is the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Day. The 2021 theme is Mental Health in an Unequal World.

July 5, 1998. I am sitting on a hard wooden bench trying to be inconspicuous. There are five rows of benches, and all are full. Everyone is waiting to see a doctor.

My eyes scan the pages of a book.

“What are you reading?” The elderly woman wearing a purple beret asks; I show her the front cover of the novel.

How did I end up here?

The question is rhetorical of course. A routine visit to the doctor; the symptoms: irritability, trouble sleeping, a feeling of sadness. He gave me a test. The diagnosis: mild depression. He recommended a good psychiatrist who attempted to root out the cause of my state at $200 an hour.

I could not afford the sessions and the medication, so I skipped the drugs. The psychiatrist advised that I could get worse, and this is why I am here at a clinic with other people whose quest for mental health, alleviation of mental illness depends on regular visits and drugs courtesy the state.

The wait is never boring.

“This is what government provide for we; you know how much for medication out there…” declared an old woman with thick lenses on her glasses which made her look permanently startled.

“That’s why you getting on like a hog so…yuh eating too much pigtail!” said a bearded, dishevelled man in a wrinkled, stained white shirt and faded grey pants while carrying on a monologue.

A middle-aged woman tells her companion seated nearby, “If I had to marry again, I’ll marry my husband.” The dishevelled man looks out the doorway and tells no one in particular, “The doctor ask me if I hearing voices, ‘I say yes, I hearing you’.”

A man with hair dyed black, looking very proper in his dark blue suits in a calm, monotone spells, “m…o…s…q…u…i….t…o”.

A male voice outside the doorway, “He always have a complaint when he come here”.

“Johnny, you have to smoke outside,” the clerk tells the dishevelled man. Her attention returns to a teen escorting an old lady with trembling lips, telling him, “Let her go and sit down”.

“West Indies get a good cut tail! Geeze, but you can’t win all the time, licks for you sometime” one of the regulars, a man they called ‘Skinny’ commiserated.

“51, all out, nah boy, something wrong,” replies the man reading the day’s newspaper.

Johnny must have finished his cigarette because he returned and flopped down clumsily on the front bench. Those seated found themselves having to make room for the newcomer who, without the courtesy of an ‘excuse’, disrupted their seating. This did not go without protest judging from the loud steups, but Johnny was oblivious.

“Jack and Jill went up the hill, you sure is water they went for?” he says to the overweight woman sitting next to him.

“I don’t know….I never met them,” she whispers.

In the sessions with the doctors, no matter what the line of enquiry they all return to the question: “Why are you depressed?”.

It is the endless questions that are most frustrating. Questions aimed at helping me arrive at my own answers. The doctors are rotated at the clinics so by the time I was seated with Dr Ramkisson, Dr James had seen me. At his session, I heard depression was anger turned inwards; Dr Barrington told me the answer to why I was depressed was inside me.

Dr Ramkisson must have been about 60. He had the calmness of one who had heard it all a million times before but, still did not convey any hint of boredom for the lack of originality.

He listened to me talk about my life at present and frustrations. Nothing I had not said before. My responses were at times monosyllables. He intermittently scribbled notes into “my file”.

“So, what would you change about your life?”

“Everything,” I responded quickly.

“So, you would change your family, your job, your friends, yourself…. then who would you be?”

As I left the clinic that day something was crystallised, I had to ask myself: Who indeed? My journey was beginning….

The Ministry of Health website states: “Mental Health is a state of emotional, physical, social, and spiritual well-being. Many factors such as stress, change and situations outside of our control can affect our mental health. As such, any person, at any age, can experience a mental health problem, that with the right support can be effectively managed. Mental illnesses, however, are diagnosable conditions that significantly affect someone’s ability to think, feel, relate with others and function in their daily life. These illnesses may be occasional or more long lasting such as anxiety disorder, clinical depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia”.

The public health sector has clinics:

• Petit Valley Psychiatric Out-Patient Clinic, Mental Health & Wellness Centres Tel: 637-328;
• Rehabilitation Centre; Arima Mental Health & Wellness Centres, Tel: 643-2350;
• Barataria Mental Health & Wellness Centre,

Tel: 638-8562;

• Carenage Mental Health & Wellness Centre

Tel: 343-4946;

• Caura Substance Abuse, Prevention & Treatment Centre, Tel: 645-4630; Child Guidance Clinic Tel: 726-1324 / 623-234;
• Pembroke Street Mental Health and Wellness Centre

Tel: 623-9084.

• Inpatient treatment for extended periods of time is available only at the St Ann’s Hospital. St Ann’s Psychiatric Hospital, St Ann’s Road, St Ann’s, Tel. (868) 624-1151, Opening hours: 24 hours.

For further information on public health services:

https://health.gov.tt/services/mental-health

Assistance is also available at the Trinidad and Tobago Association of Psychologists:  https://psychologytt.org/

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash