People with mental illnesses, people, you know, -I think people will think, ‘Oh they haven’t got no feeling, they’ve haven’t go no emotion’, but they are wrong, they have got emotions, they have got feelings, they have got plenty emotions and feelings. They want a family for themselves, they want a relationship, they want all these things, but they just can’t, they can’t get it, because of their illnesses, so do the things as well. They want to be loved, the family love them, but they want a different sort of a love, you know what I’m saying, you know, so these things as well and in my daughter’s case, I think, I think she thinks about all these things, I know she does. I know she does. I know she does, because I told you what she said to me about having a, I said, ‘You wouldn’t be here if you was’, she said, ‘No, she said, ‘I’d have a family, I would have a house’, that’s what she said. So that’s their thing, they have emotions. They have emotions, they have feelings. They have feelings and they want to be loved, not by the family, but loved by somebody, you know what I mean?

I think people make a big ho-ha about mental health, it’s not a big, big kind of disease that people get infected. Like it’s not a, -what do you call it? You don’t get the spread of the germs or anything, it’s mental stability. ‘When they have a mental problem the same way you have to tackle the problem, because once you know that his mental stability is not there then you have to tackle that. And it’s not a disease that you can catch easily like a cancer or any other things. People are saying, he’s got the cancer and he passed away or he got so and so things, he got asthma or you can, coronary attack, you get, it, jumps you get it but with the mental disease there’s nothing like a jump or anything. They need your support, you’re more friendliness and more good way approach.

If you lock somebody into maybe rehab without giving the person a cigarette to smoke or without even taking drug or drinking, you’ll be OK. A lot of them, mental health, a lot of them are being caused by drugs, most of them are in the rehab home they’ll be there for five years, that’s in giving their cigarette to smoke, their cigarette, you know they’re not doing them anything, they’re not helping them at all. Instead they are making the case go worse. Mental health need to be handled with care and support. You have to put yourself into that person’s shoes- if you are this person how would your family feel, how would your brother feel, would they not relent, would you relent. I did not relent personally, I had to give up all myself. Because my brother was very, very brilliant, the brain of the family, a pride of the family. For him to just waste away I say ‘no way, no way, no way. All of them they’ve all called me this morning wishing me happy birthday. When he thinks back he will remember the kind of fights we fought for him, he will remember. Because the hospital rejected him at the last minute, they rejected him, that was the last straw and that was our duty. Till tomorrow nothing like, nothing like that.

The clinical psychologist, she used to do these worksheets and things’

‘And on there is a lot of stuff written out, like distorted thinking, it could be 15 different ways of distorted thinking. So seeing those kind of things to me was, -really helps a lot. Oh right, so that’s called ‘catastrophising’, so that’s why, drop the glass on the floor, the world’s going to end. So just reading the sheets that were given to Adam I found helpful. And then, one sheet she did, and it was called Evidence For and Evidence Against, so if he has an irrational thought, he’s supposed to write down, what’s the evidence for this thinking and this thought, and what’s the evidence against? So I thought, ‘Oh right that looks good’ so. Then sometimes he’s panicking about something so I say, ‘Right let’s try and look at the evidence for and the evidence against. So that’s how I’ve learnt by, when I’ve seen these sheets and things, has been helpful.

One patient, she is a woman, and any man she saw to enter the room (at the community centre) to ask anything and she said, ‘Oh, that man is looking at me and why is he coming here, I don’t like the man’s face here, why is he coming here, what’s wrong with me, why are they looking at me?’ Actually he doesn’t look at that woman or nothing, they never say hello or nothing, but she feels an inferiority complex in her mind that any man who come near -coming in the room means -she is sick of men, and that’s the reason -she gets so angry and she gets so angry in her behaviour. So I take her in another room and sit down with her and say, ‘Look, she is coming or he is coming here for so and so reason, it’s nothing to do with you, don’t worry, he won’t come to you, he won’t harm you, so don’t worry. And then I make her calm down so she’s all right after a while. But I think she is having the episode that -after marriage- she doesn’t have any family members surrounding her, -her own family member, only husband, and she is not having any baby or anything, and mentally she thinks that, ‘No-one loves me. And that is the problem with her and that’s the way.

And my support worker has been good and sometimes she, -it sounds silly but once I was explaining the situation and she said, because it can be frustrating because you think, right your muscles are hurting, you’re really tired. Like now he’s not slept all last night. Literally all night he hasn’t slept so he’ll be absolutely shattered. I can see just by looking at his face that he’s shattered, he’s in pain.

Yeah, so it’s frustrating because he won’t, he can’t think, ‘Right I’m absolutely shattered, I need to go to bed early so I’ll have a bath, a hot bath. That’ll relax my muscles, then I’ll take a certain tablet and I’ll sleep through the night and I’ll feel so much better tomorrow. So he can’t think like that. But sometimes, especially because you’re supposed to be wife and husband I think, ‘Why don’t you have a bath?’ And he’ll go, ‘I don’t want a bath’, and you think, ‘God if he just has a bath he’ll, it’ll help. And then it just, -arguments and, or he goes into another panic attack. Whereas once she said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you just run the bath, put lots of bubbles in it etc and then, to try and encourage him, so you run the bath’ And I thought, ‘Oh yeah’, so just little things like that, are sort of practical ways of helping.

Now sometime ago my mum used to have a go at me, then I used to get annoyed, I said, ‘Look I’m looking after you, why are you having a go at me?’ You know. So then when I spoke to the psychiatrist they sort of said, ‘Well that’s the nature of the illness, so there’s no point getting angry and having a go at her. Then, -like trying to give her the food, when I try to give her the food, some days she will open her mouth and eat it, other days she just wouldn’t, she’ll keep the mouth closed. Now early days I used to shout at her, I said, ‘Open the mouth’, and I said to her, ‘Look I can’t spend the whole day here, why can’t you open the mouth?’ Then once again when I spoke to the eminent psychiatrist, and people like that said, ‘No it’s no point you shouting, because it doesn’t go through her head’, and this sort of a business. So I get a bit of advice from them, but sometimes I found though, -the professionals when they give advice- it’s, it’s not good as you, -well obviously they give authoritative advice, but then it doesn’t always solve the problem. Now my being an auditor, I used to solve company problems, so then sometimes -then think I ask their advice -psychiatrist’s advice-, then I find that it doesn’t seem to work, then I said, ‘Well I’m going to sort it out my way’, and I just solve the problem, right. Now, so when they, -when she doesn’t eat, so what I did was, I kept it aside, tried ten minutes later, sometimes she ate. Then another day when I tried ten minutes later she wouldn’t, then after about half an hour later then she ate, so like that, so now that’s a sort of tactic which I tend to use, then.

Yes, so the impact that it has is that I’ve got, -because he’s got, -he has no initiative really, so I have got to organise everything for him. I have got to, -if I do anything I’ve got to make sure it’s not going to have a negative impact on his life, you know. So he came with me to see my parents, one of my daughters were there as well for a few days with her boyfriend, and so that went well, I mean, -and it was good for him to be with people of his own age. But if I was not, if I didn’t take him places he would not go anywhere, that’s the thing, and we stopped in Paris on the way back, and he was quite anxious, because he hates, you know, crowds. But we still went, and we didn’t, -it was the first day I woke him about 10.00 am because we had to catch a train at 12.00, arrived in Paris at 5.00 pm, by 8.00 pm he wanted to be back at the hotel, because he could not, he was too tired, he gets extremely tired, that’s the thing. And the day after I had to plan activities which were not stressful, which were not too tiring, so in fact we went, in the morning we went to visit Le pre Lachaise, which is a cemetery with famous people, -but it’s very peaceful, so he enjoyed that, going looking at and we saw Chopin’s grave and so on, so he was quite happy with that. It’s just trying to find, you know I always feel nobody’s going to do for him, so I have got to do something to stimulate his mind and for him to have something approaching a normal life, otherwise, if I was not around he would go nowhere, because he can’t, you know, do it himself.

We come to the community centre here and near us there is a group for ladies only near our home, she goes twice a week, and it’s for ladies only. I do go with her but drop her off in the morning at 11-30 am and pick her up at 1pm every Tuesday. They do light exercise with them. She goes on Friday at 12 noon and finishes and 3pm. Once I have dropped her off I have to sit in the house, cannot go out because if her health gets back, they phone and I have to go back and pick her up. If she goes far from me, then I cannot go far. She goes to cancer research every Tuesday after 1 pm. At this place they said because it’s a ladies group, I sit in the car or walk around nearby. After one to one and half hours I go and pick her up.