Pamela Jenkins was in her twenties when a psychiatrist explained that her mother had a schizoaffective disorder.
Now a researcher at the Mental Health Foundation, Dr Jenkins is one of thousands of Scots who grew up in a household with a parent who struggled with mental illness. Her formative experiences and, later, her professional training put her in the perfect position to present My Family, Mental Illness . . . and Me, a podcast by Our Time, an organisation that helps young people whose parents have conditions such as depression, bipolar and anxiety.
“My mum, Irene, lived with a mental illness. There were voices only she could hear, and she could quickly switch from feeling very high to very low,” Jenkins says. “No one ever talked about it with me when I was young, even though I knew my mum was often unwell.”
Many of the podcast’s guests describe a sense of not entirely having understood what their parents were going through until they were older. What most have in common is a sense of childhood isolation, which included worrying about having friends over.
Jenkins conducts sensitive, intimate interviews with adults who do a great job of articulating what they went through. Joe Wicks, the Body Coach, for example, speaks about what it was like living with a mother with obsessive compulsive disorder and a father with a heroin addiction, and what he did to take care of his own mental and physical health.
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If you enjoyed the award-winning BBC3 drama In My Skin, about a teenage girl who lies to friends about the realities of her home life (her mother has bipolar disorder and her father is violent), check out the moving episode with its writer, creator and executive producer, Kayleigh Llewllyn, whose childhood inspired the show.
We also hear from Dr Kim Foster, an expert on mental health nursing, who spent some of her youth in the care system as a result of her mother’s severe mental illness, and film director Iain Cunningham, whose mother died after suffering from post-partum psychosis when he was three years old.
What all these conversations demonstrate is the importance of helping affected children know they are not alone. Few people would have had this kind of accessible resource as youngsters, and the producers are to be applauded for helping the next generation find their way.
ourtime.org.uk
