It’s not often that you come away from the ABC’s Australian Story with negative feelings about the featured person. I have a theory that if Pol Pot appeared on the programme he would come away with a gloss of acceptability over his depredations.
This is probably because of the format of the programme in which the featured person is allowed to tell their own story without any kind of intervention from a journalist. By the end of last night’s programme that featured Maggie MacKellar, The Man on the Mantlepiece (HERE) I was praying for the appearance of a journalist to sharpen their pencil and ask a few pertinent questions.
The main character Maggie, the daughter of a former Liberal Federal Minister, detailed her wonderful marriage to an adventurous, risk taking type of guy. Both were lecturers and seemed well off, middle class and without a cloud on the horizon. However there was apparently a problem as according to the blurb advertising the programme:
But there was a secret she hadn’t been told. And when the truth emerged the consequences were devastating.
This “secret” is the cause of the tone of the programme changing from sweetness and light to ominous. Maggie declares that she thought she knew everything about her husband indicating that there is a dark secret. Suspense rises. She is shown typing on a word processor, commenting on the destruction of the marriage as though the husband was at fault:
MAGGIE MACKELLAR (Voiceover reading extract from her novel): Yet, even as I polish the memory of our marriage his hands rise up and destroy all the moments we shared…
The suspense was intense. My friend and I were speculating out loud what he could have done. Could this charming man have turned out to be a paedophile? An armed robber? A king pin of organised crime?
No. Apparently what happened was that he developed a mental illness. The big “secret” that her husband had kept from her was that he had a previous episode of depression when he was a teenager. She said she considered him not telling her about this episode, a betrayal:
…he had suffered this sort of thing before. When he was 18 he had had a severe depressive episode, and he’d never mentioned that to me, and that felt like a, a huge betrayal.
She mentions this betrayal twice. Not only that. but she says she might not be able to go into another relationship because she doesn’t think she can “trust” anyone again. Forgive me for saying so but this is all a bit precious.
It’s almost impossibly hard to describe how you continue to exist when the person that you made yourself in the shape to match is gone. Possibly one of the most difficult things that I had to process was the idea that I had of my husband against the reality of what happened. And I did think I knew him. I really thought there was nothing that I didn’t know about him and that was the way we lived our life. When in actual fact, I knew nothing at all.
Really? Is she saying that just because her husband failed to tell her about an episode of depression when he was 18 then her total idea of her husband was spoiled? Why such an extreme reaction?
Betrayal is a pretty strong word after some 12 years of marriage. Many people who do have mental illnesses don’t recognise previous episodes as episodes when they happen. This is because of lack of “insight” – this is where there is a complete failure to grasp that you do have an illness. It is actually part of the illness itself and isn’t a deliberate action on the part of the person concerned. Another reason why people might not disclose is that they don’t believe the diagnosis is correct. In many cases the diagnosis may not be correct, so people might be justified in ignoring it. Some other people may regard themselves as recovered and never think any more about it any more. About two-thirds of people who have had a major depressive illness will recover completely so the odds are quite good for a total recovery so why mention it?
Many people have all sorts of illnesses that they don’t mention to their future partners. Think about all the men who have ever had mumps. Do they declare this to their partners before marriage? Mumps probably has more potential to affect a marriage than mental illness because it could affect fertility, a tricky part of any relationship. Are we going to have a whole lot of women complaining that their husband didn’t disclose their mumps illness status prior to marriage?
Having a depressive illness can hardly be said to be “devastating” if it is treated the right way. One in five people are going to have a mental illness, so it’s pretty common. Agreed that depression is a very dangerous illness because of the risk of suicide but it isn’t really one of the worst mental illnesses he could have developed. How would his disclosure have changed her attitude to him? Would she no longer love him if he had a prior episode of depression? Would it have changed her attitude towards having children? If so this is starting to sound rather like eugenics, and as the personal often becomes political, then this programme needs to be the starting point for a public discussion.
I have put this question of whether people should consider whether or not to have children or not if they have a mental illness to medical practitioners and they have said that the general feeling among the medical professions was there was no need to disclose mental illness because, apart from schizophrenia, many of the other mental illnesses actually conferred advantages and well as disadvantages. In other words the adventurous risk-taking charm of Maggie’s husband (the reasons why she presumably married him) could arise from the same genetic source as the disorder.
The thinking about the effects of genes in schizophrenia has also changed in frequent times. The genes that give rise to schizophrenia have become of great interest to evolutionary biologists because these genes have persisted despite the low fertility associated with having the disorder. The current thinking about this is that the combination of genes that cause schizophrenia could also confer advantages along with disadvantages (associated mainly with language and creativity in family members). Other researchers feel that the genes associated with schizophrenia are widely distributed in the population anyway and it only when certain combinations or frequency of genes occur that schizophrenia emerges. For instance it is quite possible that Maggie herself has more of the genes that predispose for depression or schizophrenia than her deceased husband. Is it her position that her DNA should be examined and disclosed prior to any future relationship? Is that the direction we want to go? This all needs thinking through.
What about the impending increase in diagnosing of young people, which is going to occur with the roll-out of Headspace across Australia. Many young people having adjustment problems are going to be subject to more diagnosing and more mental illness labels will be applied. Are all these young people going to be morally obliged to disclose if a marriage appears on the horizon?
The other reason why the Australian Story episode was problematic is because of the very negative and rather old-fashioned view of mental illness put forward by Maggie herself. Her husband became “dangerous” during the course of his illness. As a result of this he was put in a secure facility.
Maggie outlines that she visited her husband and told him that she would wait for him but added: “ … you need to get yourself back together again.” Relatives are often advised to not use words like this when talking to someone with depression. This is in fact the last time she talks to him because she then exits and goes “to the country” The upshot is that her husband escapes by scaling an “unscaleable” wall and then dies while attempting to climb a cliff.
A photo of the unscaleable wall is provided by Australian Story and it is appears that being of large sandstone blocks, it is in fact able to be climbed by anyone with rock climbing experience and it is apparent from photographs provided to the programme that Maggie’s husband had those skills.
There is a real story in this rather unedifying episode and that is the one about the relevant Government’s failure to supply a secure facility and therefore negligently causing a death. There would have been a story in the family’s heroic attempts to ensure that their loved one couldn’t escape the secure facility and damage himself or others, but this story wasn’t told. The story reveals that the family knew that the husband could escape the secure facility when Maggie’s brother says:
…the biggest problem was that when he was put in a secure mental institution, he was able to break out of it. So we were never certain whether he would turn up at night. And I remember having to check the locks on the house at night, uh, because we were worried about him coming into the house and doing something awful, because he had really lost the plot, to put it mildly.
The story continues into the country on its “Eat Pray Love” type trajectory of transformation through escape from a difficult circumstance into a more salubrious environment. Maggie extols the virtues of resilience in the country women around her. However those women would probably not berate their husbands after a disaster with accusations of betrayal. “I feel betrayed because he didn’t tell me we lived in a bush fire prone area”. Or “I feel betrayed because he didn’t tell me we would be likely to go broke during the drought”. These are not words heard often in country halls and marketplaces.
In order to make a good story of it The Man on the Mantelpiece had to use the rather tabloid series of talking heads where people talk about “how they should have seen it coming”. Apparently the most quirky thing the husband did was eat a hamburger in an idiosyncratic way and be rather obsessive about cleanliness. Maggie adds a list of things her husband did that presumably she thinks in retrospect were part of his mental illness. The aspects she lists include: “things where he’d take the easy way out, rather than just sticking at something; propensity to lie and an inability under pressure to make decisions.” These behaviours are not any indication of mental illness at all. They are probably not even personality traits but could arise purely in the context of that particular relationship. To say these are signs or portents of mental illness is really insulting to people with mental illness.
Apparently Maggie has received “critical acclaim” for the book written about this sad episode and is looking to a future writing career in the country.
For those looking for a more positive and hopeful (although academic) account of the latest thinking in evolutionary biology of schizophrenia you can find an excellent article here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632450/
