WHEN Peter Cross married his sweetheart Kimberly in 2015, it was more than a statement of their love for each other. It was a declaration that schizophrenia was not going to rule and ruin their lives.
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“I think it was definitely partly that, because looking at it through the eyes of other people, they thought I’d remain unwell and never marry,” says 34-year-old Mr Cross.
The couple met in a mental health unit in Newcastle about five years ago. Kimberly Cross remembers her first impressions of him.
“I thought he was cute,” 38-year-old Mrs Cross says. “My first impression was the way he talked about his illness, I thought it was really lovely. I’d hated talking about my illness, I thought everybody would judge me badly. So I wanted to be like him.”
AS a teenager, Peter Cross’ academic brilliance had all but assured his future. He was studying university courses while still at high school. His ambition was to attend Cambridge to study physics. Then, in his late teens, Mr Cross began to feel his brain that promised so much was not working properly. His thoughts were becoming disordered, and his memory slipped.
“I knew something was going wrong, but I thought the way to treat it was with my own thought process,” recalls Mr Cross. “I think a lot of people with schizophrenia have the same idea, that they can think their way out of it.”
For his mother, Janette Dempsey, observing Peter’s change was confusing and frightening. She had no previous experience of mental illness. She initially wondered if her boy was just being a difficult teenager.
“I did notice that things weren’t right, because his university grades started to slip, but I didn’t understand what was happening,” Mrs Dempsey says.
For Peter Cross, his decline steepened.
“I would crawl up into a ball for hours on end and feel like death itself was going through my veins when I had depression,” Mr Cross explains. “When I had psychosis, I couldn’t feel anything for protracted periods of time. The only thing I could feel was the heater, so I’d sit and stare for hours at the heater.”
He slept during the day and was awake all night, and he experienced paranoid emotions, “so even an old lady walking down the street would cause me fear”.
Janette Dempsey remembers concluding, “My son is having some kind of a breakdown, and I have to get help for him”. She took him to their GP, who referred Peter to a psychiatrist. Aged 21, Peter Cross was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
It took a decade, but Mr Cross gradually regained his life. Medication has helped, he says, but the unwavering belief and support of his mother have been vital.
“Very important, because if you have no motivation, no will to live, no capacity to organise yourself, how are you going to get to a psychiatrist, how are you going to get to a doctor?,” says Mr Cross. “If you have all those dreadful symptoms of schizophrenia, and you don’t have someone to take you to those appointments … you could be up shit creek.”
Janette Dempsey believes loved ones are a key to helping those with mental illness. Yet, she says, families and carers are not receiving enough support or recognition from public health services.
“The absolute tragedy is that families and carers aren’t listened to,” she says. “For a family member or carer - and you usually live with them or know them best - when you start to suspect that there’s something not right, or there’s something going wrong, it is very difficult to get help.”
JENNY Allen is an eloquent and impassioned speaker. Yet even so, she feels as though her voice was not being listened to when she reasoned and pleaded with NSW mental health services, seeking help for her brother, Bernie.
Bernie Sessions was widely known as The Man in The Doorway. He sat on a blue milk crate outside his Mayfield unit, greeting passers-by. Yet behind that cheery wave was a man suffering. Mr Sessions had been living with paranoid schizophrenia for years. Jenny Allen says her brother took his own life just over three weeks ago. He was aged 45.
Just two days before Bernie Sessions died, Mrs Allen phoned the NSW Government’s mental health line. She believed her brother needed help, as she had noticed he was slipping. When she heard back from the representative on the phone, she says help was denied. Mrs Allen was told her brother was not sick enough.
That assessment was made, Mrs Allen says, with no health worker meeting with Bernie, and no one could have phoned him. She says her brother had no phone or electronic equipment at home, because he thought he was being bugged.
“If only someone could have just come and seen him,” Mrs Allen laments.
“Mental illness is not a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday gig, and heaven help you if you have a psychotic loved one on a public holiday.”
In desperation, she contacted the Association of Relatives and Friends of People with Mental Illness (ARAFMI), a counselling and support service. Jenny Allen and her mother had a “beautiful meeting but then was back an hour later because I was so upset”.
“They put their arms around me and said, ‘let’s talk about it’,” Jenny Allen recalls. “That’s what we need. And that’s what the mental health units need, having an open door for the client and the carers, because the carers go through as much as the client. It’s all consuming.”
Janette Dempsey says families and carers often ask two questions: Who do I go to? What do I do?
“There’s a lot of focus on the consumer, but the families need help too,” she says.
DOCTOR Cath Wood is trying to ensure people are listening. She is Hunter New England Health’s director of allied health, mental health services.
While she acknowledges some feel as though they can’t access help, “what we’re trying to do is the complete opposite, and we know that connecting with families and carers really improves outcomes for patients and carers”.
Dr Wood can’t talk directly about the Bernie Sessions case, which is to be investigated. But she believes people’s access to care is “reasonably good”. In addition to the phone line, there is a face-to-face service on weekends during the day at the Calvary Mater Newcastle. The service has also developed a five-point plan to provide better communication between families and health workers. The plan is being rolled out across the Hunter New England health district.
“I’m pretty confident we will be creating a major cultural shift,” Dr Wood says, adding that engagement will benefit not just patients and their carers but medical staff as well. “You can have formats, you can have procedures,” she says, but it is “lived experiences” that provide the “a-ha moments” for staff in developing what they do.
WHEN Bernie Sessions died, many people felt not just an absence in their daily routines, as they missed The Man in the Doorway, but an aching in their soul. Word spread on social media, and the doorway became a shrine.
“The reason it was such a big thing is that so many are caring for people with a mental illness or suffer mental illness,” Jenny Allen says.
Janette Dempsey knows how much carers need to be listened to. She is the president of ARAFMI Hunter. The service operates on government funding of $137,000 a year and a whole lot of generosity from volunteers. ARAFMI “desperately needs” a corporate sponsor, she says, to help ensure its future.
As for her son and daughter-in-law’s future, Mrs Dempsey says, “You just want them to have a good life and be happy, and get out of life what other people can. And I think that’s all Pete wants, in a way.”
Peter Cross is at university, studying for a Bachelor of Commerce. He wants a job, and to be a mental health advocate. Kimberly Cross is studying graphic design at TAFE. They rent a townhouse, and they’re writing a novel together. Above all, they’re grateful to have each other.
“With the right treatment, you can be completely turned around,” Mr Cross says. Kimberly Cross smiles and says, “I’m happy with the way things are.”
Schizophrenia is a word that many people know but so few understand, according to Peter Cross.
“The question I always get is, ‘Are people with schizophrenia dangerous?’,” explains Mr Cross, who was diagnosed with the condition when he was 21. “And my experience is that because of the paranoia, people with schizophrenia are more afraid of you than you are of them.”
Mr Cross’ mother, Janette Dempsey, who is the Hunter president of the Association of Relatives and Friends of People with Mental Illness (ARAFMI), believes there is a need for more community education to raise awareness and remove the stigma surrounding schizophrenia. She only needs to look at her own son’s experience to see that.
“It’s full-time job for Pete, really, to be coping with life, yet looking on, people say, ‘What’s wrong with him?’,” she says. “It’s the judgement from people, and while you might be outwardly hearing people say there is less stigma, there’s still the unspoken, the covert. We have to stop judging people by what we see on the surface and don’t really know.”
Dr Cath Wood, Hunter New England Local Health District’s director of allied health, mental health services, agrees that instead of judging, the community should act compassionately.
“It’s important we check in with people, and it’s okay to ask people, ‘Are you okay?’ and ‘Do you need help?’, particularly if that person is a carer,” Dr Wood says, adding it’s about being kinder to each other.
Mental Health Line: 1800 011 511 ARAFMI: 4961 6717 Lifeline: 13 11 14
