Going beyond a person’s mental health file

Our latest episode of Get Real: Talking Mental Health and Disability is a wonderfully insightful interview with Heidi Everett, who has written a book about her experience in the public psychiatric system and what she describes as living with a “psych reality”.

Melbourne-based Heidi lives and breathes creativity – she’s an advocate, writer, poet, producer, performer and public speaker. She’s the founder of a living experience led arts organisation called Schizy Inc that makes space in the arts for people with schizophrenia and diverse experience of mental health.

Her memoir My Friend Fox goes beyond Heidi’s mental health file and tell in her own words and memories the living, breathing experience of her life.?It also includes Heidi’s own illustrations that add to the power of her story. It’s a beautiful book, and one that our podcast team devoured in a single sitting.

Heidi ended up in a public psychiatric ward when she was in her early 20s. She was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, though Heidi prefers to refer to it as schizo-affective, taking out the clinical term.

Heidi wants anyone who reads her book to see people in the mental health system, “not as victims of a mental illness but as survivors” and to see that those in psych wards and on the street have “Deep and ancient trenches etched into our lifelines”.

“..... not as victims of a mental illness but as survivors”

At ermha365, we work with people who know these trenches that Heidi describes, and it’s a privilege to get to know them and learn about their experiences.

Heidi encourages others to tell their story in whatever way they’d like. “It’s your story, you tell it,” she says.

Its a powerful thing - to tell a story. Its even more powerful for the people who hear it. I’m glad Heidi has told her story, and in telling her story she encourages more of us to tell ours. By opening up, by talking, sharing, listening we can humanise what is happening to many of us. After all, we are all more than a clinical mental health file.