The dark cloud over my head

“The antidepressants made me feel like a zombie. I could barely get out of bed. I was also experiencing nasty nightmares,” Susan Catherine Keter says calmly as she deftly crosses her feet. She is 51, and there is a bubbly demeanour about her. Her cheerful face remains unlined by age and has a youthful glow to it. One can barely detect the ravages of the stresses mental illness has put in her family.

“I was always in low moods, always irritable and exhausted. Plus, despite experiencing insomnia, all I wanted was to spend my time in bed. Most people around me, even family members, didn’t understand what I was going through. There was a lot of gossip and criticism. They thought I was just lazy and emotionally weak.”

The dark clouds were getting darker. The dark clouds that first appeared when Susan was only two months pregnant with her third child. Her two-year-old son, was sick, a stomach condition that needed surgery, and besides that the pregnancy was draining her too.

“I was constantly nauseated and fatigued and my son was just wailing, day and night,” she says, recalling the period in 1999 which brought on her first bout of depression. Fortunately her son’s abdominal surgery was successful and several days later, he was discharged. But while her son got better, Susan got worse. She developed high blood pressure, a condition that persisted throughout her pregnancy.

The birth of her second son in 1999 brought her even more worries. He was born with a birth defect and had to undergo surgery when he was barely a week old. “I wasn’t allowed to hold and breastfeed my baby after the surgery. I felt helpless and tortured. And my blood pressure shot up again.”

By the time they were discharged from the hospital, Susan had been put on high blood pressure medication. “My health was never the same after that. I started having one health issue after another. I would have back pain, headaches, insomnia, asthma, acid reflux and fatigue. I was always on one medication or the other. I was irritable and lacked patience with my children and my husband. I became lousy, both as a mother and a wife.”

And when her doctor, on realising that her condition wasn’t improving despite medication, referred her to a psychiatrist, she was deeply wounded.

“I didn’t want to believe that my physical symptoms could be a sign of mental illness.”

But when the medication made her feel like a robot, she decided to go back to the doctor to get her dosage reduced.

“It was like I was on autopilot. Going through life but not registering anything. The reduction helped me regain functionality,” she says.

NOT ADOLESCENT TANTRUMS

However while Susan was recovering, her 12-year-old daughter Sarah started showing symptoms of depression.

“She became aggressive, moody, and generally difficult to deal with. She terrorised the whole family. She would throw and break things, fight with her brothers, and scream at everybody. We were living in fear whenever she was around. You never knew what could set her off. And no, it wasn’t just the normal adolescence mood-swings. Sarah is my second-born daughter, so I knew what normal adolescence behaviour was like.”

SUICIDE ATTEMPTS

At the time Sarah, was in Standard Seven, and had just been enrolled in a boarding school. Later that year, Sarah had her first suicide attempt. “She’d taken some cleaning liquid and we had to rush her to the hospital. She was diagnosed with depression and put on anti-depressants.

I couldn’t believe that my 12-year-old was also clinically depressed. I was still struggling emotionally and her suicide attempt sent me back into deep depression. I was soon back on anti-depressants after I had stopped.”

Sarah survived a second suicide attempt when she joined high school. “She kept saying she wanted to die and you couldn’t reason her out of it. She didn’t see any reason to live. She would ask me ‘how do you know that death is bad if you haven’t experienced it?’ She ended up cutting her wrists in the bathroom.”

GENETIC PREDISPOSITION

Susan found herself wondering if her family was genetically predisposed to depression. Her earliest memories of her mother were that she’d been in and out of hospital. “My mother was always going to the hospital where she would be admitted for weeks or even months. I found out that she’d suffered from depression while she was pregnant with me and afterwards. She was anti-depressants throughout my childhood. My grandmother took on the responsibility of raising me when I was just six-months-old because my mother couldn’t cope.”

Susan speculates that her father also had some form of mental illness. Other members of Susan’s family have also experienced mental illness: her eldest daughter was also diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, two of her aunts had mental health problems, and her grandfather was also said to have a bit unstable (which might have been an undiagnosed mental illness).

Today, Susan and her daughter are both healthy. They are no longer taking anti-depressants and have learned how to cope. “We have found physical exercise and a healthy diet are key to maintaining a healthy mood. My daughter is a great runner and she was even talking of joining the Olympic team.”

She says she couldn’t have coped without the loving support of her husband. “My husband, Sammy, stood by me all the way through. He never gave up on me even at my worst. Social support cannot be over-emphasised.”

Because of her family history, Susan later got training in mental health and counselling. Now she is part of Reason to Hope, an organisation which deals with mental health. They educate the community on mental health, run family support groups, and run a mental health clinic on Ngong Hospital.