Maureen and I have been married for over 50 years. We still got a few years ahead of us,
we hope. We just take it easy and have fun when our health allows us to.
That will be for some time yet.
I met Maureen, it would have been about 1956. She would have been the ripe old age of about
17 or something and I was a bit older. We just seemed to click and we had a long engagement
and finally got married when she turned 21. We've got two children. One was born, Diane,
in 1962 after 1961 marriage. And the other one in 1965 was Carol.
We had it rough. We could not afford frozen peas. I longed for frozen peas. We had to
have canned peas. But it meant that there was no spare money for Maureen to do anything.
One of our problems that we realise now, was married woman, 1960s, could not get a job.
She was isolated and that was the problem.
Maureen probably had her first indication that something was wrong, which may... We
now think, may have been, postnatal depression when the youngest one was perhaps a few months
old, say 1966. Fifty years ago, there's not a problem. Have a sleeping pill, get on with
it. Now they say, "Look, there is a disease. We can diagnose it. Let's do something about
it." That is the basic problem. You've got a disease, it's nothing to be ashamed of.
I, not only had to work, but in those days I had to go to night school. I came home,
sometimes, and Maureen was pushing one or other of the children backwards and forwards
out in the front in a pusher and the kid was crying her eyes out because it was colicky,
and this situation meant that she got more and more withdrawn. I remembered that she
used to cry herself to sleep some times.
After her breakdown when she was being treated, all of a sudden her life improved and her
ability to do things improved. 1969 Maureen actually got herself a job. She had a purpose
in life, she had mobility. She had some money. Things, on the surface, improved, but the
harm had been done. They manifested themselves in physical ailments. I think they tended
to hide the mental problem until, as a result of the physical problem with her stomach,
she went to a lady gastroenterologist. "I know what's wrong with you. I know exactly
what's wrong with you. This is where you go." And she sent her to a psychiatrist. Started
treatment and she's been going upwards ever since.
But we got a little bit more money now. We go to England more regularly. As long as we've
got something positive to look forward to and as long as we can enjoy ourselves even
in a limited way, because of our health, the future is good.
It's a full-time occupation. And you have to learn. Nobody tells you. There was no beyondblue
to say, "This is what you do. This is how you do it." There was no books. So you learn
as you go along. It's an intellectual exercise and it's something that you live with all
your life. And you find things you can do and you find things you can't do. You use
humour as much as you possibly can. If you can get them to believe in themselves, they're
half way to a cure, almost.
A professional carer looks after somebody because its their profession, but you are
not a professional carer. You are doing it because you're with someone. It's gotta be
love. If you look after yourself, you've got a chance to look after somebody else. You
have to look after yourself and you have to be very... You have to be kind to yourself.
Because if you can't be kind to yourself you can't be kind to anybody else. I didn't know
that I was a carer. I realised afterwards that I had become one because of what I was
doing. So, if you are a successful carer, you save that person, but you save your own
relationship and you save the relationship of everybody who is involved by the two of you.
That is the trouble with depression because it affects everybody. And if you can reduce
that, you make a tremendous difference and you benefit and the whole community benefits
from it, but particularly, your circle of friends and relations.
The help is out there and the understanding is out there.