‘Growing Up With My Parent’s Mental Illness’

No one I’ve ever interacted with in my 23 years of life has ever been warmly invited into a family secret; most tumble into it in the dark, head first, sustaining scars and wounds that follow them around for the rest of their lives. As I listen to two 20-something Indians recount their parents’ struggle with mental health, I find myself taking large gulps of water to drown a rising lump in my throat.Tanmaya and Arjun* are strangers to me, but their stories of family conflict and mental illness are awfully familiar.“She was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was really young — maybe when I was in the 4th or 5th standard. But, I didn’t really ‘find out’ until I was in the 10th standard when she had an episode,” Tanmaya tells me about her mother without meeting my eye. Like Tanmaya, Arjun also chanced upon his mother’s bouts of depression as a young boy of 15 or 16 after overhearing a conversation between his parents about medications. Unsurprisingly, Tanmaya’s older brother and Arjun’s older sister were clued in to their mother’s struggles with mental illness, leaving them, the youngest members of their families, to make their own accidental discoveries.“My sister would visit my parents every weekend, so she was around more. I was away in boarding school so, it was easier not to tell me,” says Arjun, gazing absent-mindedly at the tiled floor in the space between us, a space that feels much smaller than it is because every Indian child can relate to a lack of communication in the family. Even so, Tanmaya and Arjun’s perceptiveness saw them through. Both speak of a noticeable change in their mothers’ behaviour, from increased paranoia and worry to a lack of enthusiasm. But, unfortunately, their individual journeys of suspicion did not end there. Tanmaya recalls a traumatic experience that has shadowed her ever since it took place when she was in the 10th grade. “I told my mom I was going out with my friend and needed some money. She refused to give me money, told my friend to leave, and locked the house from the inside… Then, we had a bad physical fight. She pinned me down to the floor and tried to choke me… She only let me go when my brother came home,” she narrates teary-eyed.