One of my neighbours has episodes of psychosis; periods when he is (according to another neighbour) “not in his right mind”.
Theirs is an unhappy apartment. The psychotic son shares his living space with an aged mother who is in the end stages of dementia. I hear her screaming in the middle of the day, a heart wrenching sound that reverberates across the expanse of the courtyard, through the corridors of our 70-year-old block, out to the street and into the suburb.
“Aiutami, per favore, Signora,” (Help me, please, Madam) she pleads, rattling the bars of the security gate she’s locked behind, but I can’t help her.
During periods when he “is not in his right mind”, her son locks her in the apartment while he takes to the streets, restlessly wandering through our suburb, walking off whatever demons are in his head, messing with his right mind. The mother, her eyes vacant, her jaw slack, her claw-hands raking her sunken cheeks, stands helplessly at the gate, alternately whimpering, then screaming.
Once, I carelessly left my own security gate unlocked and, startled, went to check when I heard my front door bang shut. The ancient Italian widow had walked the length of my flat and was curled up on my bed, her equally ancient fluffy white Maltese lying next to her, his head resting on my embroidered Mexican cushion.
Her thin, greasy hair had fallen on to her face leaving large tracts of her white scalp visible. This cadaver-like form was asleep in my most private of spaces. Everything about her was sharp; the angles of her face, her thin pointed nose, her shoulder blades sticking through the fabric of her blouse. She breathed heavily for someone so slight, greedily sucking life out of the air.
People, faced with the possibility of death, of job losses, of curtailed freedom of movement, of loneliness and of isolation, are taking strain and it is impacting their mental health
I tried to rouse her, to tell her she’d wandered into the wrong apartment. She recoiled, pushing deeper into my bed to get away from me. The old woman began to scream her blood-curdling shriek, her Italian incantations a mystery to me.
The building manager fortuitously arrived at my front door and, because she was a familiar face, rescued the now acquiescent octogenarian and led her back upstairs.
During these periods of mental instability — that include extreme exercise in the form of very fast, very long walks — the son apparently loses a lot of weight very quickly. And so, when someone rang my front doorbell, I did not recognise his shape through the frosted glass.
I opened the door to an emaciated masculine outline, his lower face hidden under a Joker mask — white fabric with a red gash across the mouth. My neighbour’s eyes were glazed as he pushed a copy of an airline magazine into my hands and said: “You’ve earned your sails. Fly.”
He then performed an action that was half-bow, half-curtsy, turned on his heels and walked away — his staccato movements mimicking The Steadfast Tin Soldier in the popular Christmas ballet, The Nutcracker.
Mental illness drives fear into the hearts of most of us because we are helpless in the face of it. You can’t reason with someone who is psychotic; you can’t have a rational discussion or arrive at joint agreements with someone who is of unsound mind.
Coming up close to and having interactions with people who are suffering from mental disorders has brought home the complexity of the problem.
My first exposure, as a teenager, to mental illness was with a distant cousin who heard voices. She seemed normal on the face of it; a little dull and plodding in her speech delivery and a little over eager in her giving of affection, perhaps, but there was no indication of the madness that was to cause her to set fire to herself on the family’s front lawn.
In June and July, newspapers and media outlets around the world, the highly esteemed New York Times, London’s The Guardian and the BBC among them, devoted acres of space and airtime to the topic of mental illness — highlighted during this strangest of Covid-19 times.
Many of the column centimetres dealt with the strain on mental health that the uncertainty experienced during the pandemic — during the lockdown — raises. People, faced with the possibility of death, of job losses, of curtailed freedom of movement, of loneliness and of isolation, are taking strain and it is impacting their mental health.
I thought about my neighbours, both mother and son, struggling to find normalcy in a world that runs parallel to the one that most of us inhabit.
They are allowed to play out their mentally challenged lives in a relatively safe environment. While we, their neighbours, complain about the ruckus they cause, about the unbearable noise that emanates during bouts of mental ill-health, we, the residents are, for the most part, compassionate.
Queerantine nightmare
Many are not so fortunate. Mental health disorders, we have discovered during this pandemic time, come in a variety of shapes and colours. Just this week, The Guardian newspaper echoed local media reports on how the lockdown has given rise to a mental health crisis among members of the LGBTQI+ community.
Younger people stuck at home with disapproving, bigoted relatives were found to be the most depressed. One university survey, called the Queerantine study, reported a marked increase in the incidence of depression and mental instability, particularly in younger trans and non-binary people facing discrimination.
The Guardian quotes someone as saying that during the prolonged lockdown, he had been “trapped” at home with his family — his description of their views said it all: queerphobic fundamentalist Afro-Caribbean protestants. To round it off, the teenager told how his father compared being LGBT to the Ku Klux Klan.
Then there are a group of at-risk boys who sleep on a pavement near the Rosebank Gautrain station. I’ve heard them referred to as the nyaope boys, these teenagers and young men who are habitual users of the street drug nyaope, a mixture (apparently) of low-grade heroin, dagga, ARV drugs and various cutting agents.
While many may be physiologically hooked on the drug, many of the “gang”, according to a Good Samaritan who keeps track of the homeless youths, suffer deep-seated mental illness. Not for them the warmth of an apartment in middle-class Johannesburg. Now, in the middle of an interminable, seemingly endless lockdown, there seems little hope for these boys.
Walking in my neighbourhood, I pass a man who, like my neighbour, has no behaviour control, who shouts obscenities as I walk past. But unlike my neighbour, he’s sleeping in the doorway of an eye-wateringly expensive house on a tree-lined street.
This week my neighbour — who is once more “not in his right mind” — opened the emergency fire hydrant taps in our building causing a flood. This week, too, he cupped his hand around the spout of a tap spraying me with water as I walked past him. I was not drenched, but it was cold and I was annoyed.
“Cleaning you up,” he said as he shrugged and did his Tin Soldier walk away.
A cleansing by water! I have spent many Aprils in Thailand celebrating the Water Festival, Songkran that marks the beginning of the Thai New Year. The word Songkran comes from the Sanskrit samkranti — which apparently means astrological passage.
On the day of this traditional Buddhist festival, people throw water at each other — using buckets and water guns and balloons and hosepipes, jugs and mugs and hats. The purpose is to douse everyone until they’re soaking wet (bearable since it’s April, the hottest month of the year.)
Water is celebrated in a ritual cleansing of the negativity of the year before; the water is supposed to wash away bad luck, ill-health, and the sins and transgressions endured and committed by the person being renewed. It’s a very real manifestation of a cleansing.
Here at home, it’s August. Spring is around the corner. We’ve had a long, dark, cold pandemic winter; a season that has been gripped by fear and death; by a form of madness that none of us has been able to control.
Perhaps my crazy neighbour has it right; perhaps a ritual water-cleansing is just the thing we need right now.
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