“It affects everybody around you.”
‘It’ is mental illness, a problem that Linda Papineau-Couture says runs deep in her family. It affected her parents and they, in turn, affected her and she’s been dealing with the fallout ever since.
Now in her 40s, she was young, maybe even two, when she first recognized the problems.
Her military father was controlling and physically, emotionally and mentally abusive. He had a “different personality.” He might have had post-traumatic stress disorder, she speculated.
It seemed like her mother just couldn’t cope with it all, she said, and became physically abusive as well.
“He would have odd freak-outs. Odd behaviour. She would break down crying. She would just get very frustrated and very angry or cry. I just knew that there was something not right going on inside the house.”
Linda ran away twice before she turned five but couldn’t escape. The abuse continued and even worsened. When she was nine, a family friend molested her over a period of months.
She couldn’t tell anyone, she said, so she changed. There were nightmares. There was anger. She felt rage. She started getting into fights at school.
Her depression deepened when she was 14. That year, she was sexually assaulted twice and her father died on duty. She started to abuse alcohol, and her drinking eventually got out of control. Her whole demeanor changed, she explained.
That’s when it happened.
“That’s when I felt the break, the split,” she recalled, talking about how her mind created an escape since she wasn’t able to actually get out of her situation.
“It feels like you disassociate completely. What you know is gone, and you’re not dealing with all the pain and anger and anguish. You just kind of separate yourself. You put up a shell so you don’t hurt that person any more but really you just keep hurting them if you don’t get help to solve the problem.”
In the face of such extreme stress and duress, Linda acted out. Her behaviour and personality changed, as did her psychological state. While her thoughts and feelings were invisible, everything else was definitely out in the open.
But any trauma can have a deep and lasting effect on people and their mental health, explained Lisa Hardy of River’s Edge Counselling Centre. For four years, she has been doing art therapy with youths mostly in their teen years, but some 11 or younger. This group includes children in care who have experienced abuse issues, child exploitation and human trafficking.
And divorce. She said that a difficult family situation often is more than enough to disturb a young person’s thoughts and feelings. They experience isolation and shame, among other emotions.
“Trauma touches all aspects of who we are: our spirituality, our identity, our personality, our physical being. It’s held in the body.”
Working with St. Albert Public Schools has broadened her understanding of the depths that youths experience troubles with their mental health. The children that she has worked with don’t fit in to the school system, she noted, because they couldn’t contain some of their difficult emotions and have acted out.
“It turns out these kids were experiencing grief but they didn’t have a safe place to express their grief, for example, over a change in a family dynamic. They’re experiencing life transitions, confusion over identity, over what they’re going to do for a living, relationship challenges, difficulty regulating intense emotions,” she continued, emphasizing their issues with physical and emotional attachments.
“Having an insecure attachment as a child has an effect on their ability socially. Adolescence and young adulthood is really noted as a time of volatile emotions. Depression and anxiety are all part of the emotional volatility. They haven’t found a safe and appropriate way to express those that don’t include harm to self or others.”
For students suffering from any form of mental illness, problematic behaviour can be just one aspect of their struggle; they’re often missing out on critical learning opportunities as well.
Thomas Holmes, a psychologist who works with the Sturgeon School Division, said children suffering from mental illness often display a significant decrease in school function – in fact, that’s one of the signs that mental illness may be a factor in a teen’s life.
He explained that the process of learning is one that takes place in the brain, so if the brain itself is not functioning optimally, students just simply aren’t in a position to be able to effectively take in and retain knowledge.
“The effect of mental health on learning can be very significant,” he said. “If a child’s anxious, then they’re not accessing their cortex and they’re not accessing their memory function.”
Dr. Michael Trew, Alberta Health’s chief addictions and mental health officer, said children can miss out not just on those educational opportunities, but on a huge number of social development opportunities as well.
“If you get a kid who’s sick for any reason, such as mental illness, and that puts them on the sidelines for months or a year, that really interrupts the normal growth and development of their social lives, of their school lives, and getting on with the rest of their lives,” he said. “Not to mention what it can do to their own sense of who they are and their self esteem.”
Leif Gregersen’s life was not just put on hold because of his mental illness, but it was set back. Normally an A- and B-level student as well as a keen air cadet, he was hospitalized for a two-week period when he was first getting assessed and diagnosed for bipolar disorder.
That was in Grade 9. While the hospital offered him classes so that he could keep up with his studies, he refused as a rebellion against his parents.
That brief period of his teen years had devastating consequences for his education and for his personal life, with lasting consequences. His “Type A” personality refused to accept the reality of his situation.
“I was really ticked off. I never understood that I had something wrong with me,” he recalled, later considering the dramatic turn.
“I lost faith in anything after that. Most of the first two semesters were As and Bs,” he stated. “My third semester report card was all fails but somehow they passed me. And Grade 10 was a train wreck.”
At the same time as his assessment, he was also promoted to corporal, which was a huge thing for cadets. It was supposed to be the best day of his life but he was at one of the lowest points during his youth.
He had always had low self-esteem but this drew him into a serious depression, one that he said he could only get out of by drinking alcohol. He just didn’t care any more.
Gregersen called his high school years “a zombie zone” that eventually involved delusional thinking and irrational actions, including some violent ones. He’s thankful that all of that is in his past but wishes things had played out a lot differently.
“I spent a lot of time hiding, being very ashamed of what others must have thought of me. I sometimes feel that I am finally getting the life in my 40s that I should have lived in my 20s.”
