As a tween, I’d heard the Rolling Stones sing about “your 19th nervous breakdown”, but I never knew what it really meant. There was also that nervous cat (“Claude”) in those Warner Bros cartoons, who’d jump to the ceiling whenever his puppy barked. Those were nerves; he was nervous, I knew that, but I also knew that a nervous breakdown was much more serious and complicated than that. Breakdowns were serious, but nobody in my world ever talked about them.
When I was eight, my Mum had a nervous breakdown. That’s what my Dad called it. Mum spent weeks away from us, getting some kind of treatment in Riverview Hospital. I remember the long drive down the highway and over the old Port Mann bridge. We visited her in a giant old hospital that had big, heavy doors and wide, echoey linoleum floors.
When I was eleven, something similar happened again. Like before, she was gone for weeks. We had a couple of home-makers come in to our home on different days, to look after me and Kim while Dad was at work, or up visiting Mum.
The root cause of her illness remained mysterious to my sister and me. All I had figured was that Mum had become nervous or emotionally fragile; that she was deeply unhappy about something, and had hit some kind of breaking point, like a pot boiling over.
In fact, she had bipolar depression for most of her adult life, and had been prescribed lithium sulphate a number of times up to then. Nothing was explained to me and Kim. I think the stigma around mental illness was still very strong back in the 1970s. My Dad was from a generation before, coming of age at the outset of World War 2. He didn’t want anyone to know our family business. We’re surely become the subject of neighbourhood gossip, or worse, pity.
In my pre-pubescence, I don’t think I ever cared much about shame; I just felt fear and worried about what was happening with Mum, and I missed her while she was away. Dad was sad and quiet when she was away too, but I don’t recall him ever speaking about any of it. He may have been stoic about the whole thing. I think his behaviour was based in sadness and resignation, and I think that we may have adopted an attitude of learned helplessness about our mother’s situation from our Dad.
What does “nervous breakdown” mean?
