It is with great pride, honour and solemn responsibility that I am given this opportunity and privilege to speak to you today.

I would like to begin by asking that we acknowledge those that are not here to speak for themselves about the impact their mental health has had on them, because for them their alternative from their mental illness was to choose to stop living. This represents thousands of Australian lives each year, and leaves a legacy of unimaginable grief, loss and suffering for thousands more fellow Australians each and every day.

My lived experience as a carer spans almost 30 years; my lived experience has been within two very significant relationships, one as a wife and now as a mother..............Read the complete speech by De Backman-Hoyle to the Mental Health Commission

Shedding the Black Coat - Jill Parris (Author), Kali Paxinos - (Narrator) A story about living well with schizophrenia

This book focuses on the life of one migrant family in Melbourne who have a schizophrenic son and explores the issues they have all faced. It highlights the stages of shock, denial, alienation and ongoing grief. It describes how the family, including the son with schizophrenia, reach acceptance and how this family’s resilience is central to rebuilding their lives. It celebrates the way in which Kali Paxinos, an indomitable Greek mother, has negotiated the mental health system and found a way for her and her family to live well with a mental illness, and then go on to support others.

The book begins by chronicling the lives of two generations of the Paxinos family. In the first part of the book the history of this eccentric Greek family captures the hereditary aspects of mental illness and how it was managed within the family in the Greek context. This narrative also captures the wounding effects of living within a traumatised family and continues tracing the impact of this wounding on the lives of the next generation.

The second part of the book offers a three hundred and sixty degree view of the illness (the person with schizophrenia, his mother and siblings, a case manager and a psychiatrist) and builds on this picture to describe how this family has managed and planned for the future of their mentally ill person.

Woven throughout the book is a description of how Kali has learned about schizophrenia and built on these learnings to support and advocate for other people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities within the mental health system and beyond.

Kali believes that it is through story telling that we learn, and the book is a series of wonderful stories of pain and joy, life and death, beginnings and endings.

The book is available for $25 including postage from: jill.parris@gmail.com

When people think of recovery from an episode of illness - whether physical or mental - they often think solely in terms of hospitals, doctors and nurses. Clinical care is essential of course, but its not the whole story, as SANE Speaker, David Braniff explains... Read more (PDF)

Review by Alan Rosen, Psychiatrist
Intangible is a slightly offbeat documentary film portraying a highly evocative sequence of accounts of the years of experience as a being the family carer of a person with severe and persistent mental illness. It includes being a childhood carer growing up with a mentally ill mum, and the caring experiences, in both the Aboriginal and wider communities, of a highly respected Aboriginal elder woman.

Many of the carers demonstrate some of the creative interests that they pursue to sustain themselves through tough times, and talk to the importance of instilling and maintaining hope.

The film has been very professionally turned out by a team led by Tanya Clifton, with very high production values, through the creative editing and graphics by Visible Creations.

It deserves a prominent slot on National Television, then should be shown in major art galleries in conjunction with a touring exhibition of these carers' artworks, and perhaps of others of a similar high calibre.

The film is a groundbreaking project developed by the Family and Carer Mental Health Program, Far West (NSW) Local Health District, with funding partners: My Time Project (Richmond Fellowship of NSW); Mental Health Drug and Alcohol Services, Far West Local Health District, CentaCare Wilcannia-Forbes; Far West Commonwealth Respite and Carelink Centre; and Maari Ma Health Aboriginal Corporation.

ARAFMI NSW (Keiran Booth) has endorsed the Project. MHCAA is mentioned as a referral point for carers.  The DVD will be released in Carers Week, 16th October and will be available through ARAFMI NSW.  Information on obtaining a copy will be posted here when the DVD is released for sale.

Please click here to read the Book launch flyer (PDF)