We sat down to chat with Mary O’Hagan, who’s currently the Executive Director of Lived Experience in the Department of Health in Victoria. Mary shares snippets from her memoir “Madness Made Me” and speaks about how value and meaning can be derived from experiences of madness. We ponder what it could look like if communities looked after each other and created space for people in distress.  

Check out Mary’s Book here: https://www.madnessmademe.com/

Come and listen with:
Lucy (She/Her) – A big fan of cream and storytelling

Rachel (She/Her) – Social Worker, Dialogical Practitioner, mad footy fan and wildly passionate about transforming the culture of mental health services to be person-led and human rights informed.

Incredible artwork @sharleencu_art

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT – A difficult gift

[00:00:01 ] Lucy: This podcast has conversations around different mental health experiences that may be distressing for some people. If that doesn’t feel like something you want to explore today, you might want to visit another podcast and come back to us another time.

[00:00:14 ] Rachel: discovery college acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to lands, waters and community. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to the elders, past and present. They have never ceded sovereignty.

[00:00:32 ] Lucy: In this podcast, we share stories that help us learn from each other, connect us and inspire growth. We want to acknowledge that this way of being, of coming together to share knowledge and stories, is a tradition that has already existed on this land for hundreds of thousands of years as a part of the culture of First Nations people.

[00:00:51 ] Rachel: discovery college acknowledges the views shared in this podcast are about mental health experiences, but are not a substitute for professional mental health advice and support. The views in this podcast are not the views of Alfred Health, but are the views of the individuals we’ve had conversations with.

[00:01:07 ] Lucy: The stories we share on this podcast aren’t just stories, but memories of the people who have bravely shared their experiences with us. Remember to take care of yourself as you listen, as well as to take care of the stories that you hear.

[00:01:33 ] Rachel: Extremely Human is a conversation about the profound experience of extreme states. When we speak about extreme states, we want to explore a more humanistic way to understand people’s experiences that aren’t always shared by others.

[00:01:47 ] Lucy: Each extreme state holds different meaning for each person, including those related to psychosis, depression, grief and addiction. As we chat with a variety of humans, we explore the important question how can we respond to distress with greater compassion and humanity?

We sat down to chat with Mary O’Hagan, who’s currently the Executive Director of Lived Experience in the Department of Health in Victoria. Mary shares snippets from her memoir, “Madness Made Me”, and speaks about how value and meaning can be derived from experiences of madness. We ponder what it could look like if communities looked after each other and created space for people in distress.

Alright, Mary, thank you for coming in, joining us, I was wondering if you could share it just a little bit about yourself, what you’re passionate about, anything that you feel like you want the listeners to hear.

[00:03:00 ] Mary: Yeah, so I guess the key thing listeners might want to know is that I have my own lived experience of mental distress, and that occurred at a fairly discreet time in my life between about the ages of 18 and 27.

I was pretty involved in the mental health system for most of that time, and it had a hugely disruptive impact on my life. Since then, I haven’t had any major distress, and I’ve been working in the mental health area trying to bring about the kind of change that I thought was necessary based on my experience of using services and just on my general experience of mental distress and of the way that society and people who are looking on respond to it.

[00:04:00 ] Lucy: Sounds like the perfect person to have on the podcast, then, because that’s what we’re trying to do. That’s what it’s all about.

[00:04:07 ] Rachel: Mary, I think we’ve kind of let you know about this, but we try to ask all of our guests a bit of a starting question, which is a bit different to talking about extreme states, but we try to think about how different people might have disproportionate reactions to events or things that happen in their life. And we’re wondering if you’ve got a story about something like that.

[00:04:32 ] Mary: Yeah, well, I can flare up quite a lot.

I don’t do it that often. I probably did it more when I was younger. I flare up when things like when the computer is not working, I can start yelling at the computer.

[00:04:48 ] Lucy: The spinning wheel of death is the worst thing.

[00:04:50 ] Mary: Yeah. And when I’m on the phone to the bank and I’ve been waiting for 45 minutes and I say, I want some help with something, and they say, we can’t help you, I can get a little bit heated at those moments. So, yes, I do have disproportionate responses, and it’s one thing that I’d really like to change about myself if I could, but it’s very difficult because I find this flare up actually happens very quickly before you actually have time to think, I guess. Yeah, it’s kind of very quick and very quick to dissipate as well.

[00:05:38 ] Rachel: So it’s hard to interrupt when it’s..

[00:05:42 ] Mary: Yes, I think it is very hard to interrupt. In fact, if I took a really concerted effort at doing that, I might be able to, but it doesn’t really happen often enough to do it, and it hasn’t had a big impact on my relationships. My partner doesn’t like hearing me go on about the computer or the bank or whatever in the next room very much. But no, it hasn’t been hugely disruptive to my life, but it’s something that I’d really quite like to be able to modify, among other things, about myself.

[00:06:23 ] Rachel: It’s pretty human, though, don’t you?

[00:06:24 ] Mary: Yeah, yeah, it is.

[00:06:28 ] Lucy: Mary. So we’re chatting in this podcast about extreme states, and that means different things to different people. I was just wondering what it meant for you, if it had any meaning at all, what comes to mind?

[00:06:43 ] Mary: Well, I guess in my life you can be in extreme states when you’re dreaming.

[00:06:49 ] Lucy: Yeah, actually that’s a great point.

[00:06:51 ] Mary: And in fact, someone once said to me, well, people get psychotic every night when they’re dreaming. So I think that’s quite an interesting take on it. I think I’ve been in extreme states when I’ve been in grief or when I’ve been in a state of psychological injury. Obviously, that sends you into a state that is more extreme than your day to day reality. And then I guess the big experience of extreme states I’ve had was that those nine years when I was experiencing my existential crises, major mood swings and psychosis.

[00:07:43 ] Lucy: Was that something that you would want to talk about?

[00:07:46 ] Mary: As in, oh, yeah, talk about it. I’ve spent my life talking about it, so it’s no problem talking about it. Yeah.

[00:07:52 ] Lucy: What was that like? Nine years is a long time to be in an extreme state.

[00:07:57 ] Mary: Yeah, well, I was in and out of the extreme states. I wasn’t in them constantly for nine years.

[00:08:05 ] Rachel: Can I just ask, before you tell us more about that, Mary, I wonder what you think about the use of the term extreme states and as an alternative to other ways we might describe these experiences.

[00:08:17 ] Mary: I quite like the term extreme states. I find mental illness a problematic term.

[00:08:26 ] Rachel: Why is that?

[00:08:27 ] Mary: Because the idea that this is an illness is just one model or one way of understanding these extreme states. And I think that people really need to be able to decide for themselves what having their own explanatory framework or their own understanding of what the experience is and why it’s happening. Unfortunately, once you get into the mental health system, you’re told this is what you have, and there isn’t much opportunity often, for people to explore other ways of understanding it.

[00:09:15 ] Rachel: I think I heard you say at the start that you’ve been working for many years now trying to cause change in the system. Is that kind of some of the changes you’re trying to see happen?

[00:09:28 ] Mary: Yeah, I think really, in a way, the change in the way services and society respond to people at some level is based on how they understand the experiences that people are having or the behavior they are showing. And so I think it is quite important that we challenge the way the clinical worldview and society have viewed these experiences, because that kind of becomes the fundamental platform on which all service and societal responses are built, in the west at least, and actually in many other cultures, madness or whatever you want to call it, has been misunderstood, stigmatized, and people have experienced quite a lot of discrimination. The reason for that goes to the way