All posts tagged mental illness

• September 28, 2017

  Guardian Australia story: ‘”His Death Still Hurts”: Pfizer anti-smoking drug Champix ruled to have contributed to suicide’, September 2017

  A feature story for Guardian Australia. Excerpt below.

  ‘His Death Still Hurts’: the Pfizer anti-smoking drug ruled to have contributed to suicide

  An Australian coroner says Champix had a role in Timothy John’s death, which occurred after only eight days on the drug

  

  When the retired Queensland schoolteacher Phoebe Morwood-Oldham started an online petition following her son’s suicide in April 2013, she could not have known that her insistence on asking hard questions of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies would lead to an Australian-first finding by a state coroner.

  On Thursday in Brisbane magistrates court, coroner John Hutton found that a commonly prescribed drug named Champix – manufactured by Pfizer and sold internationally under the name Chantix – contributed to the death of a 22-year-old Brisbane man, Timothy John, who died by suicide soon after he began taking a medication that he had hoped would cut his smoking habit from eight cigarettes a day down to zero.

  For Morwood-Oldham, the finding was a satisfying outcome for a lengthy process that began with a Change.org petition that she started four years ago, which asked for on-the-box warning labels on Champix packaging. It has been signed by 49,000 people. “His death still hurts so deep,” she wrote at the top of the petition. “After taking the anti-smoking drug marketed as ‘Champix’ for just 8 days, my beautiful boy hung himself. But despite reports of 25 suicides linked to Champix in seven years – there still aren’t proper side-effect warnings.”

  Every Sunday for four years Morwood-Oldham and her older son, Peter, have visited Timothy’s grave at Cleveland cemetery. The weekly routine involves the laying of lillies and turning their minds toward a young man who was, as his headstone says, “much wanted and loved”. Morwood-Oldham tells Guardian Australia that Timothy’s death “was so sudden” and it affected her deeply.

  “I lost the person I love the most in the world, in eight days. I never expected it.”

  Talking about Timothy, Morwood-Oldham warns that her emotions are “all over the place”. He is never far from his mother’s mind, nor her gaze: when she opens her laptop to share some photographs, there he is, her screensaver. A cute, blond boy aged six, aiming a cheeky smile at the lens.

  Timothy had suffered mental health issues, something his mother speaks of in terms of grades out of 10. He had for a time been a 4/10, then, after cognitive behaviour therapy, he was back to 9/10.

  “How did he go from a 9/10 to a 1/10 in eight days on Champix?” she said. “The autopsy showed there were no alcohol or drugs in his system other than Champix and Ibuprofen.”

  The inquest heard that, on a drive back from the Gold Coast just hours before his death, Timothy asked, “Mum, do you think I should give up the Champix? It’s making me feel strange.” Morwood-Oldham told the original two-day inquest in November last year: “I said to him, ‘Timothy, if it’s helping you to give up smoking maybe you keep it up’.” She had not been part of the consultations with her son’s GP when he was prescribed the drug and the Champix packaging did not contain warnings for any potential adverse effects.

  To read the full story, visit Guardian Australia.

  For help if you are in Australia: Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; ­Lifeline 13 11 14, Survivors of Suicide Bereavement ­Support 1300 767 022. For help if you are outside of Australia, visit suicide.org’s list of international hotlines.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• September 4, 2017

  The Weekend Australian Magazine story: ‘Susan, Unbroken: After Dr Andrew Bryant’s suicide’, September 2017

  A feature story for The Weekend Australian Magazine, published in the September 2-3 issue. Excerpt below.

  Susan, Unbroken

  Her husband’s suicide was devastating. But Susan Bryant was determined to call it out.

  

  The last few days had been nightmarish and Susan Bryant was tired of explaining. She decided to write an email to try to explain the inexplicable. The words came to her in a rush, powered by grief, anger and frustration, as well as a desire for the cause of her husband’s death to be known, not covered up. It was a Saturday evening in early May and before she travelled across town for a family dinner, she sat in the study inside the beautiful home on the hill she had shared for 25 years with a brilliant gastroenterologist named Dr Andrew Bryant. Her first instinct was to say sorry.

  “I apologise for the group email but I wanted to thank those of you who have been so kind with your messages and thoughts over the last three days,” she typed. “Apologies also for the length of this email but it’s important to me to let you know the circumstances of Andrew’s death. Some of you may not yet know that Andrew took his own life, in his office, on Thursday morning.”

  The family’s beloved white dog lay on the floor beside her in the study, while a cat was curled near her feet. Andrew had not suffered from depression before, she wrote, but his mood had been flat during Easter and he had been sleeping poorly because he had been called in to see public hospital patients every night of the previous week. She wrote that because of these long hours — not unusual for an on-call specialist — he had missed every dinner at home that week, including one to celebrate his son’s birthday. “In retrospect, the signs were all there,” she wrote, then chided herself. “But I didn’t see it coming. He was a doctor; he was surrounded by health professionals every day; both his parents were psychiatrists; two of his brothers are doctors; his sister is a psychiatric nurse — and none of them saw it coming either.”

  Susan addressed the email to 15 colleagues at the law firm where she works in central Brisbane, and she hoped that it would help them understand why her daughter had phoned on Thursday morning to briefly explain why her mother would need some time off. “I don’t want it to be a secret that Andrew committed suicide,” she wrote. “If more people talked about what leads to suicide, if people didn’t talk about it as if it was shameful, if people understood how easily and quickly depression can take over, then there might be fewer deaths.”

  Together, they brought four children into this world and they all still live under the same roof. “His four children and I are not ashamed of how he died,” she wrote. Susan knew that her children felt this way, but she double-checked with them before she sent the email, and before the five of them left the family home to visit the Bryants in Paddington, a few ­suburbs over. One by one, her children came into the study and read the email over her shoulder. They saw no problem with it. She ended her letter with the spark of an idea; a glimmer of hope. “So please, forward this email on to anyone in the ­Wilston community who has asked how he died, anyone at all who might want to know, or anyone you think it may help.” It took her about five minutes to write. She sent it at 5.45pm on Saturday, May 6, and then she went to be with Andrew’s family.

  The next afternoon, Susan thought that a few of her close friends and neighbours might like to read the message. And so, at 2pm on the Sunday, she passed it on to another five people who live in the inner north suburb of Wilston. When two of her children asked if they could share the email on Facebook, she said yes, because she thought that it might help their friends understand what had happened, too.

  Within a few days, her words had been read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Her email was republished and discussed online and off; both inside and outside the medical profession. It was as though she had shot a flare skyward on a dark night, and suddenly, she found herself surrounded by strangers who were drawn to the distress signal.

  People responded to her honesty with their own. They wrote to her with deep, dark secrets and confessions, some of which they dared not speak aloud. She gathered their letters and cards in a large basket that sits in the centre of her kitchen bench, while hundreds more notes piled into her email inbox. Writing to her helped them. She did not know it when she wrote the email, but they needed Susan Bryant then, and they need her now.

  To read the full story, visit The Australian. Above photo credit: Justine Walpole.

  For help if you are in Australia: Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; ­Lifeline 13 11 14, Survivors of Suicide Bereavement ­Support 1300 767 022.

  For help if you are outside of Australia, visit suicide.org’s list of international hotlines.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• September 20, 2016

  Backchannel story: ‘Wikipedia Is Not Therapy!’, August 2016

  A feature story for Backchannel. Excerpt below.

  Wikipedia Is Not Therapy!

  How the online encyclopedia manages mental illness and suicide threats in its volunteer community.

  

  One recent Tuesday night in the suburbs of Sydney, Elliott* was sitting in front of his home computer, editing Wikipedia and debating with a fellow volunteer who was continually undoing his hard work. He was devoting his weeknight hours to developing an article about Salim Mehajer, a former deputy mayor of a Sydney city council who had attracted national headlines for a variety of indiscretions, including shutting down a public street without authorization in order to film his own wedding. But as Elliott typed, his eyes intent on the screen, his mental state was deteriorating.

  Elliott, 37, knew the inner workings of the online encyclopedia better than just about anyone. Since his first edit in 2004, he had invented the popular ‘citation needed’ tag, used by editors to indicate when a statement requires more evidence. He had started the administrator’s noticeboard,where the site’s volunteer leadership could discuss inflammatory incidents. And he wrote ‘exploding whale,’ a quirky article that remains emblematic of the sparkling brilliance for which the crowdsourced encyclopedia is widely beloved. For the latter creation, which summarized how the Oregon Highway Division attached half a ton of dynamite to a beached sperm whale carcass in 1970, he was awarded Wikipedia’s first ‘oddball barnstar,’ and so another user pinned a bright green badge to his userpage to acknowledge his enterprising work.

  But on this particular night, his virtual achievements were far from his mind. With his wife and two young children occupied in another room, Elliott was locked in what’s known as an edit war, while using a different account than the one that had earned him his earlier plaudits. Elliott was convinced that his detailed account of Salim Mehajer’s traffic violations, including an occasion in 2012 when he ran over two women in his car, belonged on the site. His interlocutor, another Australian editor of prominent standing within the community, remained unconvinced. “I don’t like the guy either, but Wikipedia’s policies on undue weight, original research and biographies of living people don’t not apply because you don’t like someone,” the second editor wrote, mistaking Elliott’s industrious research for bias against Mehajer. On several occasions, this second editor had reverted these lengthy additions, before using one particular adjective to describe Elliott’s work: obsessive.

  Their bickering had been brewing for several days. The pair went back and forth in the article’s ‘talk’ page, which is linked in the top left corner of every entry on the site. Elliott argued passionately for his cause, and at one point logged out of his account to back up his own argument anonymously; these contributions were tagged with his IP address. Two days earlier, he had responded anonymously to another editor, writing, “I fart in your general direction, which is a hell of a lot more pleasant than editing Wikipedia, I can tell you!” After reviewing the conflict, a site administrator decided to ban Elliott on that Tuesday night. “Given the seriousness of this conduct, I’ve set the block duration to indefinite,” noted the admin.

  Elliott’s mind was on fire. Already short-fused from several months of unemployment and recent health and financial woes, he felt overwhelmed with stress. As he sat fuming in front of the screen, his wife approached and asked him to help put their children to bed. The request startled him, and he reacted with a flash of fury. Elliott immediately regretted his anger. Stunned and embarrassed, he grabbed his phone and keys, hopped into a white Hyundai, and sped off.

  After driving for a while, he parked outside a local school and switched off the engine. He pulled out his iPhone and started typing a lengthy email. Titled “The End” and sent to a public Wikipedia mailing list watched by thousands of people around the world, late on the evening of Tuesday, May 17, Elliott’s email begins, “I’ve just been blocked forever. I’ve been bullied, and I’m having suicidal thoughts.”

  More than 2,000 words later, after recounting the events surrounding his ban in the exhaustive manner of a man well-versed in defending his position to nitpicking online strangers, he wrote, “I know I’m not well. I have fought this feeling for a decade.” Elliott ended with this: “I sit here in my car and contemplate suicide. My despair is total. There is not a kind one amongst you.You have taken my right of appeal, my ability to protest and my dignity. You have let others mock me, and I have failed to contribute to Wikipedia’s great mission—one I feel so keenly. I failed. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I will drive, I don’t know where. I pray my family forgives me.”

  To read the full story, visit Backchannel. Above illustration by Laurent Hrybyk.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Tech Journalism, Writing / Andrew McMillen

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