This is an ABC podcast.

I suppose the key first early memory is when I'm about seven and I'm,

I was reading my Sesame Street book in bed and I guess mom was doing her infamous loud crying in the room next door to me.

And so I got this red texter and I was monitoring the volume levels of the crying through

these little spirals in the borders of the book.

When it got louder, I'd do bigger spirals.

Justin Hazelwood is a 40-year-old writer and musician.

His childhood was challenging, to say the least,

and it's had a lasting impact on his life.

My mum's mental illness and schizophrenia is best described by sort of the audio symptoms.

The difficulties of living with mum was through the sounds she made.

And so I guess people with schizophrenia often have verbal tics

and mum would do this repetitive swearing to herself and grinding her teeth

which is sort of impossible to just describe to people I'm finding that she would sort of have

so much tension in her jaw that she her teeth would kind of crack somehow and it was these are just they were just

the most upsetting sounds on earth and they just happened to be sort of regular main

stay as pretty much my entire childhood up to 18 was having to hear this set of incredibly stressful noises

fairly regularly.

You'd think with such serious illness, Justin's mother would have had access to mental

health services, but that never happened.

The best way to explain how I access to mental health services was I didn't.

And I didn't know about them. I didn't even think about it.

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