Mental illness ran in Meg's family. Suicide forced them to talk about it.
All In The Mind
ABC listen
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pulitzer prize finalist Meg Kissinger grew up in the 1960's and 70's, steeped in feelings of shame and guilt about the mental illness that plagued her family.
Now a journalist covering mental health, she's made it her mission to share stories of lost loved ones and the systems that failed them.
This episode explores the topic of suicide. Please take care while listening and don't hesitate to reach out for support if you need it. You can reach Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music, and more. |
| 0:07.8 | Take two alcoholics, one with bipolar, the other with crippling anxiety, |
| 0:12.8 | and let them have eight kids in 12 years. |
| 0:16.3 | What could possibly go wrong? |
| 0:19.1 | That is one hell of a line, one hell of a question from a memoir written by Meg Kissinger. |
| 0:25.2 | Meg has spent 25 years covering mental health in America as a journalist. |
| 0:29.8 | It's a job she spent her whole life training for. |
| 0:33.0 | I was born in 1957, and so the 1950s and 60s, this was a topic that we just didn't have the language for. |
| 0:42.5 | So I watched as the people that I loved the most became quite disabled by their illness, but we didn't have a way to talk about it. |
| 0:52.8 | And a way that I found to understand it was to go out and |
| 0:57.0 | report on it. So to talk to people out in the world, strangers that were struggling. And I found |
| 1:04.1 | that I could learn from them what I couldn't from the people that I lived with and loved. |
| 1:11.3 | This is all in the mind. |
| 1:12.9 | I'm Sana Khadar. |
| 1:14.6 | Meg is turning her reporting inwards this time. |
| 1:17.5 | Her memoir is titled, While You Are Out, |
| 1:19.9 | an intimate family portrait of mental illness and an era of silence. |
| 1:23.5 | I knew that I was going to be unearthing some very painful archives. I was going to be getting |
| 1:29.7 | the medical records for my family. So I knew it was going to be, you know, a scary chore. |
| 1:36.9 | But for her, this work is necessary, a way to end the silence that leads to stigma, that leads to shame, |
| 1:43.5 | that leads back to silence. |
| 1:45.0 | And there's hope bound up in our story too. |
... |
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