This is an ABC podcast.

Growing up, Elfie Scott knew something wasn't quite right with her mother.

But she didn't know what, and she never asked because no one in her family ever spoke about it or acknowledged it.

And that silence colored everything.

I think that it's kind of a feeling that you can probably relate to if you have any secret in your family really, any sort of like open

secret that nobody's willing to discuss. And I knew that there was something that I didn't

understand, something strange happening in the house, something inherently different

about my family that I couldn't express.

Elfie is a journalist and writer now, and she's expressing the unspoken in her book called

The One Thing We've Never Spoken About, Exposing Our Untold Mental Health Crisis.

But I want to backtrack a bit here and tell you a little bit about her family first,

beyond the illness that affected them, because in many ways, Elfie's childhood was wonderful.

So my family consists of my dad who worked as a banker for many years. I also have an older sister.

She works in Canberra and my brother lives in London and we're all incredibly nerdy people,

I think is fair to say. And what did your mum do for work growing up?

My mum worked as a flight attendant for a while, and that's how she met my dad.

And then while we were growing up, she used to work for very random companies.

She worked for a while for Unilever.

And the only reason I know that that's the company she worked for is because she used to bring home, like, cases of Lipton iced tea.

Amazing.

I never drank water until I was, like, eight years old.

That's like a kid's dream.

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