BY JANIECE CAMPBELL
“What I hope will happen by telling my story is that when doctors are treating someone with a mental illness, they won’t just be treating an illness or a set of symptoms, but that they’ll be treating a human being. There’s a whole person there that has had trauma, pain and they have all the same needs as everyone else.” Roxanne Stewart-Johnson
Mental illness is a prevalent issue in Jamaica that not many citizens take seriously. A growing cause for concern, the developing nation’s adult rates of mental health challenges range from 3-5% with psychosis, 15-20% with depression and anxiety, and 30-40% with personality disorder, according to a study by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute. Though the statistics are striking, the sad reality is that many Jamaicans are not adept at dealing with mental illness, with many believing it stems from the work of demons or the practice of “obeah.”
“In Jamaica, it’s very easy to be branded as someone who’s weird. It’s very easy to be a pariah in a culture that views any kind of oddity in a negative way. So, with things like mental illness, you can very easily find yourself socially isolated because people don’t want to have anything to do with you,” says Roxanne Stewart-Johnson, a mother of two living with bipolar disorder. “There’s a stigma and there’s a lot of ignorance around mental health. I had a friend tell me that someone at church told them not to visit me anymore because they thought that the devil was in my house.”
Roxanne, originally from Jamaica, was diagnosed in college after experiencing an episode of psychosis, which incited fear and caused her to run into oncoming traffic. After several failed attempts at finding a psychiatrist that would treat her with compassion while also dealing with the heavy side effects of medication (that doctors did not warn her about) including weight gain, hypersomnia, and hallucinations, her life momentarily took a turn for the better. She fell in love, got married, and gave birth to her first son, Benjamin.
But her highs were then followed with a series of lows.
Three months after giving birth, Roxanne experienced psychosis once again and had to be hospitalized. On this occasion, she was heavily sedated with lithium and haloperidol, both used to treat mania. Conscious and complicit, nurses then told her that the doctor would administer an injection. Before she could get more information, it was lights out. When she woke up, she was unable to speak properly; she had a stutter and couldn’t put sentences together coherently. She’d been given six weeks’ worth of fluphenazine, an antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia, without her consent.
Roxanne’s perfect love story also soon went awry when her now ex-husband began showing signs of domestic violence through wielding a hot iron near to her as she slept and through verbal abuse. At the same time, she was having troubles at work, having disagreements with her mother, and to her surprise, she became pregnant for the second time.
Unfortunately, the psychiatrist that saw her through her first pregnancy passed away, so Roxanne was off to find a new doctor. She aimed to be on little to no medication alike her first time around. A friend recommended Dr. Jacqueline Martin, the doctor who would activate her fight or flight response.
Upon meeting for the first time and without looking at her prior history, Dr. Martin suggested that Roxanne abort the baby and be hospitalized. Unwilling, she insisted on keeping the baby and fulfilling a full-term pregnancy. The second time they met, Roxanne wanted a refill on her prescription of quetiapine, a low-dosage medication that helped her sleep. Though she had no symptoms of psychosis and didn’t exhibit any harmful behaviours, the doctor then became aggressive, threatening to put her on an unsafe combination of multiple drugs and forced hospitalization. Dr. Martin then asked her to sign a waiver, an agreement to proceed with all of this while totally absolving herself of any responsibility should the baby die or be harmed in the process.
Knowing her requests would continue to be ignored by healthcare professionals, at thirteen weeks pregnant, Roxanne made a lone decision to leave everything behind and seek asylum abroad. Without telling her husband or her family, Roxanne and her son boarded a flight to Canada and never looked back.
“I was hearing so many good things about Canada on the news. At the time, the whole thing with the Syrian refugee crisis was happening, and Justin Trudeau was saying he wanted to help them. This was also the Trump era, so many immigrants were avoiding the United States. So, I said Canada’s cold, but that’s where we’re going!”
With no regrets, Roxanne would soon give birth to her second son, Salem in Toronto. After a lengthy series of court hearings, her and her children would later be granted refugee protection by the Canadian government. She then pursued and completed her Master of Journalism degree at Ryerson University. While it’s a blessing that she successfully made it out, many other mental health patients in Jamaica will continually deal with physical and sexual abuse at the hands of healthcare workers as well as have their human rights being violated. Roxanne aims to be the ground-breaking voice for those who are silenced back home.
“I definitely want to see more accountability and transparency within hospitals. I would love for a body like the United Nations to look at Jamaica and countries alike and see how mental patients are being treated inside those institutional walls. There’s a lot of silence, and people that are speaking out aren’t believed because we have a mental illness,” she says.
She continues.
“I’d also like to see more patient autonomy and respect for their rights, where they’re allowed to make decisions about their treatment. I know for most of the doctors that I went to, none of them spoke to me about the side effects associated with these drugs and they didn’t ask for my informed consent. I don’t even think they knew about the side effects themselves! A lot of patients are being forcibly treated without giving their informed consent or without consent period.”
For more information on Roxanne’s inspirational story, watch “A Psychiatric Refugee” on YouTube, a thought-provoking two-hour documentary where she delves deeper into her personal experience of fleeing Jamaica’s abusive psychiatric system.