‘There were times I couldn’t leave the house’: Diagnosis that changed Aussie woman’s life
An Adelaide woman has revealed the “immense barriers” she faced to access treatment for her condition, and experts warn it’s an urgent situation.
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Rubia Sutton has been seeing a therapist since she was 14 years old, but it took the better part of a decade before she was able to find a diagnosis that fit.
“At first, I was experiencing a lot of anger and pessimism about the world,” the Perth-based 24-year-old told news.com.au.
“I had gone on hormonal birth control quite young, because I had acne and I was really embarrassed about it. I feel like that, combined with some events in my life and a family history of mental illness, kind of set something off inside of me and it got to a point where I really needed to speak to someone to unpack it all.”
Having been encouraged by her family to see a psychologist, Rubia began her mental health journey, and over the next few years several labels or diagnoses were thrown around.
“I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression,” she said. “Which explained some of my symptoms but not the full picture.
“I also displayed a lot of ADHD-like tendencies in my behaviour: I was impulsive, I’d have periods of intense passion for something where I was almost manic about it, but then very flat periods when I lacked all motivation as well.”
Australia is in the grips of a mental health crisis, and people are struggling to know who to turn to, especially our younger generations. Can We Talk? is a News Corp awareness campaign, in partnership with Medibank, equipping Aussies with the skills needed to have the most important conversation of their life.
Psychiatrists began to suspect bipolar disorder, something that runs in Rubia’s family, but like some of the other labels, she didn’t feel it resonated with what she was going through.
“I think to me, that seemed at first like a really negative thing, because I experienced a lot of trauma surrounding my family member’s mental health issues, and I didn’t want to be put in that same category.”
The first time Rubia heard about borderline personality disorder, it was her mother who brought it up.
“She’d been doing a lot of research and once I started looking into it, it seemed to be the one diagnosis that really fit.”
In her early twenties, after several periods of hospitalisation for more acute mental health crises, Rubia saw a mental health team in her home city of Adelaide who finally made the diagnosis official.
Characterised by instability in mood, relationships, and self-image, often leading to impulsive behaviours and a strong fear of abandonment, borderline personality disorder is strongly linked with complex PTSD.
“When I heard about complex PTSD, it made a lot of sense to me,” Rubia said.
“I never had one singular event in my life to tie my mental health concerns to, but I had all of these little traumas that kind of built up in a sense, and that was quite validating to me to know that it doesn’t have to be this one thing that happens to make you the way you are. It can be complex.”
Rubia says that at times she’s faced immense barriers to accessing treatment, particularly since becoming independent of her family and having to navigate the mental health system as an adult.
“I’ve found it super difficult navigating the waitlists for everything,” she explained.
“In my later teen years, when I was taking care of myself and living by myself, I didn’t have my parents’ support in that sense. When I was younger, my mum was able to pay for me to access services privately. But then when I got older and I had to do all those things myself, you know, I remember there being three months between appointments and stuff like that, because that was the earliest I could get in on the public system.
“I’ve been super fortunate in my current job, because I work for St John’s Ambulance, and I was offered five free counselling sessions through work that didn’t have a waiting time.
“After my latest admission to hospital, work gave me another 10 free sessions for the year, so now I’ve got 15 for the year and I’m seeing my psych fortnightly at this point so it won’t last me the whole year but it’s still something, because otherwise, I’m paying upwards of $100 every couple of weeks to talk to someone.”
The Australian Psychological Society backs up Rubia’s experience, claiming many struggling people could face waits of weeks or months for an initial appointment.
Chief executive Dr Zena Burgess said the situation was “dire” in regional and rural areas particularly.
Mental Health Australia policy and advocacy director Emma Greeney said the nation was seeing some “staggering rates” of mental distress.
She said intervening early was “so important” but cost was impacting whether people got the support they needed.
Ms Greeney said some young people were being forced to choose between paying their rent or for a psychologist appointment.
“We hope that the next Australian government makes a bold commitment to address this imbalance,” she said.
Rubia also recalls sitting for hours in an urgent care centre trying to be seen in order to access psychological support, or sleeping overnight in the emergency department only to be sent home with some paperwork and a number to call if she fell into crisis again.
“I felt like, OK, well now I’m just on my own again,” she said.
“I was admitted into hospital late last year for a really bad period of anxiety and depression, and I was basically just encouraged to go home as soon as possible, because they said ‘we don’t want to keep you here, and it’s not nice here, and you seem fine, so we’re going to give you a doctor and you can go’. And it just kind of felt like even if the access is there, you’re discouraged from using it if you appear too ‘well’.”
Research by News Corp’s Growth Distillery with Medibank reveals Gen Z Australians are the least confident in managing their mental wellbeing compared to other generations, which could be in part due to the barriers to access presented by cost.
It also revealed social media outpaces healthcare professionals as the primary source for mental wellbeing information, with almost two thirds of Australians are relying on social media platforms to access information on mental wellbeing, compared to one third for healthcare professionals.
For Rubia, who shares about her experiences on TikTok, she finds the process validating, revealing she gets a mostly positive response from other young people whenever she posts content about her own diagnosis and journey.
“I get a lot of messages from people asking ‘what did you do? What was your process? How do you talk about it?’ So that’s really good to know that people are looking at that and relating,” Rubia explained.
“It’s nice to think that by being vulnerable about my own stuff maybe I can convince someone else to try to seek help or to not be ashamed.”
Bek Day is a freelance writer
Originally published as ‘There were times I couldn’t leave the house’: Diagnosis that changed Aussie woman’s life
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