The secret history of me

JOURNALIST Lanai Vasek on a life entwined with mental illness, tragedy, foster care and eventual happiness.

Vasek on assignment for The Australian, beyond Bourke. Photo: Stuart McEvoy

ONE of my earliest memories is of my mother, dosed up on a cocktail of sleeping pills and prescription medication, bleeding over our kitchen floor. She had smashed her head into the glass window of the oven. It was 1991; she was 27 years old, and I was three.

We were living in a quiet cul-de-sac in Maroochydore, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. As she lay dazed on the cold, grey tiles, blood gushing out of the wound, I went on a long, dark race down the driveway to get help. The driveway seemed so long when my legs were much shorter and with my Mum apparently dying on the floor.

According to court documents I’ve only recently been allowed to see, Belinda Beth Vasek (née Borthistle) – my mother – had taken “a premeditated overdose while caring for her child”. She hadn’t wanted to survive, but I had got out of bed searching for a glass of water and that had pulled her from her lethal slumber. Like any mother, she would have done anything for me; even if that meant abandoning her “premeditated” plans to end her life.

Over the next two years, my Mum was subjected to more than nine involuntary hospital admissions, six within a 12-month period. Nearly always she was locked in a psychiatric ward and often she was kept in hospital for lengthy periods in an attempt to pacify her bipolar disorder, a severe psychotic illness that is categorised by episodes of mania and depression. Many bipolar sufferers try to end their life. The vast majority get the right treatment, and are able to live normal and productive lives. My mother wasn’t one of those.

Two years later, things came to a head. Documents tendered to the Family Matters Court in Darwin, where we were living at the time, say there was “strong concern [over] the ability of Belinda Vasek to provide a safe, stable environment for her daughter, Lanai Vasek, in the future”. In hindsight, I tend to agree. But of course, no child ever wants to be taken from the arms of their mother.

The documents say that while I was in my mother’s care I witnessed many of her psychotic episodes. In her worst moments she even did the unthinkable: she hurt me, a fact I was shocked to uncover. “When unwell, Belinda Vasek has been verbally and physically aggressive towards Lanai,” the documents say. “Two child protection investigations concluded that Lanai Vasek was a child at risk of physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect due to Belinda Vasek’s psychiatric illness.”

My Dad – Stephen James Vasek – had been estranged from us since before I could remember. My Mum and he split up when I was just a few months old. He wasn’t able to cope with her mental illness, and the person she became when unwell also did not want him around. So the court determined that “sole rights in relation to the guardianship of the child are to be transferred to the minister until the child attains the age of 18 years”. I became a foster kid, in other words. I was five at the time.

Dissecting the truth
It sounds a cliché, but turning 21 – supposedly the gateway to adulthood – saw me reflect on all the things I still didn’t know about my past. All I had were fragmented memories, often horribly traumatic, and I felt it was important and appropriate to dissect and face the truth. For a long time I had never really understood why I was in care, or why I was being moved from one place to another, or where or how it would all end; and there were very many nights when I went to sleep extremely confused about the decisions that were being made for me.

It took several lengthy phone calls, a heated discussion, a few angry tweets and some animated emails but finally, in October last year, I was assured my Community Services case files would be retrieved and prepared for my viewing. Community Services (formerly DoCS) is the leading government agency responsible for child protection, foster care and various other basic welfare needs in NSW (I had been transferred into their care from the Minister for the Department of Health and Community Welfare of the Northern Territory on October 19, 1994, and remained their ward until my 18th birthday on March 29, 2006).

From what I had been told, my case files would chronicle everything leading up to, and during, my time in out-of-home care. Caseworker reports, court documents, phone records – everything. I would finally have the truth, or so I hoped. It took nearly two months, but last December I sat with five folders that contained all the answers I had been longing for.

“Why are those paintings Blu-Tacked to the wall?” I asked the caseworker who had been assigned to brief me on the contents of my files before I started reading them. “Ah, well, there’s no glass or sharps in this room,” she said, followed by a lengthy pause. “Would you like a glass of water?” I wondered if I would be presented with an actual glass of water or if it, too, would be plastic.

“No thanks,” I replied. “So, why are there two doors? Does one connect with the room next to us?” I asked. “Well, no, that’s just so there is always a safe exit and entry point for caseworkers in the room,” she said. “We aren’t used to having ¬people so relaxed in here.” “Here” was a glass-free trauma room in the tower of the Community Services office in Chatswood on Sydney’s north shore. I wondered what kind of stories a room like that could tell, and then quickly remembered I had my own, very traumatic, story to discover right in front of me.

It was a strange experience. There are lots of rules: you have to have a support person, your first reading must be in the department office, and so the list continues. During the ’90s, the time I wanted to know most about, the majority of case notes were written by hand or typed, so the early part of my files were extremely hard to read. To make matters worse, the pages are ordered in reverse; from the back to the front of each folder (but, of course, no one tells you that; you’re left to figure it out on your own).

Reading the files was equal parts eye-opening and confusing, like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with foreign pieces that don’t quite fit together. It was my life through someone else’s eyes: without the emotion, without the minute details that can change the way an event, or person, is perceived. The files took me four months to finish. I found myself reading one page, stopping, giving up, and then coming back a day later to do the same thing. It was, and still is, extremely painful.

Psychotic episodes
From 1988 to 1995, my mum was hospitalised dozens of times. Born in Tamworth in 1964, those who knew her in her late teens say she ¬suffered several bipolar-like episodes even then. However, it wasn’t until 1988, just months after my birth, that she was formally diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder.

In a letter from the director of the Sunshine Coast Community Psychiatry Service in June 1992, my Mum was described as “very unwell” and “insightless into her illness”. The letter was addressed to the Queensland Department of Family Services. It was a plea for the department to step in and organise a “contingency plan” for the likely relapses in my Mum’s mental health. “Once she recovers from this episode of mania she is at high risk of further relapses, and the associated danger to her daughter’s well-being,” the letter reads. “I have no reason to believe Belinda is an unfit mother when she is well.”

In early May 1995, a DoCS progress report states my Mum – while living in southeast Queensland – was having psychotic episodes but was being refused treatment. “[The maternal grandmother] has tried to have Belinda restrained by the Health authorities but they decline,” the report reads. “It sounds as if Belinda’s behaviour is not serious enough to warrant scheduling.” A few days later Mum sought assistance from local health authorities. She knew she was losing her battle. She knew she needed help. On May 19 she was restrained by police and admitted for three weeks to a Brisbane hospital.

Less than three months later, on August 5, I attended her funeral. I was seven years old. My Mum had committed suicide in heavy scrub in Biggenden, south of Bundaberg. Her body wasn’t found for several days. She’d gassed herself in her car on July 31, 1995. She was 31 years old. She’d ended her life a three-hour drive from the home we had shared in Maroochydore, where four years earlier she’d taken her overdose. I had saved her on the first occasion, but this time I wasn’t there to help. I’m not sure I would have made much of a difference anyway. She had pre-arranged everything. She was in pain, she had wanted to go and she was determined to get her way.

On the day of her funeral, I remember wondering if my Mum was even in the box lying at the front of the church. It seems almost comical now, but on a day filled with grief for so many, I remember being upset that I had to wear a dress to my Mum’s funeral and wasn’t able to wear the new jeans I had purchased to wear on Jeans for Genes Day.

Psychiatrists’ reports state Mum’s reluctance to take medication was the main catalyst for her continued relapses. Ceasing medication is often a common problem with bipolar-affected people: once Mum started to feel good again, she felt she didn’t need it any more.

With the right coaching, treatment and support this could have been a different story. Perhaps if there had been better health funding for sub-acute beds, and more mental health nurses, she might not have been discharged from her many hospital stays so quickly.

But the most important thing I believe she needed, and was not given access to, was after-care support, such as continued counselling, targeted support groups, or simply someone on the other end of the phone, trained and willing to help. She missed out on all these things, not because the services weren’t there, but because they were underfunded, understaffed and overworked. She slipped through the cracks and paid with her life: a casualty of a mental health system that didn’t work. Nearly two decades on, the system is crippled by the same problems, and it’s still not working.

First night in care
It feels like a lifetime ago, but the first night I spent in a foster home I was bullied. I was in a departmental crisis cottage in Darwin. Just hours before, my Mum had been carted off in the back of a police paddy-wagon and admitted to the Cowdy Ward psychiatric unit of the Royal Darwin Hospital. It was May 25, 1993; a month later I would officially be a ward of the state.

I wanted to eat porridge for breakfast and although I was only five, my new foster sister told me porridge was for little babies and I was one of them. She was scolded, I cried, but fortunately she was only a temporary sister and I haven’t seen her since. I spent several weeks in that home. It’s strange, but my most vivid memory from that time was the amazing-smelling strawberry shampoo the house carer let me especially use. She was very kind to me. I can still recall its rich, fruity aroma.

After a few legal humps and several psychological assessments, in June that year I was placed in kinship care with my maternal grandparents in Tamworth, in rural northern NSW. As a young girl I was happy with them; we lived close to my aunt and uncle, and I regularly got to spend time with my cousins. I had lots of friends at school. But in mid-1996 my Nan and Pop decided to move to Queensland. We relocated to Bribie Island, about an hour north of Brisbane. I remained a ward of the NSW government; contact was maintained mostly via telephone.

Once I reached my teens, however, things began to sour. My grandparents were ageing, and as I grew up we grew more apart. Despite several attempts at family counselling, the fighting got too much for us all. I began to fall in with the wrong crowd at school. I could see my life going down a path I did not want to be on. I knew I had to get out. My paternal grandmother became aware of the troubles I was having, and despite us having had minimal contact over the years she wrote to me and extended an offer for me to finish my schooling in Sydney with her.

In July 2002, aged 14, I moved south and my Grandma enrolled me at Stella Maris College, a private Catholic secondary school in Manly, on Sydney’s northern beaches. My new life had begun, or so I thought. Acting out, like most teenage girls, I continued to rebel. I stayed out late one night with friends. My Grandma wasn’t impressed. She kicked me out. I was back in ¬foster care, but to my eternal gratitude the school waived my remaining fees.

My teen years in out-of-home care were spent with the support of a non-government agency called the Burdekin Association. Following the 2008 Wood Report on Child Protection Services in NSW, Community Services increasingly contracts out day-to-day support services to organisations such as Burdekin, Barnardos and Anglicare. It’s an attempt to ease the burden on overloaded caseworkers, and it works. Community-based services can often provide a higher level of one-on-one contact, which in a troubled life can make all the difference.

I stayed with Burdekin until I was 18, and it was my caseworker there, Anneliese Hermann, whom I very much credit with getting me on the right track in life. During my later years in care, my Community Services caseworker touched base with me on average once every three months. Anneliese was there every week and was always ready to help when I needed a guiding voice. If there was an assignment to be done, or I had a difficult doctor’s appointment, if I was having trouble at school, Anneliese was there, one of the few constants in my life. She still is, and she still regularly takes my phone calls and provides support to me in any way I need. The day I sat and read my case files for the first time, she was right there beside me.

In total I had nine recorded placements during my 13 years in out-of-home-care; the last four years, from ages 14 to 18, were the most unsettling, with seven different placements. But over that time I met and lived with kids who endured much worse – some unimaginable – circumstances. My many foster sisters and brothers often shared their heartbreaking stories with me, telling of their countless placements and the awful things their parents did to warrant their injection into the system.

A drop in the ocean
Every 15 minutes, someone in Australia attempts suicide. Every four hours, someone like my mother succeeds. One desperate life lost because that person felt they had no one to turn to. Ninety per cent of people with physical illness gain access to ready good-quality care in Australia; only 35 per cent of those with mental illness do. And that figure drops to 15 per cent for young men and people in rural and remote areas, especially indigenous people.

According to data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the number of children in out-of-home care has more than doubled in the past decade. In 1998 there were around 14,500 children in out-of-home care. In 2008 there were almost 35,500 children on a care and protection order and just over 34,000 children in out-of-home care, the majority of whom were either in foster care (47 per cent) or living with relatives in kinship care (45 per cent).

A study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Picture of Australia’s Children 2009, also revealed one in five Australian parents with children aged up to 14 reported suffering poor mental health. This ranges from short-term depression to the more severe psychotic illnesses. There is currently no national data to track the number of children who enter out-of-home care as a result of a mentally ill parent. But my experiences persuade me that there must be a strong link.

Mental health experts say the $178 million in funding announced in this year’s federal budget is a drop in the ocean of what is needed. Severe mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, that often hit the hardest, were largely neglected under the proposed funding model. So too were the after-care support services that might have saved my mother.

My biggest fear is that in 10 years’ time I’ll be reporting for The Australian on a little girl who wasn’t as fortunate as I was; perhaps killed by her mother in the midst of a psychotic rage, or neglected to such an extent she suffers irreversible emotional and physical damage. What saddens me most is that if that does occur, fingers will be pointed at the parent, not the system. I know that there are children today, almost two decades after I was taken from my mother, who are witnessing the same horrors that I did. Who will forever have vivid memories of their parents’ psychotic episodes. Who may already be orphans.

Of course there will never be a perfect mental health system. Some people will always slip through the cracks. There will always be lost children; there will always be lost parents. But if we don’t give it a real shot, how can we ever say we’ve done the right thing?

The files that told me so much about my life, and about the pain that took my mother’s life, are now closed. They will sit in a box in my bedroom and probably remain closed for many years to come; I’m not sure if I will ever look at them again. But the passions they have stirred in me will remain. I cannot close my eyes to the failures in our mental health system, and I’m determined not to let others do so, either.

At 22, I have completed high school, been to university and, unlike many people my age – let alone those who have grown up in foster care – I am already living my dream career. There are regrets, of course; I will never know the things other people know about themselves: my first word, what I was like as a toddler, how my parents met, or how my Dad proposed – he only contacted me occasionally and died of a heart attack when I was 16. But I was fortunate to meet kind and generous people who tried to take the place of family. The relationship I currently have with both sets of grandparents is strained; maybe one day this will change, but for now, I don’t really want it to. I survived the system. I survived my mother’s mental illness. I am one of the lucky ones. But it shouldn’t come down to luck.

Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; Lifeline 13 11 14; beyondblue 1300 22 4636