Maureen Allen is a schoolteacher of Welsh and Irish extraction, and lives near Melbourne on Phillip Island. In this recent autobiography, she examines the causes and effects of depression, and tells us what the blackness feels like, not in textbook terms, but from her own experience in the trenches of this affliction.
The author is a lifelong victim of mental illness which seems to have run in her family. Revealing the volatile and sometimes traumatic relationships that both her parents and maternal grandparents had, she also poses the question, “Despite our superior knowledge these days, are mentally ill people still looked upon as dangerous. And Why?”
Maureen has suffered from having little or no support from her family, especially her adult children who show signs of the illness themselves. In this book she emphasises that family silence and family denial about mental illness can be fatal. The absence of a supportive environment can contribute to severe depressive episodes and may even be a death warrant.
With unflinching honesty, she relates the impacts of experiences such as a failed home-style abortion, and an obsessive extramarital affair. Her own confessions make this a bracing and thought provoking account of one person’s struggle with inner demons. Out of Joint is Maureen’s ‘act of hope’ that relatives of persons with mental illness will understand, after reading her story, that depression is a disease, and not a habit, and that its victims need help and hope, and not resentment.
