Documentary Short - Financial Impact and Poverty

The filmmakers behind the documentary I'm involved in, I AM STILL YOUR CHILD, have released a number of short supporting videos that focus on different aspects of living with a parent struggling with mental illness. The one below deals with the financial impact of mental illness. Simply put: it ain't easy.

The entire video series can be viewed on the official Youtube site and add up to over 30 minutes of bonus content. While the documentary is only available for streaming inside Canada right now, the short videos should be watchable anywhere in the world.

Lightly-Edited Transcript

Marie Leavens: Bipolar disorder implies when they go into a manic, they spend money irrationally. [Andy] drove us to bankruptcy because he would ‘max up’ my credit cards for all kinds of stuff. And even sometimes, like last year, the bank kept offering him an overdraft protection. First two times, it’s like, “you know, we could have some nice Christmas gifts.” And I’m like, “that’s nice, but we can’t pay it back afterwards. So, no.”

Eventually, he succumbed and took it. Didn’t tell me. Bought all kinds of goodies. Suddenly, I’m like, “where does the money come from for all of these?” Suddenly, dawned on him what he had done. He finally told me and showed me. Because now they were saying, “you need to start paying back.” He couldn’t do that. He had no income.

They don’t realize the implication and the responsibility of the money. You know, when they’re in that ‘mood,’ it doesn’t register. So it’s very difficult. Because of that, we’re in the process right now of activating his mandate so that he will never be able to have a credit card without my consent or anything like that.

Von Allan: Money was very tight. She had declared bankruptcy. So we were living pretty hand to fist a number of times. My mom was basically on her own. And then there was the support of systems in Ottawa and Ontario that could help her through this, which wasn’t much.

For anybody who’s dealing with this stuff now, it doesn’t seem — from my point of view — to have gotten much better. And then when you factor in my mom’s health, she suffered from migraines. Very, very bad migraines. So just to get out of bed in a day was a victory. And then, maybe on a day where she was actually fairly lucid, she physically felt awful and couldn’t function very well. And that means you don’t have the ‘ammunition’ to be able to cope with some of what you’re dealing with.

Jessy Bokser: My house was lost in the process of my mom’s mania sort of erupting. Through her destroying the inside of the house and I think her doing that was part of her facing the struggle of wanting to change her life and our home being that really concrete symbol for it. Because we had lived there for 20 years as this very normal, average family. And suddenly she was in this completely different mindset and she wanted to change that home space. And then in doing so, changed and took apart and sort of destroyed our mental and physical home space. And then, of course, because of everything, we were forced to move.

Von Allan: Fundamentally, I figure if we were rich, while there would have bee problems, some of the indignities that my mom went through wouldn’t have happened. For instance, dealing with mental illness — dealing with schizophrenia — and having to go to a food bank on a particular month. That wouldn’t have happened.

Or one of the memories I have is my mom would ask either my relatives or sometimes our landlord for either a loan or some type of cash advance or a gift of money or whatever to make ends meet, because we had a bad bill that month or something. If you are wealthy, some of those issues disappear.

That is not to say that people who are wealthy who are dealing with these things — dealing with mental illness of any form — aren’t struggling mightily. But I think poverty made it worse. And I think the indignity of really struggling and having to feed a kid, feed herself, and what have you, made it worse.

And I don’t think you can quantify that in any way, but it certainly didn’t help.

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