Email | Print

I was born in the Netherlands in 1952 as the 7th child in a family of 11 children. All of us were born within the lapse of 17 years. I have lived in Italy since 1972. At the beginning of 1995, six months after the death of my mother, I began slowly to develop paranoid schizophrenia with a very great delirium. I separated from my husband for the same reason.
In May of 1998, I was put into the psychiatric section of a hospital by my psychiatrist for two months. Then I was put into a “special community” for six months and every weekend I could go home to stay with my husband and son. I was also given a holiday of three weeks to be together with them.
Three to four days after the haldol medicine therapy in the hospital, I stopped completely hearing the voices! This was never cleared up before I took haldol until June or July of 2002. I started the psychotherapy before leaving the “special community”and now I still meet my psychiatrist Dr. Tibaldi and my therapist Dr. Palazzi not because I need it for myself, but because the statistics of relapse within the first 10-years after medicine-therapy convinced me to keep up with treatment.
In 2006, Dr. Tibaldi and also Dr. Palazzi invited me and other recovered schizophrenics and other mentally ill-recovered people to write our personal stories and I really felt like doing it. Just at the end of 2007 in Italy, there will be concluded a competition made for the first time on Italian territory for recovered persons with mental illness in: 1) poem-series; 2) fantasy-stories; and 3) autobiographic stories. The selected contributions will appear in a 2008 book. Other contribution will all be published on Internet websites.
My story is an autobiographical one. I'm already busy to translate my personal story also in the dutch language and will publish it by myself in the dutch-spoken territories of Holland, Belgium, and so on, also within 2008.
I felt persecution from my mother all my life because I always felt to be too much of a burden for her since I was a very little girl. My mom died in 1994 when I was 42 years-old. I was never sure that she really loved me. All her behavior showed me again and again that I was a burden to her.
My eldest sister persecuted me by violating my privacy and the privacy of my new family, supposing several times to be the 'expert' one and trying to get me to respect my mother even though my mother did not respect me anymore.
From 1978 until her death, my mother refused to have me, my husband and later my son as guests in her house. Furthermore my sister, a psychologist, also claimed to be more of an expert than me on my own youth experiences and she tried to mislead me with her 'expert' explanations about what to me was a substantially good youth.
My sister-in-law mostly persecuted me after the separation from my husband and son, treating me in a very insulting way, supposing me to be a dishonest wife—like a faithless wife, like a “bitch” because I exposed them to the dishonor of their culture and their denatured mother. My Sicilian family never supposed that I could have my personal and great mental suffering also because of their invasive culture.