Help for a silent hero
15 October 2007
Featured in the Geelong Advertiser Saturday 13 October 2007 P 14-15
To view the .pdf version of the article from the Geelong Advertiser click on the following link: Help for a silent hero.pdf
New Geelong mental health services that provide on-going, home support to people with mental illness and much-needed time-out for their carers, may just save a lot of lives.
Corio’s Rene Costmeyer, a full-time carer to his mentally ill brother, tells Mandy Squires the new services will provide him with the break he needs to keep battling on.
THE Costmeyer brothers are no strangers to struggle.
Growing up as "wog boys'' in a working class family of 14 in Corio in the 50s, Rene and Andre got used to fighting for survival.
It was always them against the world.
Living together decades later - in the family home their father built - the brothers are today fighting harder than ever.
Mental illness is an unpredictable and powerful enemy.
Battling Andre's schizophrenia, says Rene, is the most relentless, exhausting and frustrating fight he has ever taken on.
Now his 58 year-old brother's full-time carer, Rene, 47, admits there are times he feels overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task.
"The truth is, I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for,'' says Rene. "It's pretty bloody tough at our house at the moment, I can tell you.''
But how could he wave the white flag, after guessing at the battles his brother had fought – by himself - since the pair were parted when they were boys.
He can only guess, he says, because after 20 years of being institutionalised, Andre can not, or will not, talk of the horror he has endured.
Rene suspects his brother was systematically abused when first placed "under lock and key'' in an institution, aged 21.
"Sometimes he just cries for ages,'' says Rene. "I think he's remembering.''
The daily battle though, is about to get easier.
New mental health support services announced by Karingal Community Living this week - designed to help bridge the widely-acknowledged gap between clinical care and on-going, home support for people with chronic mental illness - will not only assist Andre in taking steps towards recovery and independence but will also provide Rene with some much-needed respite.
"This sort of help - getting a bit of a break - will save my life,'' says Rene.
With the new support, the brothers can, and will, battle on, he insists.
"As kids growing up, as wog boys, things were never easy … we always had to fight,'' Rene says. "I'm telling Andre now, 'c'mon mate, we've still got a bit of fight left in us.''
Andre's story is the stuff of movie scripts.
Through the eyes of a then 11-year-old Rene, his older brother was "quite OK '', when he was first placed in an institution but a "blubbering mess'' when he saw him eight months later.
His brother's descent into significant mental illness spiralled year by year; with every mental hospital and institution.
The brother Rene remembers was "a normal kid'' who rode his bike, helped looked after his younger siblings and mucked-about in the paddocks of a then semi-rural Corio.
He also remembers a "brilliant mathematician'' who could solve any puzzle and made a game of doubling numbers.
“Any number at all, you could give it to him and he would double it, just like that, quick as a flash,’’ recalls Rene.
If there were signs Andre was mentally ill as a boy, Rene did not see them.
However, he admits it is possible they were there, and lost in the mayhem and struggle of life in a large, working-class migrant family.
Or that he was simply too young to understand them.
There was an incident, Rene remembers, when Andre was 17 and worked in a paint factory, when he let litres of paint go and stood and watched rivers of shiny, perfect colour flow onto the factory floor.
The incident followed the drowning death of his brother's best - indeed only - friend, says Rene, and probably signified deep grieving, rather than madness.
But it may well have been the act which sealed his brother's fate, when it became clear, that because of his age, he could not join his family on a (failed) migration attempt to America.
Andre was 'dealt with' by his father.
"Dad was a good man but hard,'' says Rene. "He worked so hard to support us all and he was really smart too … but he probably didn't really know what to do about Andre.''
Only a child at the time, Rene was not in a position to prevent his father "committing" his third eldest child.
As an adult, however, Rene joined forces with his girlfriend, who worked as a secretary for a psychiatrist, to have his brother moved to a reputable and comfortable mental health facility in Melbourne.
Only a phone call from a stranger asking Rene to confirm his brother’s birth date many years later revealed Andre had been moved to Geelong.
Rene, who was then caring for his aged father, arranged for his brother to visit the family home on weekends.
“Andre would never want to go back at the end of each weekend,’’ says Rene. “He kept asking if he could ‘stay home’.’’
When the boys’ father died, in May 2005, Andre “came home for good’’.
While Andre has improved, he still requires constant care.
“I have to tell him everything and do pretty much everything for him,'' Rene says. "There’s no peace because he just follows me around the house.’’
Project manager for Karingal mental health support services, Jenny Porter, says caring for people with chronic mental illness can be difficult and draining.
The new Federally-funded program will provide a total of nearly 12,000 hours of respite support to local carers of people with mental illness.
The Karingal service also includes a personal helpers and mentors program, designed to help people with mental illness set, and achieve, personal goals.
"It's a long-term program that is all about taking little steps,'' Jenny says.
Rene is pleased - and relieved - to be one of the first to benefit from the new service.
Small steps and short breaks are fine by him. All he needs is a pause in battle.
"I'm going to keep at this, keep going, because I want to prove people wrong. I want to show the people who think Andre is sort of beyond help, that's not true,'' says Rene.
"It's full-on but if I can see that Andre's life is better because of what I'm doing, then it's worthwhile. Then I've achieved something with my life too.''
To enquire about Karingal’s new mental health support services call 5249 8900.