If all organising is disorganising and reorganising — let’s reorganise how we think about mental illness

By Amanda Tattersall.

I have walked a life living two identities. On the surface, I am ‘normal’ Amanda. I work, connect, and strive in the world just like you. At my core, I have lived a life yearning for change. I am an organiser.

I discovered organising in the wake of the social movements that rose and fell around the war in Iraq back in 2003. I joined a massive coalition in Sydney that held enormous demonstrations, but despite our passion, we didn’t succeed. It was a turning point for me. I embarked on a quest to find different ways to make change. In 2004 I enrolled in a PhD and travelled to North America where I soon found organising. I met people like Mike Gecan and Joe Chrastil from the Industrial Areas Foundation and did their five-day training. But change is hard and I wrestled with organising initially. I didn’t love the IAF’s idea of compromise and I found the practice of relational meetings troublingly difficult. But as I finished my PhD and contemplated my return to Australia, my resistance reorganised. The rest is history — the Sydney Alliance began and still lives decades later. Community organising grows across Australia.

But I also have a secret identity. It’s usually invisible. But if I trust you, I might share a little detail. It’s not something I am in control of and occasionally it surges out of me. It is ‘awe-some’ in the truest sense of the word — it’s stunning. It shocks. It can, at times, disgust.

My secret identity makes me different. It’s because my brain is different. I have a serious mental illness — bipolar disorder-1, which means that I live with mania and depression, and have experienced psychosis.

It’s confronting to learn that the life that you hold together is not how others live. I was always aware of the obvious differences, like being hospitalised in a psychiatric ward for two months when I was 19 or losing my job because of my mental illness when I was 38.

But it’s the little differences that stand out to me. Like how my brain and body work in tune with the seasons. Every winter I have to resist my brain’s call to depressively retreat. Then, in Spring, along with the scent of the first…