The Unseen.

My sister has bipolar. She has rolled with it for years; riding that rollercoaster while internalising guilt for being a ‘failure’ because she hasn’t led a ‘conventional’ life.

Tired of the medicated numbness, she convinced herself she was ‘cured’. Four years later she admitted defeat to a beast she cannot grasp in her hands for a physical fight. A force unseen. An invisible Icarus of the mind that takes her flying her up to the sun. As the energy burns and melts, she begins to waver and finally — she crashes. A seemingly endless cycle if left untreated.

When the latest experiment with a new medication resulted in an allergic reaction, she refused to get out bed that day.

She lay there and said, “the only thing you have in this world that is truly your own is your mind. And then… even that gets taken away from you.”

I did not know how to comfort her. What do you say? I awkwardly patted her and sat perched on the edge of the bed with the discomforting uselessness of words. My parents fretted; Dad wondered out-loud if she needed to come back to Islam to be healed, Mum sputtered at the suggestion and told him to get lost.

My sisters distanced herself from Islam when she was a teenager. She distanced herself from the pressure of upholding particular restrictive understandings of being devout, and from ignorance that told her to ‘pray more’ as a solution to mental illness, from people who rejected psychology and medication as Western quackery and suggested she might be possessed. Across her schooling life, her struggle was put down to being a ‘difficult child’ or a ‘rebellious teenager’. Issues compounded by dyslexia, as she struggled to conquer the curves of cursive, let alone the dots and squiggles of Arabic. She was introverted, artistic — I often wished I could even be half as talented. But she was frustrating, and I didn’t understand her “moodiness”. One day we were best friends, the next day she’d be wholeheartedly telling me she wishes I was dead. The diagnosis of bipolar in her late teens was met with an underlying sense of skepticism and shame; only a few of us were faithful believers of the reality of mental illness.

I’ve read the shoutout to neuro-atypical Muslims and it’s reassuring enough. However, there remains the struggle of being part of a community that isn’t quite ready to let go of ‘pray more’ as an answer to all our issues. And in the ‘West’ (an ideological behemoth that refuses to let the world live without binaries) the Muslim community is simply part of a larger social reality that still struggles with understanding mental illness. From BeyondBlue campaigns to RUOK day, we’ve still got a long way to go toward comprehensive empathic responses to people with mental health issues. We still have policymakers who think it’s okay to slowly chip away Medicare and other health services, like cutting funding to youth mental health services such as Headspace. I can’t help but write this back into some sort of political piece in order to grapple with something tangible; policy, healthcare, activism… anything to channel the feelings of helplessness at seeing my little sister struggle.

The thing is multiple communities and families grapple with the challenges of mental illness — it is not a special struggle for any community. The struggle is expressed in various ways across the its spectrum of spaces in which is can manifest, from individuals to families to communities and wider society.

These barriers exist in so many ways. It exists in the fight to prove the existence of illnesses no one can ‘see’ in order to make a case for disability support. It exists in ostracisation. It exists in regimented and inflexible schooling and work environments that fail to support or harness potential.

It exists, most of all, internally — in struggles that are often invisible to outside observer. As I have noticed through my sister, she has mastered the art of the balance between appearing and being, where people often mistake ‘appearing’ fine as ‘being’ fine.

Regardless of her struggle with depressive bipolar disorder, I always joked that she should have been the older sister; she is smarter than me, she is a mother to an adorable 9 month baby, and she is talented in ways that I can’t even pretend to be. Things I went to university to learn, she just knows because she observed the world. This has always been one of those jokes that masked a truth; my admiration for her determination, her intelligence and stubborn spirit that makes her immovable in her convictions, that makes her a fighter.

In my conversations with Jasmine, I am constantly moved by how she understands and sees life in a way unfamiliar to me. Our conversations shine light on corners of my mind I forgot to dust, changing my perspectives on life and what is means to be a woman, and to be a Muslim.

She still has her mind.

This idea that it’s compromised, that it’s been taken away from her, starts to seem unreal.

I spiral into questioning the ways in which we have been socialised to interpret mental illness. Why we are taught to dismiss the ‘insane’? Why is she positioned as ‘incomplete’? Why would her value be undermined just because she doesn’t function ‘like normal’?

She’s more than her illness; she is my sister. A mother. A daughter. An artist. Like many others, she is a human with a vibrant inner life.

It has been through her that I have found understanding in moving away from a focus on the arbitrariness of judgement, reward and punishment in order to find ways to simply live better and more compassionately. Whether a reward is imbued in an act or not has become irrelevant. I work to ground the practice of my faith in empathy. Rather than banking on ‘rewards’, live for the idea that being compassionate and kind can only fulfil you, and never be a source of detracting from your life. Whether it is the one we have here, or the one you believe will come later. Rather than just praying more, let’s be kinder more.

Furthermore, people who are Muslim (whether formerly identified, or current) and who struggle with mental illness have not lost capacity for engagement with the spiritual. And let’s face it, faiths are often just a language in which spirituality is chosen to be expressed. We can do more to facilitate that expression. We can raise awareness of ways to encompass holistic practices of spiritual, medical and psycho-social support.

The experience of mental illness may be documented and measured by medical professionals, but from what I’ve seen from my sister it is still a largely experimental field. It is a constant tinkering of medications, looking for the right dosage, tailored for each individual. Rather than treat people who struggle with mental illness as spiritually incomplete, we ought be creating supportive environments for exploring spirituality and nurturing inclusive, safe spaces.

Spaces where we can all tinker with our faith.