Not Waving, Drowning

Mental Illness and Vulnerability in Australia

Mental illness is the great isolator – and the great unifier. Almost half of us will suffer from it at some point in our lives; it affects everybody in one way or another. Yet today Australia’s mental health system is under stress and not fit for purpose, and the pandemic is only making things worse. What is to be done?

In this brilliant mix of portraiture and analysis, Sarah Krasnostein tells the stories of three women and their treatment by the state while at their most unwell. What do their experiences tell us about the likelihood of institutional and cultural change? Krasnostein argues that we live in a society that often punishes vulnerability, but shows we have the resources to mend a broken system. But do we have the will to do so, or must the patterns of the past persist into the future?

“In our conception of government, and our willingness to fund it, we are closer to the Nordic countries than to America. However, we’re trending towards the latter with a new story of Australia. The moral of this new story is freedom over equality, and one freedom above all – the freedom to be unbothered by others’ needs. However, as we continue to saw ourselves off our perch, mental health might be the great unifier that climate change and the pandemic aren’t.”—Sarah Krasnostein, Not Waving, Drowning

Correspondence discussing Quarterly Essay 85, Not Waving, Drowning:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Krasnostein is the multi-award-winning author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer and Quarterly Essay Not Waving, Drowning. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals in Australia, the United Kingdom and America. She holds a doctorate in criminal law.

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“Australians today are a complacent people but our boast of living in a lucky country [is] at times just strident enough to betray that we cannot yet take our material comforts utterly for granted,” wrote J.P. Parkinson, a psychiatrist, forty years ago in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. He continued, “It would be surprising if we could, considering it is less than two hundred years since our European forebears were regarding a harsh and barren land with horror and despair. John White, principal surgeon of the First Fleet and of the colony of New South Wales, called the country a ‘place so forbidding and so hateful as only to merit execrations and curses – a source of expense to the mother country and of evil and misfortune to its inhabitants.’ Is there any link across perhaps a mere four or five generations between that view and our own?”

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