Irena

Irena is a First Nations woman in her late 40s. She was institutionalised in her early teens and lives with complex trauma arising from her time in a psychiatric hospital.

‘I was bullied at high school. My teacher ripped my assignments up and said that I’m not going to amount to nothing,’ Irena told the Royal Commission. ‘She put me down because I was never any good at spelling and all of that. I couldn’t do assignments.’

She told her mother about the bullying.

‘Mum thought I was a bit womba [crazy] … I wasn’t. I was stressed out.’

After that, a doctor had Irena institutionalised. Irena said her mother would never have accepted it if she’d fully understood her situation at school.

‘I wouldn’t tell her any of my problems because I didn’t want to stress my mum out.’ Her mother had cervical cancer. ‘She was dying.’

Irena said the abuse started the day after she arrived at the institution. ‘One of the patients threw hot water on me, and my skin was peeling off my chest.’ Staff refused to help her.

‘I feared for my life because I’ve seen girls and they were getting raped in the institution I was in.’ Irena was in the ‘juvenile unit’ but was moved to the adult section. ‘I think because I knew too much and I witnessed those things.’

Irena told the Royal Commission that one day a male nurse tried to rape her.

‘My mum came up to visit me … She said, “I want my daughter to be out of here today.”’

With a solicitor’s help, Irena moved to a different ward. Here, she said, she witnessed nurses murdering a patient.

‘I pretended to be asleep. I got up and could see them through the curtain.’

Irena said after pulling the curtains, the nurses ‘put all these tablets down [the woman’s] throat’ and ‘suffocated her with the pillow’. The ‘old white lady' was Irena’s ‘very best friend’.

‘She was like a mum to me.’

When Irena told supervisors about it they placed her in seclusion. She didn’t see her mother for several months and was put on high levels of medication.

‘They sedated me. They were taking blood out of me every day. My body was getting weaker and weaker. I felt like I was going to collapse and die … It was terrifying.’

Psychiatrists diagnosed Irena as schizophrenic. She was released after about 10 months, but kept getting sent back.

‘I’d be kicked out and that. I started wandering on the streets, like, you know, homeless. And the police used to pick me up, because I was under this Mental Health Act, and take me back.’

She said for more than three decades, mental health professionals have treated her in ‘an inappropriate way’.

‘They’ve been pumping me with medication … I’m trying to get off it. There’s nothing wrong with me whatsoever … I don’t know what the hell they’re trying to do.’

Irena is finally ‘going to therapists’, and wants to see more counselling for First Nations people in mental health hospitals.

‘There was male Aboriginal counsellors, but there should be more ladies … For some reason they just set us Aboriginals up for failure … I want programs, you know, drug and alcohol and suicide preventions.’

She’d like to get involved with counselling and supporting people when they come out of institutions.