An advocate for healing compassion
In the heart of Bertrams, a short walk from Ellis Park Stadium and surrounded by crumbling houses and decaying art deco apartment buildings, is a hidden haven for 80 residents with serious mental illnesses. Monica Laganparsad visited the Gordonia Rehab Ce
LAST week, Charlene Sunkel was seeking donations to stock the kitchen at Gordonia Rehab Centre. It had been four months since the Department of Health had given the centre the subsidy necessary to feed and care for the mentally ill residents who live there.
‘‘It was tough but we managed,” said Sunkel.
The department finally paid on Wednesday.
Sunkel says she is an advocate for the mentally ill, but the residents describe her as their activist.
Eighteen years ago, Sunkel lived at the centre. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1991, her symptoms peaked when she finished high school.
‘‘I had never heard the word schizophrenia. My family told me to pull myself together. They thought I was being rebellious,” she said. ‘‘Back then, if someone was seeing a psychologist, it was highly classified.”
Sunkel spent nine years in and out of hospitals, institutions and care facilities. In between her stints, she held on to her administration job at the Department of Health before she was medically boarded.
‘‘Thinking back now, I did some really funny things. I used to go to work in my pyjamas, carrying my briefcase. It must have looked ridiculous to people on the bus, but I didn’t see anything wrong with it. My hair would stick up and instead of brushing it, I would cut it off.
‘‘I thought I had special powers and I believed I could fly,” she laughed.
She ended up at Sterkfontein on an involuntary admittance.
Despite the cruelty of the place, it would save her and make her a champion of the mentally ill.
‘‘I was in a psychotic acute ward, which would be a locked dormitory with 40 women. Every morning they would line us up naked, fill up the bath and we would all have to use the same water to bathe in. After 40 women had gone through it, it was disgusting.”
Cigarettes were the currency that bought her to the front of that bath queue.
‘‘I’m not a religious person, but after two weeks of that I prayed. I was planning to hang myself with the bed sheet that day when I was moved to a semiopen ward.
‘‘It was that experience that brought me here today — that inhumane treatment. Even today, I can’t close my bedroom door or office door.”