‘This terrible disease’
After the suicide last year of Professor Bongani Mayosi, respected cardiologist and popular dean of the faculty of health sciences at the University of Cape Town, Professor Lizette Rabe, who started the Ithemba Foundation after her son’s suicide, wrote an open letter to UCT students. “I am so sorry that you as a student community, and especially Professor Mayosi’s nearest and dearest, will also now have to grieve the loss of yet another victim of ‘this terrible disease’, as author Virginia Woolf wrote in her last letter to her husband before walking into the River Ouse,” wrote Rabe.
“You would probably know that psychologists talk about ‘compounded grief’, or ‘complicated grief’ – grief that has been compounded by many other factors, and a death as a result of suicide certainly is ‘compounded’, or ‘complicated’ grief.
“The core of my message to you is this: Professor Mayosi, as a beloved husband, father, son, brother, or cousin, as dean of your faculty, as role model, as top researcher, as a super human being, did not make a decision to kill himself. No, he was the victim of humankind’s cruellest disease. Yet we — due to sociocultural-religious reasons, and the fact that science is also still grappling with psychiatric diseases — still cannot understand that it is a cruel disease that robbed him of his life, and with it, him from you.
“It is important to understand that the person who has lost his life did not desert you, and that you should not feel anger towards him. If anything, you should feel anger towards
‘this terrible disease’. Depression is an illness, not a weakness.
“But what then is left for us to do after such a devastating loss? I think, in the name of Professor Mayosi, all of us can contribute to help raise awareness of depression as a biological disease — and realise that it can viciously claim victims, seemingly anywhere, any time.
“It is clear that we need public awareness and public education to understand that without mental health, there can be no health.”