I am Debra Lampshire. As a little girl, I started hearing voices. I always kept the voices very, very secret. It felt like all those trappings of my madness, I'd never be able to free of them and this is what I would always be. This is my story. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 I suppose the enduring effects for me of my madness has been an absolute self-loathing. 'You're so stupid. 'That's why your mother left you.' That's something that still clings to me. 'Nobody wants to be around you. 'Peop` You know, they're all laughing at` They just want you to go away.' I always kept the voices very, very secret. 'How could you not know this? 'How could you not know people don't want you around?' When they point things out to me, you see them. (TAPE REWINDS) I can never be completely comfortable nor confident about the past, because there's just so many blanks, and sometimes I've been able to retrieve stuff, and sometimes I haven't. I was born in Auckland. I was born on May the 27th in 1957. My birth mother called me Norma. My birth mother was 19 when she had me, and when she told my father, it was the last that she heard from him. After my birth, I went to Marinoto, which is an adoption agency. Parents are selected. They were matched for colouring and a variety of things like that. I'd actually been named after the matron, so I was given the name Dorothy at Marinoto. When I went to my eventual parents, my mother did not like that name at all. They called my Debbie Joy. (CHUCKLES) Yeah, so that's how I got my name. Yeah. I was brought up in a state house in South Auckland in Otara. We were all quite poor, and there wasn't really anybody that was better off than anybody else. My father was what was called a commercial traveller, so he was away most of the time. And my mother worked in a factory, and I spent a lot of my time alone. For a child who was sensitive and with a vivid imagination ` on the one hand, imagination can be a positive if you're very solitary, but on the other hand, sensitive people tend to feed off relationships, not off being solitary. So solitary time can be then unhealthy for them. Mum was a very independent, very capable woman. She did a lot of activities ` outdoor bowling, indoor bowling, bingo, (CHUCKLES) and the RSA, the Cosmopolitan Club. There were a lot of events that revolved around alcohol. Everybody drank. She loved a smoke. She loved a beer. She loved a laugh. Looking through old photos, there just isn't a single photo where there is not a drink of some description. Debra's mum was... She was quite... I have to say, edgy. She could be very critical. She was a challenge. What we would kind of consider criticism, I suppose, she was thinking more of... that this is discipline. Children literally internalise the messages they get into who they are and who they become. So criticism translates into an inner-critical voice, so we tend to predominantly then be self-critical. I was a very poor sleeper. I was a bed-wetter. I had a mind that didn't stop even then, so I was constantly thinking about things. I had a very vivid imagination. I was never anybody's best friend; I was never first on the rank or anything like that. I suspect that people would've thought of me as an acquaintance rather than as a friend. It was quite a primal sort of feeling that I just really didn't belong anywhere or to anyone. At that stage, I didn't know I was adopted. One day, I was sitting on the bench outside the class during break, and this girl came up to me ` this little girl ` and she came up, and the sun was sorta shining behind` I couldn't even see her face. All I could see was, like, this halo around her face. And... (CHUCKLES) And she said to me, 'Hey, Deb! You wanna be my friend?' And I thought she was an angel. I really thought she was an angel. It was just the most wonderful, wonderful feeling. It had such an impression on me at the time that I remember (STAMMERS) I craved that... always after that. I had quite a few things that happened to me round about that 7` I must say, that 7-, 8-year-old age, and one of the things that did occur is one weekend my parents were away,... and our neighbour at the time was chopping down a hedge, and I said to her, you know, 'Why are you chopping down the hedge?' And she didn't reply, and I said, 'I really think that you should talk to Mum and Dad about this.' And she just flew. She completely flew at me... and said... you know, (STAMMERS) she had spittle. She was foaming at the mouth, sort of thing, and she had spittle all over me, and... And I just kinda stood there, and then she said, 'Do you not know how to move? Are you so stupid?' 'Can you not move? Go on. Just go. Don't you hear what I'm telling you to do?' STAMMERS: And I just wasn't able to move. And then she just started laughing and mocking me. I felt very stupid, but it also made me... 'Adults cannot be trusted. You can't trust them because they'll turn. 'You never know what they're gonna do. So they say... 'They say they like you; they even say they love you, 'but if you do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing, then you're gonna get torn to shreds.' When I was about 7, I discovered I was adopted, and a kid at school had said to me, 'Oh, Debra, you're adopted, aren't you?' And I went, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' I didn't know what adopted meant, (CHUCKLES) but, of course, you know, 'Yeah, yeah. That's me.' And when I went home, I said to Mum, 'Mum, am I adopted?' And she said yes. And it was... probably the first time... that I had that absolute disconnect from myself. I just into a kind of state of shock. Mum was doing the dishes, and she continued to do the dishes. Everything that I thought I knew about my world... had just gone, and all I could think of was,... 'What did I do wrong? 'I must've done something wrong to be given away.' And then I just... couldn't get past that I must've done something wrong. I remember being in bed and feeling... quite frightened and worried. STAMMERS: And then I heard this lovely,... very maternal voice come in and speak to me, and she was saying, 'It's all right, darling. Everything's gonna be all right. 'In fact, I'm going to stay here.' STAMMERS: And I remember... that I felt her physically sit at the end of the bed, and she said, 'I'll` I'm never gonna let anybody hurt you. 'I'll never let the monsters get you. I'll always be here to protect you.' And I felt her stroke my forehead, and I remember thinking at that time, 'It's my mother. She's come back to get me.' Give dry skin the elbow. New Age Perfect Intense Nutrition - nourishing cream enriched with precious New Zealand manuka honey, that repairs dry skin. It's about feeling comfortable in your skin. New Age Perfect Intense Nutrition from L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it. In the beginning, I only ever had one voice. It was a maternal voice. And when she comes in, I immediately relax. It's an immediate ` my shoulders will go down. I will feel it, and I probably will smile as well, because she just kind of... layers herself on me, and... Yeah, she's like a cushion, like a pillow when you... She's so comfortable, you know, and so available. She makes herself very available, yeah. Given a sensitive child, good imagination, solitary life, you can see that a comforting maternal voice would've been likely to be experienced as a very comforting thing. And certainly from what Debra's said, there was not a lot of comfort for her growing up. When I was about 11 or 12, as a family, we had gone to visit a family friend. On one particular day, I was caught in bed with this person. His wife found us together. She dragged me out of bed, and she started hitting me and beating me. They took me into another room and sorta said, 'We want you to tell us what happened.' And... I said, 'Nothing happened,' cos I knew to say nothing happened. After that incident, I learnt that when an adult tells you to keep a secret, that you must. The other thing was I thought I smelt. I started to... And I thought I smelt of excrement. I thought I smelt of shit, and I... That's where the cleaning started, so the excessive, kind of, cleaning started from that. And it wasn't until I went to intermediate school that I started to develop other voices. Typically, children who experience sexual abuse feel that it is something bad they have done. And so one way that manifests is in that kind of compulsive cleaning and a way to try and undo that feeling of being dirty. If that child has a supportive, nurturing family setting where they can feel safe to tell secrets, then its damage is much less, whereas if they're in an environment where it's not OK and where` they've internalised messages of criticism anyway, then it's just gonna be doubly damaging. Growing up in Otara was actually quite a thing, quite a stigma. I went to an intermediate school that was slightly out of our area, so the kids were quite unfamiliar to me. I had a lot of anger. I suppose I held a lot of anger towards the bullies, but I had no way of expressing it. And because, I suppose, I have a very active imagination, I decided that I had superpowers, and my superpower was that I had death-ray eyes. (CHUCKLES) So I used to sort of go around school, glaring and staring at people with my death-ray eyes, and it used to make me feel quite powerful. The other kids just thought I was weird. (LAUGHS) It was the 1960s. I started to develop other voices, and they became negat` they turned out to be very negative voices. There's one voice. I call him Alpha Male. He's Alpha Male because I experience him like a wolf. He does all the taunting and the teasing and the... He circles me, and he goes round me, and he` He gr` You know, he can growl; I can smell his breath. And, you know, (STAMMERS) the spittle, it's on me. I can feel him. He's gon` I know he's gonna come in, but what he does is he draws the pack in. And they all come in, and then they all start. They laugh at me. They like to humiliate me. And they will laugh at me and scoff. It's that, (CHUCKLES) 'Who do you think you are? You're nothing. You're nobody. Look at you.' By the time I got to high school, there were greater expectations on me. Because I was haunted by this idea of being stupid and therefore unlovable, what the voices were telling me was, 'Oh, so-and-so's looking at you,' or, 'That person's laughing at you,' or, 'Can you hear them? Can you hear them in the back? They're plotting. They're plotting against you. 'You better watch out when you get out of here because something's gonna happen.' And I'd get more and more worked up. I couldn't stay focused on my work, and then I would just kind of stand up and look around, and everybody would just stare at me, which proved exactly what they were saying. And often there would be, like, smirks and giggles, and I would` It would just be, 'Get out. Get out. Get out!' I would rush out of classrooms, rush out of school, and I can't think of a single instance in all that time where either a teacher or a pupil ever came to check that I was all right. It got to the point where my parents got called in. It was determined that I needed to have a psychiatric assessment. So before I went in, my voices were very, very active, and they were saying, 'They're gonna separate us. They're gonna separate us. 'They're gonna take me away from you.' And... 'And then you'll be` You'll have no one. You'll have nothing, you know.' 'You've got no friends. Nobody wants you around. So if we leave you, then, you know, 'you'll have nobody in your life.' They were very clear to me that I must not disclose them, so I must not say anything about them. The questions he asked were very` of a very sexual nature. I felt very uncomfortable. I was quite, like` quite naive. He used all the correct terminology. I mean, I didn't have a clue what a vagina was. We just called it Doris at home. So (LAUGHS) I didn't know what he was talking about. My voices would kind of instruct me about what to say and what not to say, and I did tell him some things that weren't true, and also the very sexualised questions, there was no way I was gonna answer that. To my great, sort of, relief, he never asked me about voices, so I didn't have to lie. The psychiatric report went to the school. My mother disagreed with his assessment of me. She said to me, 'It's just rubbish. It's just absolute rubbish. 'I don't know who he was talking to, but it wasn't you.' A prerequisite for me to stay at school is that I must undergo treatment which would include medication, and that was the end of my schooling. I was 15. When I had to leave school, things very quickly fell apart. Then it was just really full-blown madness. * When I had to leave school, it just created this huge void of which the voices just filled it completely. I couldn't maintain a job. I would just walk out and just not go back. I would often tell my parents that I was working when I actually wasn't. I started to get what I` what I thought were demonic voices. I started to hear the voices of demons and very occasionally the devil. This idea of being` of me being evil and wicked was really growing. When they would bring me to that point where I couldn't hold them back any more and they stared to get control, I would just run, and it would be, 'You're gonna die. You're gonna die. You're gonna die.' A) it was so draining, but I would feel so beaten and so defeated, and it was that... that smirking, that kind of, 'Any time we like, babe, 'we can get you to do. You're just a puppet. You're just a puppet. 'You'll do whatever we say, and you'll do it how we tell you to do it, when we wanna do it, 'and you're ours.' My voices told me that I was gonna get a message from God. A) that was very appealing, but also it gave me a purpose. A lot of the language around adoption is the idea that you're chosen. In fact, when there was an announcement in the paper, if you were adopted, it used to say 'chosen with love', which was code for adoption. And when I developed this idea that I was a messenger from God, they told me that I was the chosen one. So, I had two diametrically opposed ideas. I believed I was a messenger from God and I was going to receive a message that would free the world of tyranny. I also believed I was a personification of evil. And when I went outside, I believed I had the capacity to breathe evil into the world, and therefore I had to stay inside so I wouldn't do that. What the voices were telling me was that they were the test, cos clearly I was on a heroic journey. And this is what happens to heroes. They're reviled; they're laughed at. All the great heroes, from Star Wars to Jesus, they get this. (LAUGHS) They knew all this. So, part of it is being,... you know, a` What is it? When you're` It's not abandoned. What's the right`? Sorry. I've lost that word. Isolated. You get isolated from people, and people don't understand you're doing it for them. So I was taking on all this horrible, horrible stuff that the demons were telling me that I had to put up with and deal with so that other people didn't. Around that time, I was going out with people who were much older than me. I suppose I was very attracted to the bad boys, etc. I was a person you could get to do anything. I met someone at age 16, and it was a very intense relationship. We got involved very quickly. I got pregnant, and we got married. I sort of thought, 'Well, this is gonna be my life now. 'I'm going to be protected and looked after and all those sorts of things,' but that's not, sort of, how things worked out. At the age of 17, I had my first child, my daughter. I found that experience... very overwhelming. I remember Debra not being happy, and... And she was quite detached, and I think that sort of worried me. The marriage dissolved, and things started to unravel. For me, the voices became completely activated. 'Oh, you mustn't leave the door open, cos you'll get attacked, cos you're in danger. 'You can't have the window open, cos somebody's gonna climb through the window. 'Oh, there's somebody` I can see somebody outside now.' The handwashing was about, 'You're filthy; you're dirty. You need to keep clean for your child.' I washed three times, so you wash, dry, wash, dry, wash, dry, and then leave (STAMMERS) the bathroom or the sink or wherever it was, and then it would be, 'Oh my` You touched the door handle. Go back. 'You've touched this. Go back.' They completely filled my day, so I had to this, and I had to do that. I had to do that one, and I had to do that. And if I didn't do them in sequence, something terrible is gonna happen in the world. There would be a volcano; there would be a tsunami; there would be a flood; there would be` So it was always giga` It was always biblical. Catastrophic thinking is one of the major drivers of anxiety, but in Debra's case where it became beyond the realms of possibility, really what we're talking about is anxiety and catastrophic thinking that's driving into psychosis. In my late teens, I ended up in Kingseat Psychiatric Hospital. It's a beautiful entrance to Kingseat, with these beautiful palms. As I'm driving up, on the road, the locals have written 'loony bin' with arrows, and my heart just sunk, because I didn't realise it was a loony bin. I thought it was a hospital. Kingseat is not unlike any other asylum, I guess, in those days, institutions that would've been across the Western world ` large institutions, lots of people not necessarily going anywhere, often admitted for life. You could look back and say it was archaic. I never, ever told them about my voices, cos it just wasn't a safe place to do that, so I never told them. The medications that you were given were the old-fashioned tranquilisers, and they were incredibly sedating, so it made people appear much older. We used to sort of go in lines. I don't know why we did that, but you'd get, sort of, a string of people in a line just kind of shuffling along, and it looked almost comedic. And I always thought it was like cows going to the milking, (LAUGHS) cos that's what it looked like as we were all lined up. Meredith was a woman, and she had been an exotic dancer. She was English, and she'd an exotic dancer in England. And she had this little transistor, a little, red, tiny transistor, and she'd always dance around. One day... She was particularly fond of that song. It was by The Animals. 'We've gotta get out of this place.' And she grabbed me, and she's singing it with me. And she grabbed my hands, and we're going around, and we just really started getting into it. You couldn't help it. She was so infectious with her laughter and her smile. Then... the staff came in, and they pulled her away and said we had to be quiet and it wasn't OK, and she started screaming. And they started pulling her away. She was begging, 'Please, please just let me dance with Debra. Please just let us dance.' And I was saying, 'She just wants to dance,' and then one of the nurses came up to me and said, 'Debra, there's no music. You can't dance without music.' And I went, 'There's music up here.' (UNSETTLING MUSIC) The voices loved Kingseat. It was the perfect environment for voices ` no stimulation, no competition, cos no` (LAUGHS) There was` You didn't get much time to talk, so they loved it there. * The voices loved Kingseat. It was the perfect environment for voices. Because I believed that I was a personification of evil, I used to feel it in a physical form, and I felt it as a lump in my chest. And so I used to try and remove that lump, and how I used to try and remove it was usually with my bare hands. And so I would claw and scratch at my body and occasionally use sharp objects to try and get at it. Claybury House was on a slight hill to the side of Kingseat. It was part of Kingseat but just slightly removed. Claybury House was controversial in the way that it was breaking from the usual way that people were treated in the institution. So it brought in this idea of doing a group therapy ` residential group therapy. They would put you in situations where you would have to play out an event in your life. There would be a lot of touching... as a way to desensitise. Particularly with females, it was always that we were frigid. That was a common term that was sorta used. But there was nothing you could do. Who are you gonna complain to? I mean, when you're a mad person, who believes you? It's just` It's all part of your delusional thinking or whatever. I was in and out of Kingseat. During those periods of time that I was out, I remarried. I had three children. My parents got married when I was about 7, and I was a bridesmaid. We got out of the car, and Mum was out, and the dress was out, you know, getting fluffed. And Mum started to verbalise the things about... 'Your dress won't be good enough. He might not love you. 'He might not marry you today. He might not want you.' And she's verbalising all this stuff to herself. It's like a verbalised attack, but it's being voiced by her. With my second husband, I never talked to him about the voices. I always kept the voices very, very secret, and so he wasn't aware of what was going on. I could keep it contained for a while, but every now and again it would come out, and then I'd have this big explosion, in terms of I'd have big arguments with my voices and things like that. He tended to just withdraw. And so... I did two things ` I read, and I knitted. We'd go to school, and she'd start knitting. You know, she'd say goodbye, and then six hours, we'd come back and she would be in that same spot. That's what Mum did. Mum sat there, and she knitted all day, and then we came home. Whenever I went to leave... the house or a building of any sort, as soon as I got to the door, my heart would start pounding, and they would start saying, 'It's dangerous out there. It's too dangerous. 'There's people waiting for you. They're gonna stab you.' DAVID: Debra describes fearing that people are against her, that people are gonna stab her, things that certainly are possible but highly unlikely, but to her are part of reality. So, again, it's agoraphobia but secondary to these so-called psychotic beliefs. During our marriage, I spent time in ho` in Kingseat ` you know, in and out. There would be periods of time where, for example, we'd have an auntie, and an auntie would come around, and it would be like, 'Aunt Marie's gonna take you to school today,' or, 'Aunt Marie's gonna be here this week.' All I was aware of was that Mum wasn't around. I'd never go in voluntarily. (LAUGHS) I used to run in front of cars and run around and cause havoc and cra` So, you know, the police would come. I'd get very, very hot, and I'd try and get rid of all this evil, cos the evil was hot. And I'd try and get rid of all the evil, and so I'd start undressing. So I used to undress in public. The explanations would be, 'The demons are after me,' things like that, and so they would generally end up taking you to... sometimes directly out to Kingseat or sometimes to a doctor or something, but generally when I went out there, it would be via the police. Eventually, all that took its toll, and it was the end of my second marriage. (CADENTIAL PIANO MUSIC) The government decided to shut the institutions down. There were new antipsychotics which made it easier for people` well, supposedly easier for people to be in the community. When I came out, I went back to my parents' place, and it was very much, 'Debra must avoid stress. Debra must avoid stress.' They would have lots of private conversations about me, and I became convinced that they were plotting to get rid of me. They were tremendously relieved (CHUCKLES) when I finally left. There were like boarding houses for people. Some months down the track, my father contacted me to say my mother was very unwell and she was in hospice and that she was relatively close to death. And so I went, saw her, and that was the last day of her life. (SNIFFLES) What I was able to be for her was I was able to be... a daughter and just a daughter and nothing else, and all that other stuff on the periphery, that didn't matter any more. We were just mother and daughter. EMOTIONALLY: And I had disappointed her in so many ways, (SNIFFLES) and there was none of that. So I knew that was her way... of letting me know that... whatever misdemeanours, whatever had happened, that she had forgiven me. Mum was 63 when she passed away, yeah. I went to the funeral. One of the things that they focused on is that I was adopted. And Auntie was saying how good it was for Mum to take in children and how lucky I was that I got to stay. It was a family secret that I was adopted, and my mother would've been mortified. Then we went to the reception, and I was laughing and joking with people and teasing and doing all the things that are completely inappropriate, and I knew it. I knew I was being inappropriate, and I couldn't sort of stop myself. It wasn't till afterwards I sort of realised that I was being everything that they said I was. My adopted mother made me promise that I would never pursue seeking out my biological mother. I didn't actually feel that I could do that till after she had passed away. The adoption laws had changed, and with the law change, I now could have access to my original birth certificate. So now I knew my birth mother's name ` her full name ` and she was completely open to meeting up. She'd never` She hadn't actually forgotten me. (CHUCKLES) * I knew my birth mother's name ` her full name. She was descending the stairs, (LAUGHS) and she was rushing down the stairs to meet me with open arms. It was just wonderful; it was just fabulous. And we just embraced. I couldn't stop looking at her and touching her. I just wanted to touch and look at her. We maintained contact. We would have lengthy phone calls and visits, etc. And then circumstances changed for her, and it became very difficult for us to maintain that contact, and then the contact ceased. I felt a huge grief and loss at losing... losing her again, but also didn't` didn't feel entitled to insert myself into her life. (UNSETTLING MUSIC) The voices had started to get very activated again, and they were picking up on things. I was living in, like, a halfway house, and I was very wedded to the idea that God was going to ring me. So I used to go into phone boxes and just` I'd spend all day in the phone box waiting for the phone to ring. I started to have doubts that I was the messenger, and it was the most difficult thing for me to come to terms with, cos I couldn't justify my existence any more. And I'd have no other option. I'd have to kill myself. I just` I would have to. (LOW, UNSETTLING MUSIC) I met Jack at work. We work together. I had a truck on the trailer, and it was... I met her. It was outside her house by coincidence, and she just came out, and she was really interested in it. Out of politeness, I sort of said, 'Oh, I see you've got a wreck on the back (CHUCKLES) of your van,' sort of thing. Yeah, wow. (CHUCKLES) And he got really excited. He said, 'Oh!' He said, 'Oh, Debra! He said, 'I've been after one of these for years,' and he said, 'Finally found one. It was left in this barn, just left to rot, 'and I finally got it and da-da-da.' And the thing that struck me the most was not actually what he was telling me, but how excited he was. She would ask me all about the truck and what I was gonna do with it, and, you know, 'Can you repair something that bad?' And I said, 'Yeah, anything can be repaired if you put the time and effort into it. It ended up being sort of a life-changing conversation, and I really thought he was talking to me. He wasn't talking about the truck; he was talking about my life. I probably sat quite passively, but inside, I was going, 'Oh my God, oh my God.' (LAUGHS) It was shortly after that conversation ` I actually said to him, 'Would you be interested in helping me to restore my life?' I just figured that, you know, I'd give it a go. I was up to it. I'm not sure that he actually cottoned on that I was actually hearing things. He did notice some things. He noticed that I talked to myself a lot, (CHUCKLES) which I wasn't aware that I was doing. And I said, 'Well, do you wanna carry on like this? Is this your life? 'Do you see this as being your life?' And she said yes, and I said, 'Well, it doesn't need to be.' You know, 'If you could change it, what would you like?' It would be not to be so anxious. And that's how it basically came about, and I said, 'We can do this if we work together. 'If you trust me, we can stick at it and work at it and get it done.' (HOPEFUL MUSIC) So, I explained to Jack that when I went to go through the door, I would actually start to panic and I would have a very strong physical reaction. We just did it step by step, and when I first went out, I did panic; he did hold me. And what I found was I didn't die, cos I thought I was gonna die. Not only did I think I was gonna die; I thought that I had the ability to infect the world with evil. When it became apparent that nothing happened to him ` he was still standing there, and I'd survived it ` it was so exhilarating, because here was a belief that I held to be absolutely true, and now I'd found that actually that was not correct. It was just a tenacity thing. I had more tenacity than all her demons, so basically I won out, (CHUCKLES) wore them all out. We went to Melbourne ` cultural capital of Australia. She flew basically without any medication or anything like that. The last night that we were there, I went for a walk on my own, and I... stood on the banks of the Yarra River, and my senses were completely kind of overwhelmed. They'd just` They'd just mown the lawns, so there was a beautiful smell of freshly mowed grass, which was always lovely, and then there was the smell of the Yarra River. There were the lights twinkling over it. It was a really sort of magical, sort of, moment. And I remember I had that thought. I was thinking, 'Why the hell did I deny myself this?' For all those years, I denied myself,... you know, just the sheer, sort of feral joy of being able to breathe in nature. I think it's when I sorta came to the realisation that I was finally free. I was free to live my life how I would choose. What's going on here for Debra is what for many people is one of the critical elements of recovery. It's when they make that transition from their lives being ruled by their symptoms and experiences to pushing back against them and actually taking control back in their lives despite the ongoing symptoms. So Debra describes that as being almost like an awakening, and many people will describe it like that ` that they almost` it's like reclaiming life when you've had it squeezed out of you for a long time. I noticed a huge change in her after we came back from Australia. She was up to taking on more things. I just reframed things, and it was... (STAMMERS) Something that I'd started to do with my voices is that I'd started to refrain them. So I just thought, 'Oh, bugger it. I'm gonna go back to university. 'I'm just gonna learn everything. I'm just gonna fill my mind, and I'm just gonna do that.' I was just a mad student, like everybody else ` you know, worrying about word counts, worrying about referencing, worrying about getting assignments in on time. So we all shared those kind of stresses, and it was one of the few occasions where I felt really connected to people who weren't mad. There was a woman who was running a group for people who heard voices, and it was just sheer coincidence that she actually asked me if I would be involved. She didn't know I was a voice-hearer. See, I'd always known that other people heard voices, but I didn't think that their voices or their experience was the same as mine. Based on the symptoms that she's described, I have no doubt that they fit with the criteria for this thing that we call schizophrenia. With the group that we started doing, I was talking to... talking to and with and listening to other people, and a lot of our experience just could be layered on each other, in terms of being bullied, not fitting in, being really lonely, which seemed to have a lot less to do with, sort of, neurotransmitters and brain chemistry (CHUCKLES) and a lot more to do with just having a sort of` a bit of a fractured life. Once the word kind of got out ` there was this group where you could come and you could talk and there weren't repercussions, you weren't punished, you could talk openly and honestly about the situation ` there was a` there became this huge demand. I first started doing the groups for Auckland District Health Board. I was really fortunate in that I was actually working in a clinical service but I wasn't a clinician, and it was very much at the infancy of what we call service-user participation and involvement. So it was very innovative. It was very brave of my DHB to do that. (CHUCKLES) And the kind of outcomes they were getting were so positive that they invested in it and they invested in me, which meant that they hired me. It really launched my career, and it opened so many doors. Eventually, I got hired, by the university, and now I'm a Professional` what's called a Professional Teaching Fellow at Auckland University. Yeah, that was McDonald's. Oh yeah. And at the core of this, people wanna be loved; they wanna be befriended; they want to have a life worth living. Every day, I get the opportunity to prove to myself that nothing and nobody's gonna stop me from doing this. The reward is far too great, cos you make the world better by one person. You've made their world better. In terms of, like, parental role models, right, the resilience... the resilience that I've been able to role model off her,... you can't not be proud of that. I'm really proud of her for two reasons ` one, that she made the effort, and also what she's doing with her life now, making other people's lives better, (VOICE BREAKS) and that really makes it all worthwhile. I think that self-fulfilling prophecy was there around her ` wanting to save the world from the tyranny of voices, and here she is very much doing that. So it kind of came to fruition, really. And the winner for the Attitude ACC Supreme Award goes to... Debra Lampshire. (CHEERING, APPLAUSE) 2016 Attitude Awards, I won the Making a Difference Award, and then I won the Supreme Award, which was, I think, apart from the birth of my children, (LAUGHS) was probably the most extraordinary thing... event that had ever happened to me. 'Oh my God, I'm living my dream! I'm living everything.' I don't actually spend a great deal of time with my voices any more. They sorta come in and out. They're kind of inconsequential in lots of ways, only when they get rarked up. (CHUCKLES) But they delivered me to this place, because if I hadn't had that, then I don't think I would've` I don't think I would've made it. I am Debra Lampshire, and I'm living with voices. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019