Laura Burke is a talented actress and writer, heavily involved in the local theatre scene – the same scene she had to leave behind a decade ago when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
“I first started having hallucinations, I was really confused, I was kind of frightened. I lost a lot of my ability to think and feel and communicate very well,” says Burke.
Burke was treated at Nova Scotia's early psychosis program.
“I was given second generation anti-psychotic medication,” says Burke. “I think there was a psychologist there for a short while, there were learn about psychosis psycho-education sessions.”
Burke says the disorder impacted how she perceived herself. During her recovery, peer support helped her to make sense of her own experiences.
“Through meeting other young people who had gone through similar things who were living completely normal lives, who were funny and smart and doing great things with their lives and who were in relationships and were in school and working,” says Burke.
Burke went back to school after her diagnosis and has been working as a therapist for the past couple of years.
She has also returned to theatre and incorporates creative arts into her work as a therapist.
“I saw a drama therapist when I was first ill and that really helped me get in touch with a lot of emotion that I think was quite buried through the negative symptoms of psychosis, so that led me to want to go back to school and do that,” says Burke.
Burke is participating in The Road To Recovery Walk, the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia's signature fundraising event.
“It's an opportunity for the community to come out and show their support for those that are living with mental illness,” says Donna Methot, president of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia.
Methot says the road to recovery spreads an important message and helps break down the stigma surrounding the disorder.
“That goes back to another myth that once you have schizophrenia, that's it,” says Methot. “It's practically the end of your life, and that is a myth because there is recovery and recovery is expected in mental illness.”
Burke says she believes it is important to promote a sense of hope for those living with mental illness.
“There's a psychiatrist in the states, a really famous psychiatrist named Daniel Fisher, who talks about how for a long time medicine always talked about how they didn't want to give false hope to people with major mental illness,” says Burke. “But now, he talks about how false hopelessness actually creates more harm than false hope and I think we need to really overcome that false hopelessness.”
