Jane: The attitudes of others – Taking ‘many’ medicines (3)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Jane
Female
Age at interview: 53
Number of medicines: 8
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Jane and her husband made a deliberate decision to be open about her situation with members of their immediate community. They responded with care and support.
My husband has quite a public position and so we decided that it would be helpful to announce to the community that we were in that … I wasn't well and I was having some treatment. And people were lovely and very warm and kind and caring and I felt like, when I finally was well enough to rock up and participate in things again, people didn't go, you know, ‘She's the one who's taking tablets’, but there was a genuine care and concern. But other people might have said, ‘Oh, gee, you looked alright to me! I wouldn't have thought that you don't cope. You cope with everything!’ So people do make assumptions and judgements about what you’re taking and why you are taking it. Perhaps sometimes they express that in unhelpful ways and I found that particularly difficult.
By the same token, I felt I didn't know a lot about mental illness and, if what I knew was shared with somebody else, then that would be helpful for them. So, I guess, as my next episode of depression happened, I was quite happy to talk about that with people and to let people know that, yeah, that I wasn't well and there are people who aren't well and there is help available as well.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.