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* Melisa feels scared every time she walks through the streets of Bogotá and has to cross a pedestrian bridge. Suddenly a voice tells him to jump, other times he talks to people no one else sees, they tell him to run, to flee. Every day he struggles to get out of bed and live another day.
The origins of his illness are attributed to a childhood full of pain. This 29-year-old woman says she met her mother only six years ago. He told him that he was from a town called Los Andes Sotomayor in Nariño and that When she was 17, her sister’s husband abused her, leaving her pregnant at a very young age. “This is how I was conceived.”
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He also learned that his grandmother was a violent woman who ended up scaring the woman who had no choice but to flee with her baby to Pasto where she gave her son to the care of a stranger. “When I was one and a half years old, she left me there, supposedly to seek a better future and then rescue me, but that never happened. My life was hell, that woman told me that I was a nuisance, a garbage, a nuisance and I was born to ruin my mother’s life. “
In the hands of that woman and her daughter it was until the age of 11. She was beaten throughout her childhood in a house where all that time she witnessed the entry of children of different ages. “They put us begging at traffic lights, picking up leftovers from restaurants so we could eat, cleaning car windows, asking for clothes or things from house to house.” She says that part of her life would have personified her, but not the other.
Melisa says she was a victim of sexual exploitation for the first time when she was four years old. “The son of the owner of the house was a military man and it was he who raped me for the first time. Since I was a child I lived in that place where they even forced us to have sex with animals”. In his memories there is always that green house, with a tin roof, with large doors in which he suffered all kinds of humiliations, exploited by a gang of pimps. At the age of ten, she became pregnant but her six-month-old daughter died of a cardiac arrhythmia.
They put us begging at traffic lights, picking up leftovers from restaurants so we could eat, cleaning car windows, asking for clothes or things from house to house
When she was eleven years old, she was punished for being late home. “They burned my leg, so the next day, when I went to school, a teacher noticed and told me that we had to report. At first I didn’t want to because I was very afraid and I still feel afraid, all the time, of let them kill me, but at that moment I felt, like never in my life, supported “.
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She had to report where the drugs were and what was happening in that place, but it was not easy because she was always threatened by her captors. “I remember they told me that they had me on tape, that if I behaved badly they were going to show my classmates what I did with dogs and cats. The police found out about all that but they only caught two guys, the rest were not because there was no hard evidence at the time. “
Already supported by the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF), she says that her life changed, at least for a time. He studied his baccalaureate at a religious school in Pasto (Nariño). “The nuns were very nice. Besides, we were very few girls, only about 16.” They had to change her name many times because what the discovery of this girl had uncovered was very serious and involved very dangerous trafficking gangs.
Despite all the measures, the risk did not stop and Melisa had to be transferred to Bogotá. “Here I also came to a nuns’ school in the Las Cruces neighborhood, it was not the same because we were already many girls, about 120, so the change was very great. Living with the characters of so many women was not easy.”
And even so, she managed to finish her baccalaureate in 2004 when they began to treat her for psychiatry. “I have suffered from disorders from a very young age, my diagnoses have always changed. Sometimes depression, sometimes bipolarity, until three years ago I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.”
Every day, in addition to fighting to forget his past, he seeks to escape the voices of strange people that no one else sees. “I see men who look like monsters, they come out of the walls and have no skin. It’s a horrible feeling. When I’m in the street I hear voices, they tell me to run. That is exasperating.”
Sometimes those strangers mistreat her, they tell her that she is crap, that she is useless. “When they call me from downstairs, I look out the window and they yell at me to jump. They do it with signs, but they are people I don’t know.”
During his entire life he has attempted suicide about fifteen times. Remember that the first time it happened was when I was only eight years old. “I took some medications, a full pot of pills. When I woke up I was in the hospital. The woman who exploited me told me not to say anything, that they knew where my mother was. They always threatened to kill her.”
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All these hallucinations are caused, she says, by the cruelty she suffered in her childhood. Melisa must take at least 15 medications a day, but she has suffered such severe crises that she has been hospitalized several times. “I was recently in a psychiatric clinic, my partner says that they took me there because he wanted to hurt me. They gave me 16 electric shocks. That terribly affected my memory, my sense of location. Sometimes I go out to buy a bag of milk and when I try I don’t remember where I live when I come back. “
And despite that life unimaginable for many, Melisa was able to graduate from high school and study a career thanks to the support of an Italian foundation that supported her until the sixth semester while she was able to remain under the care of Family Welfare. “But then they took me out and I couldn’t get my degree in Linguistics and Universal Literature at the Universidad Gran Colombia. Working little by little I was able to finish subjects, but to graduate I have to do a diploma and I couldn’t due to lack of resources.”
Melisa has worked in Franciscan churches, in informal sales, offering avocados, newspapers, but her illness increasingly undermines her job opportunities. “I have deteriorated a lot and that makes our economic situation, mine and that of my partner miserable, as well as a result of the pandemic many opportunities to earn a living have ended.”
Their situation is desperate because they spend weeks without eating well. “We have lasted up to three days taking only salt with water,” he says. His partner is called Dayana and they met 11 years ago in one of the aid institutions where they both converged. None have been able to get a job.
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They live in a tenancy in the Villanueva neighborhood of the town of Kennedy and for a small apartment they must pay 350,000 pesos a month. “They threaten to kick us out because we are falling behind a lot with the payment. I have had to ask for help from colleagues who were in homes with me and relatives but every day it is more difficult, more with this disease.”
Melisa is also looking for a disability pension because no matter how hard she tries, it is very difficult to control her illness and at the same time survive. “Having schizophrenia is like living in a different body, it is waking up in the morning and not remembering things from the immediate yesterday. Many details of this conversation that I am having with you will have been forgotten by tomorrow.”
In moments of lucidity he dreams, has ideals and goals. “I would like to finish my degree, be helped, remember what I learned, have what to pay the rent and always have something to eat. I don’t want to go back to the streets, it’s the hardest thing in life.” Fortunately, her illness is treated thanks to the Sisben but she has to beg to go to her weekly appointments and claim her medications.
And despite the fact that forgetfulness is a characteristic of her illness from her mind, she has not been able to remove her past, the same one that haunts her day after day. “Many times I close my eyes and what I see is a girl sitting crying, asking that no one touch her again. For me it is horrible to remember those guys and see their faces laughing again. I despair when I get up because I feel that I have no control on my body. That is why I have tried many times to take my life to see if at last all that comes to an end “.
What is schizophrenia?
According to the Colombian Association of People with Schizophrenia and their Families (ACPEF), schizophrenia is a mental disorder that causes disturbance in people’s social, family and work relationships. It generally begins between adolescence and adulthood.
It is characterized mainly by the presence of hallucinations, delusions, alterations in the course of thought and / or disorganized behavior. These symptoms that may appear accompanied by other syndromes or personality disorders; For this reason, we speak of a complex disease that does not appear in the same way in all individuals.
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City disorders
These stories are part of the multimedia special ‘City Disorders’ that seeks to listen to and make visible to those who suffer from mental disorders in the city so that these diseases are no longer taboo. Seeking help is the main purpose of this news special.
CAROL MALAVER
SUBEDITOR BOGOTÁ
Write to us at [email protected]
* Names changed by protagonist request.
