“No one dies from schizophrenia,” Rob Matheson tells me. And yet his mother had schizophrenia and died at just 48 years of age. She was a deeply compassionate woman who ran the TB Ward at the Heidelberg Hospital.
There was no such thing as a remedy for PTSD in those days. They filled her with psychotropic drugs and gave her ECT until she resembled Jack Nicholson in the final scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
From this terrible experience Rob has become an incredibly empathetic person, an amazing artist and lover of the natural world.