Stepping over the finish line, Elyse Ohia was astonished. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t trained enough for the gruelling 44km run. It was the fact the mother-of-three had planned to die well before the starting whistle blew.
Instead, Elyse crossed the finish line in South Waikato smiling from ear to ear. If she could do this, the Bay of Plenty woman realised, she could do anything – including conquering the mental illness that brought with it a raging P addiction, the loss of two of her children and almost the end of her life.
“I finished that run and proved to myself that I was capable of something great,” the 31-year-old tells Woman’s Day. “It was an amazing feeling.” At 13, Canadian-born Elyse began to experience severe mood swings. “There were two extremes,” she explains. “Once, in anger, I threw my mobile phone so hard, it broke. Once, I put my foot through a door.
At other times, I could be so happy and I had so much energy, I’d go on cleaning binges.” Despite her wild moods, Elyse got married at 19 and a week later, the newlyweds immigrated to New Zealand with Elyse’s family. Within a year, she was overjoyed to give birth to a daughter but was soon overwhelmed by a low state of mind that seemed to swallow her.
“I didn’t understand what was happening,” she recalls. “I was leaving my husband with the baby a lot. I didn’t want to deal with it. He would come home and I’d be very happy, then 10 minutes later, I’d be screaming at him.”
Elyse was diagnosed with postnatal depression, but nothing seemed to help. Six months after giving birth, she took her baby and walked out on the marriage. “I was heartbroken,” she recalls, “but I’d decided to leave him before he left me.”
It was the beginning of a six-year emotional rollercoaster that saw Elyse repeating the patterns of her first marriage, quickly falling in love and having babies – a boy and a girl – with two more partners.
Along the way, she began drinking heavily and was introduced to marijuana, then methamphetamine. “With P, once was all it took,” says Elyse gravely. “I remembered the feeling and I wanted that feeling again. Before I knew it, I was addicted.”
Elyse and partner Daryl with his daughter Heidi (left) and her youngest, Wairaka.
She’d been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder after the 2010 birth of her third child, but the medication made her feel like a zombie. “I decided I’d rather deal with the mood swings than feel like that.”
Painfully aware that she’d had three children to three different fathers, at 28, Elyse had her tubes tied, despite having lost custody of her two eldest kids. The despair pushed her to the brink. “I attempted suicide several times,” she confesses. “Every time, I wrote letters to my children. I needed them to know it wasn’t their fault.”
By 2014, her life was in ruins – she was a single mother struggling with addiction and with seemingly no hope of a better future. But that November, she met her current partner Daryl and a month later, she went “cold turkey”, stopping all drugs and alcohol overnight.
Elyse in December 2014, a month before she got clean of drugs.
Around this time, Elyse saw on the Mental Health Foundation’s website long-distance runner Mal Law’s call for participants in the High Five-O Challenge, in which he aimed to raise $500,000 for the charity by climbing 50 New Zealand peaks and running 50 off-road marathons over 50 days. Inspired, Elyse signed up for the 44km Maungatautari leg of the run.
But during the lead-up, Elyse again began planning to end her life. Thankfully, she didn’t go through with it, realising “deep down that I was loved”. On March 21 last year, despite not having run more than two hours previously, Elyse crossed the finish line after eight hours.
A year on and Elyse’s life is unrecognisable. Still clean and sober, she’s been discharged from the mental-health system and is managing her disorder with a minimum of medication.
She’s also raising her youngest daughter and has regular contact with her eldest girl. “I still get lows, but I’m a lot better at knowing what triggers them and have learned a lot of good coping strategies,” tells Elyse. She also began nursing training in January, explaining, “I want to work in the mental-health and addictions service – to be able to tell people, ‘If I can do this, anybody can.’
“I’m incredibly ashamed of some of the things I’ve done to myself and my family, but I don’t let it take over. The mental illness is part of who I am. My youngest knows Mummy is sick sometimes. My eldest daughter knows as much as you can tell a 10-year-old. I want them to know life can be hard, but you can fight through. Their mummy is a fighter and she loves them.”
Crossing the finish line after a 44km run was an “amazing feeling”, she says.
