Iza comes clean about mother’s suicide: It’s liberating

Iza Calzado

Now, I can be a true and authentic advocate for mental health,” declared actress Iza Calzado, who recently admitted in a 28-minute video uploaded on Facebook by She Talks Asia that her mom, Mary Ann Ussher, “committed suicide” in 2001.

“It feels liberating. I cannot be [an advocate] without talking about it,” said Iza. “In some ways, it comes from a place of triumph. I can say that I am now starting to heal. I’m more complete now, compared to when I joined the business at 19. How could I talk about it then, while feeling shame, fear and guilt at the same time? I was still processing all those feelings with the grief.”

The actress added: “What’s important is that I get to use my mom’s story to help others. She was very vocal about her condition. She talked about her depression openly, it’s just unfortunate that not a lot of people understood it. She did a lot of reading on it, but there was hardly any help. There was a lot of misdiagnosis, as well. I guess she would have loved for her story to be an instrument to help others.”

Iza chose to tell her story on Oct. 10, which was Mental Awareness Day. “I never lied about it when I was asked before. I would just always say I couldn’t talk about it,” she said, adding that there were media people who knew about what really happened to her mom, but chose not to publicize it as a sign of respect to her dad, the late director-choreographer Lito Calzado. “I also didn’t want to talk about it on television for the sake of high ratings.”

She said there were times when she had to call people’s attention for erroneously reporting that her mom died of cancer. Iza said the confusion was caused by the fact that she lost two mothers to breast cancer. “My dad’s second and third wives both died of cancer, but not my mom,” she stressed.

In December, while reading reports about her wedding to British businessman Ben Wintle in the papers, Iza recalled finally telling herself: “I cannot have her death written that way all the time. I have to come forward and talk about what happened.”

Iza found the “proper venue” via She Talks Asia, a women’s movement of which she is a cofounder. “It’s good that I came out with the story in that manner,” she said, referring to the video, which she herself edited, along with videographer Carmen del Prado and host Bianca Gonzalez. She Talks Asia cofounder Sarah Meier did the two-hour interview with Iza.

“While editing, I would ask Ben and my friends for advice because it was a two-hour conversation that we had to trim to 28 minutes. Sadly, we had to leave out a lot of details,” she shared with the Inquirer.

When the video went public, Iza said people reached out to her. “I realized that this can happen to anybody. We are not glorifying it—I want to stress that. I’m alarmed by the large number of teen suicides. It’s something that I want to understand and help with.

“Hopefully, we can find real solutions to this in the same way that we’re so gung ho at finding a cure for cancer or HIV/AIDS. There’s a lot that we still don’t understand, but we’re learning. There’s still hope.”