To feel very uncomfortable about this Guardian article?

[KingscoteStaff]

Front page of the 'Family' section. A grandfather talking about his 21 yo granddaughter who has just committed suicide.

It just doesn't feel real. Could it be some sort of exercise in writing the most unsympathetic narrator ever?

Actually, I wish I hadn't posted my last post and I hope it doesn't upset anyone. I will ask for it to be deleted.

Bingo! Isn't that exactly what some people are saying about the article?

No it's not, if you read the thread.

Comments have been that it's narcissistic, loveless, critical, judgemental fails to understand mental illness, appears to blame the girl for her illness, pretentiously and badly written etc.

And her name could well have not been "Emma".

No don't, it was a good point WrongTrousers.

I have read the whole thread and contributed.

Comments have been that it's narcissistic, loveless, critical, judgemental fails to understand mental illness, appears to blame the girl for her illness, pretentiously and badly written etc

Well that's quite the one sided view of the thread right there.

I've just had a quick google and its very easy to find her Facebook page which I think her family have left up 'in memory of'.

The article itself has played on my mind so much today.

One-sided or a brief summary of the criticisms of the article?

You weren't expecting an exhaustive list surely?

I thought 'bewilderment' was the main emotion here- he couldn't get over that. I sympathised.

Every one of your posts on this thread both attacks the author's prose and questions his worth as a human being

If you publish writing you are automatically submitting it for criticism on style as much as anything else. It's absolutely ludicrous to suggest that a piece published in a national newspaper should somehow be immune from criticism.

The comment about his 'worth as a human being' is deeply ironic. This is a man who's crafted and published an article about a young, dead relative which does precisely that - gives her no worth as a human being. I don't see why someone who writes something that nasty about an actual relative should expect complete strangers to treat him with kid gloves.

I think it is an honest if over-written piece. But his prose is a side issue here.

He doesn't understand his gdg's struggles and he never will. It must be the same for almost everyone else who knew her. It is a very big ask to want your loved ones to endlessly be your carers and supporters with no let up. I know I get fed up with it.

Poor woman suffered greatly - but not in a bubble.

I too slightly question his decision to sell this to a national newspaper and he might well regret this in the future. But I can't condemn him for what he has written.

Maybe she was a cow & attention-seeking. No mental illness stops you from also potentially being those things.

She didn't sound more attn-seeking than any other willful child/teenager, to me. The whole theme of pseudo-being in control played out in a lot of her behaviour, though. Goes with the anorexia.

"It is a very big ask to want your loved ones to endlessly be your carers and supporters with no let up."
Nobody 'wants' that, ffs. Surely what any of us 'want' is to lead a full and fulfilling life? What makes anybody think that somebody would want to need carers for our whole lives?
And yes it's a big "ask", and no doubt nobody wants to have to do it any more than they want to need it, but that doesn't change because it's mental illness doing the asking instead of a physical illness or a disability.

Quite, Ninja

I wasn't expecting anything. I was pointing out that you've only given one side.

Wow Bill "The comment about his 'worth as a human being' is deeply ironic. This is a man who's crafted and published an article about a young, dead relative which does precisely that - gives her no worth as a human being. I don't see why someone who writes something that nasty about an actual relative should expect complete strangers to treat him with kid gloves."

I so agree with you on this one.

In reply to your comment about the article being unintentionally 'nasty'.

So I was summarising the negative comments.

" I don't see why someone who writes something that nasty about an actual relative should expect complete strangers to treat him with kid gloves."

I don't see that what he wrote was "nasty". I've said what I think about the piece many times in this thread so I'm not going to repeat myself, but you're reading things into it that I didn't see, and a lot of other people didn't see either. I see someone trying to make sense of their loss. I also see something of Emma, as she was, when she was alive. I don't see anything "nasty", that's for sure.

"Lass hasn't conflated anything. I found her posts perfectly clear."

So did I. I didn't say her posts were confusing. I said that they conflated two separate issues. She has taken a piece of prose, which she objects to on aesthetic grounds, and used her subjective opinion about that to decree that there's something lacking in the person who wrote it, presumably because his piece didn't follow some mumsnet-approved matrix of how grief is supposed to read in a piece of journalism. She's used an aesthetic judgement to make a moral judgement. Do you see.

No not really. I used an aesthetic judgement on his prose. My assessment of his character was based on the actual content; had he written using monosyllables in short sentences and said the same , I'd have come to the same conclusion.

Plenty of judgements are made on here about the content of say Katie whtsername and how unpleasant she is.

Anorexia involves fixed irrational beliefs. Some sufferers are delusional, others have good insight.

Many mental illnesses do not involved delusions.

That's because Katie Hopkins is constantly giving her opinion on anything and everything and likes to be controversial and her way to do that is so more often than not to be horrible

And I'm saying Lass didnt conflate the two issues. It is you who conflated the two, incorrectly imo.

Why I've no idea, there's nothing in the text of her posts to support the claim that her criticism of his character was based on dislike of his prose style.

I don't dispute that's what you're getting from it, but I find it extremely hard to understand why. Everything he says about her is negative. There is not one positive chink of light, not one slight recognition that she may have had positive attributes. Not a single acknowledgement that her family may have at times taken the wrong path bringing her up. It's all about how marvellous they are and how dreadful she was. It's a tract of blame rested squarely at her feet.

All sorts of people try and make sense of things, nice ones and nasty ones. The act of trying to make sense does not make you a good person, it's the methods you use and the conclusions you reach.

And reaching the conclusion that it was all her fault and that she was brought up perfectly and had every opportunity but pissed it up the wall for no reason.

It's very clear from that article that she felt she had a poor childhood and was treated badly by her parents. Yet all that is airily dismissed as fantasy. There isn't a single moment of reflection that perhaps if she had been believed, listened to and helped when she was still a child perhaps the damage could have been reversed before it was too late.

If an article like this was published in the Daily Mail the same people saying how wonderful this article is would be baying for blood and calling it discriminatory. But I really think some people (although not many thank goodness) are so in thrall to Guardian brand that they lose all their critical faculties an powers of independent thought when it comes to worshipping at the altar of the Guardianista.