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?

horrid

He never understood her.
He feels angry at her for what she did to her family and herself.
He is bereaved and his child is bereaved.

We may not like what he has to say. We might think he is unkind and insensitive but this is his perspective.

He is not a MH professional, he is not a policy maker. He is a grand father who can't work out why the hell his grand daughter could make herself well and get on with life.

Its what he feels and thinks and there will be millions who feel the same way.

You don't have to agree with him but it is an insight into how a lot of people feel.

The article is very sad on many levels.
Hopefully she had family and friends who could see the other side of her.

Wow. He was clearly an emotionally abusive asshole to her all her life and (like most emotionally abusive assholes) has no idea how being surrounded by this toxicity impacts on a person's mental health

He writes beautifully. He doesn't dumb down. OK, sometimes he overwrites, but generally he's very articulate.

I an understand his frustration and anger. Guilt, too. It must be extremely hard living with someone with MH problems who refuses to get help for them.

On MN, if woman posts saying her h has MH issues and doesn't want to get help for them, and he's horrible to live with, everyone replies 'LTB! You can't help him unless he wants to help himself!'

How is this any different??

Agreed about the pretentiousness of the writing style - it strikes me that the desire to craft a series of affected sentences has trumped any attempt to empathise with his GD's experiences, or to discuss these in a meaningful way. He sounds awful.

Agreed about the pretentiousness of the writing style - it strikes me that the desire to craft a series of affected sentences has trumped any attempt to empathise with his GD's experiences, or to discuss these in a meaningful way. He sounds awful.

Agreed about the pretentiousness of the writing style - it strikes me that the desire to craft a series of affected sentences has trumped any attempt to empathise with his GD's experiences, or to discuss these in a meaningful way. He sounds awful.

There always was a surfeit of available explanations for Emma’s irrational conduct. "Self-dramatisation, attention-seeking, shortcuts to fame, laziness, hormones, bad seed … there’s a clarity, a sensibleness, a sameness to them all, the inexorable logic of those convinced of their own rationality."

He's not saying he feels any of this personally.

He's talking about the narratives that people around, professional and personal, composed to rationalise her self destructive behaviour.

The way people then become fixed in their own logic which ultimately tells you more about the way that they think than the person they aim to deconstruct.

He is angry. I don't think that we can object to his anger.

I think (like others have said above) that he is expressing - dispassionately - how difficult her behaviour was to deal with.

This doesn't make him disgusting. It makes him honest and possibly a bit cold. But understandable. We are expected to have never ending supplies of patience and sympathy for those with mental illness but we have no sympathy for those ftiends and relatives who have also been damaged and affected by it.
I don't think he sounds like he doesn't like her. He sounds defeated by her. She was defeated by herself, too.

I think the language makes it difficult to understand exactly what his opinion is.

I can't decide whether he's blaming her, blaming the illness, blaming society or blaming himself.

There's obviously a lot of anger in this piece. I'm wondering whether it partly comes from watching his own daughter's pain in not knowing how to help Emma and devastation when ultimately she couldn't.

I get people being angry after suicide.

I still can't begin to excuse or explain this article.

I knew which article you meant OP before I even opened the thread.

Deeply odd undertones to that piece. Very uncomfortable reading.

He lost me when he points out that he ruined the one experience she genuinely enjoyed. He almost seems proud of it.

It's hugely lacking not just in empathy but in any kind of psychological insight. If he was a cold, unfeeling father who demanded that his own child skip prettily through fields with a smile plastered to her face at all times, then maybe that child was not a great parent to his granddaughter. Maybe emotional expression other than joy was banned. That could lead to all sorts of illnesses down through the generations.
I have some sympathy with his raw anger. Suicide is, after all, the murder of someone who was loved by those left behind. But I bet that cold, impatient, intransigent attitude, passed down through generations is as much a cause of her mental illness as anything else.

Badly phrased, I meant - to those who are left behind, dealing with the grief, post suicide, suicide must feel like murder - same abrupt brutality, same lack of concern for others.

Christ, that's so hard to read. Someone got a thesaurus for Christmas didn't they?!

I think it is possible to understand and have sympathy for the writer's anger, guilt, sadness, confusion etc and believe that he has the right to express this, whilst at the same time feeling that an article in the national press, so soon after her death, with no attempt to hide the young woman's identity is not the appropriate way to do this.

His writing is awful. It's so florid.
Zero compassion for the child in question.
What a disturbing article. He does not come across well at all.

And yes, if he parents/grandparents like he writes, perhaps he might like to consider the possibility that just maybe he contributed to her death.

What a cunt.

The article is full of hate and blame.

The last paragraph is just unbelievable. He thinks he's proving what a "problem" child she was when she was doing something the vast majority of DC have done.

I wonder what sort of father he was

Gosh, I didn't read that article as angry at all.

To me he's trying to make sense of what happened & part of what he sees is that her whole life led up to this moment. You could say "Why didn't everyone try harder to be more empathetic"; but then he talks about how head strong she was, ran rings around the mental health professionals, & will-fully refused to acknowledge her terminal illness. The only bitterness I read was towards the mental health panel that let her run rings around them (not sectioned).

One could say "That's what mental illness is, that people can't help themselves"; but the bottom line is, it's absolutely rotten to deal with when people who are willfully self-destructive. It can make you completely crazy trying to help them. One is allowed to detach when the only way to preserve your own mental health is to distance yourself from their problems.

Yes I have personal experience.

I thought it was very sad and honest, although in a somewhat hard to read writing style in the middle.

I didn't see him blaming her, more a sense of sadness that as a family they had never understood her and from very early on she had experienced normal family experiences wholly differently to everyone else - what he means by 'her default setting was black'.

It was also very sad about how with clearly extensive help from psychiatric services and support from her family, nothing had ever changed this and her suicide had become almost inevitable.

I felt there was a lot of love in the article - for her warts and all but also making it clear that she did have a huge negative impact on the rest of the family, who kept on loving her all the same and are hugely affected by her death, mainly because of the sense that nothing they had ever done had been the right thing all her life. The main feeling was exhaustion and a sense of defeat.

Thats a strange article.

Seems like he is still trying to make sense of it all himself. Interesting that he suggests that she was trying to fly rather than to kill herself.