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?

[Elendon]

People who are deeply unhappy can inflict damage, but that damage is not as much as those who are suffering the unhappiness in the first place.

This piece lacks empathy. And it has made me realise that my close relative needs serious help right now, though she won't take it. That is something beyond my control. Sadly.

[MrsFrisbyMouse]

ipost That was a very moving and vulnerable post - and so much of it I agree with. I hope you one day you find some internal peace. We are fallible and we do our best with the resources available to us. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, that is not enough.

Re: the article. It is one of the most honest accounts of being a relative of a deeply mentally unwell young person I have read.

Yes his writing style is overly florid (I suspect he is of a particular generation) - and you have do a very close reading to get the full sense of what he is saying - as he often hides the words that capture the true sense of what he is saying in obscure ways.

But the overall sense to me is one of being angry with himself for being unable to understand her. His recollections of her as a younger child are just what jumps out to him as he is trying to process the grief and create understanding from this tragedy.

How, despite all the support that was wrapped around her - she escaped. More than that she actively worked to deflect help and to maintain her control. There is very little that professionals and family alike can achieve if the person doesn't want to be helped - is unable to be helped. Especially with young people - whose brains have yet developed enough to be able to see the nuances in life - they live in the sharp contrasts between black and white - unable to see beyond what the chemicals in their brain are saying. (Hence the high rates of suicide between that 17-24 group) Yet families are derided because they 'didn't do enough to help.' Despite in many cases giving everything they collectively had to try and save one individual - the whole family balancing on an event horizon - fighting not to be consumed by the black hole.

The cost of mental illness goes way beyond the cost to the individual - it destroys entire families - the after effects rippling through continuing generations.

We are so bound up in the rhetoric of helping, understanding and supporting people with mental illness that we forget the actuality of the others who are living with the consequences day to day - and those that get left behind when it goes tragically wrong.

[Elendon]

Yes, I agree, he would not have been able to save her. But. He does sound controlling. I get the feeling he was controlling and so was she, and this was the clash. She lost the battle.

[MrsFrisbyMouse]

p.s. He didn't set out to write a compassionate piece - he is a writer and everything he has said has been crafted with care. I suspect the dispassionate sense is to give him some mental space from it - and in a few years he might very well write a different piece.

But the futility and bleakness is very raw and very real.

[furryminkymoo]

A bewildered angry grandfather who is hurt by his granddaughters actions.

That's what I read. The suggestion that he is abusive is a huge stretch of imagination and projecture.

I thought the article was well written, challenging and deeply honest.

[Kidnapped]

Yes, it does come over as callousness towards her. It reads very much like 'look what this awful child did to me'. And they lived on different continents; I wonder how much he actually knew her.

Didn't really understand the significance of the dropped sweet. Wouldn't a lot of 6 year olds pick up a sweet that had dropped on the mat and eat it? He seems to think that was indicative of her terrible character rather than normal behaviour.

The writing style is awful. Florid as someone else mentioned.

I do wonder what Emma's parents and siblings make of the article.

[KondosSecretJunkRoom]

Fundamentally, however, it takes a very un-insightful person to see that your pain is just nothing, nothing, compared to the pain of actually living that, as the person affected

I hear this a lot.

Caring for someone who wants to be dead is not nothing. It's not nothing in comparison with anything. It doesn't go away as you walk away from the person. It's not undone with a bout of therapy.

It's like holding on to someone who is drowning. Always drowning. Always holding. It is pure fear. It's exhausting. It's not nothing compared to anything.

[furryminkymoo]

mrsFrisbyMouse you write beautifully.

[Elendon]

The cost of mental illness goes way beyond the cost to the individual - it destroys entire families - the after effects rippling through continuing generations.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with this. It only effects generations after if you make it out to be so. This woman was an individual in her own right. She had mental health issues. To meld that into familial sequelae is compounding the issue. Perhaps the writer saw a connection with his granddaughter, perhaps he saw her as an abhorrence. It's not clear. And it's poorly written, albeit in florid language, and quite frankly, the voice of someone who wishes to control.

[ShastaBeast]

I read this too and disappointed there were no comments. It was unnecessarily difficult to read and very harsh, poor girl. I do understand the frustration of mental illness, it can make people selfish and unpleasant at times - I've suffered depression and lived with someone with severe mental health issues. But overall, some love and empathy should shine through the anger, it doesn't in this case.

[corythatwas]

It could of course be that he is taking his anger out because he does feel the loss badly- but what kind of a jerk does that in a national newspaper? And what kind of a newspaper prints that?

It's the kind of stuff you say to your therapist, precisely because you know it's a safe space. It's the kind of stuff that you scream out aloud when you are punching your pillow and know that nobody who can be hurt can hear.

Yes, I can relate to what MrsFrisby said. When my dd attempted suicide I was angry. When she did it again, I was angry. In those years when I lived constantly on tenterhooks in case she would make another attempt, I was angry.

But if I had chosen to hang her out in the national press in this way to work off my own anger and grief, our family- all the other people who were also suffering- would never have forgiven me. And rightly so.

In traditional British (and other) society, there are rules about how we speak about the dead. There are reasons for that. This poor girl can never come back and defend herself. She can never change this final verdict on her life which is now printed and archived for all to see. Other members of the family can never un-see it. Younger members of the family will grow up not having known anything good about her: all that is there for all to see is how useless she was in the eyes of the one member of her family who chose to lay his feelings open in public.

Honesty would be saying "I am hurt and angry and I don't know how I can forgive her". It is not the same as pretending to give a detailed verdict on somebody's entire life and only choosing the negative stuff. And even honesty isn't something you have to choose to do that in the national press.

[crashdoll]

I find it interesting that people on here are showing compassion for him but he found none for her. That says a lot about him, I'm afraid.

[iPost]

My problem with the Guardian article is that he shows no love at all

If I write about late MIL you'd be hard pushed to spot the love.

God knows I was hard pushed to spot the love for 20+ years.

I didn't even know I did until more than 3 years after her death. I had spent so many years being decisively dispassionate about her, to keep the hate and anger in check that it was squished under many layers of entirely necessary denial. I had to keep the hate and anger in check. When you have stood over a frail old lady with a pillow in your hand and had the horrible realisation that, yes... you could. And you really wanted to. Keeping emotions severely, tightly locked down is better for some people's breathing status, and other's non-incarcerated status.

I grieved for her very belatedly. On my own. With so much regret for what could have been that I was utterly floored. With an extricating realisation of what the illness stole from her, from the woman she would have been if she hadn't had it. Because we saw glimpses, in the few times it was more controlled. And she was warm, funny, quirky, loving and desperate for a daughter-ish relationship in her life. She was a lot like me in some ways. We could have made each other really very happy. And the menfolk would have quivered in the face of The Matriach, and Matriach in training.

But the illness took that away. It took everything. Killed who she was supposed to be. Killed who we should have been. She's dead and we are pale imitations of who we thought we were, who we could have been.

Burying the love lets you survive when feeling the love is the lead weight that will stop you fighting to keep your head above water.

Give him time. It is early days. He is a bereaved man. Probably mourning, in the only way he can manage right now, not just his granddaughter, but the maiming and scarring of all the other people he loves.

Wanting people to make expressions of the right emotions on a "socially acceptable" timeline is a almightily huge ask of the exhausted, worn down and traumatised by suicide.

We can't all be everything the rest of the world wants to be, when they want us to be it.

Some of us were never cut out for care and responsibility for mentally ill people. We didn't choose it, it chose us. We fail. We fuck up. We don't feel the way we are supposed to feel.

There are two choices.

Judge us.

Or forgive us.

Forgive us for being flawed humans who did not choose the challenge that left us on our knees. And maybe don't heap more on our already tottering pile of regret and internal self recrimination by asking us to emote in a manner, on a timescale, that best pleases the observers.

If that is an unacceptable proposition , maybe the better alternative is for lots more jumping up and down at governments the world over that have scaled back mental health provision to the extent that the incapable are being asked to do the impossible.

[SpunkyMummy]

I 'like' this piece. Of course it makes me feel uncomfortable. Because the subject is terribly uncomfortable and tragic.

But I think it's honest. He's angry, sad, felt helpless, has seen how much her behaviour impacted the family, wanted to understand her, but couldn't. He isn't hiding behind beautiful sentiments. This is raw and honest.

I remember Emma’s first trip to Niagara Falls with this grandfather who hated heights combined with the motion of rushing water, but had decided to “man up” in front of his six-year-old firstborn third generational who wasn’t afraid of them or of anything else. Careening down the highway, I heard a grunt beside me. Her gumdrop had popped out of her mouth. She bent forward, recovered it from the grubby floor mat and contemplated it lovingly. “Throw it out the window,” I said. She looked at the hairy gumdrop in her hand, glanced up into my profile and back to the gumdrop. I could hear the clicks as her brain calculated the probability of my relinquishing the steering wheel to confiscate the contaminated sweet. “No way,” she said, and rammed the gumdrop home.

Such a bittersweet recollection. The one of them in the garden as well.

Then she moved from Toronto to Montreal to be free. And then the rent came due. And she’d already spent it.

He doesn't understand her. But how could he? Because from an outside perspective this doesn't make sense.

[MissHooliesCardigan]

ipost I agree with everything you've said. I ran a carer's group for years for people caring for someone with psychosis - most of them were mothers to adult children - and it was truly humbling hearing what people go through. Many of them had been physically abused, most of them had been subjected to their loved one verbally abusing them or wrongfully accusing them of something eg putting cameras in their room or poisoning their food. I remember the mother it a young man with schizophrenia who was a longed for only child who had started training as a doctor before he got ill and now spends 14 hours a day in bed, rarely leaves his room or changes his clothes. She said that it is like watching someone drowning - occasionally they bob up to the surface and you get a glimmer of the real person and then they get sucked back under the water.
Spike Milligan speaks very eloquently about depression and says that he can understand that someone who is suicidally depressed for no obvious 'reason' can be very hard to deal with for someone who has never experienced true clinical depression. We've all been 'depressed' as in down in the dumps and it's natural in some ways to think 'I've been depressed and I got over it' and to feel a bit irritated with someone who is depressed when they have 'everything to live for' but it just doesn't work like that. I've nursed someone who was a very successful lawyer who had lost 4 stones, had to be tube fed, put in a wheelchair to take her to the toilet and turned every hour to stop her getting pressure sores. On the surface, this woman had what most people would think was a perfect life.
Suicide is the most awful thing to try to come to terms with because those left behind tend to feel a toxic mixture of anger and guilt on top of the 'normal' feelings of loss and grief when someone dies.
I think the writing in this piece is dreadful but I kind of get what he's trying to say.
Mental illness sucks but it also sucks for those around the person who is ill.

[furryminkymoo]

I agree with MrsFrisbyMouse, behaviour of a family member with mental health can damage an entire family, the damage is the gift that keeps giving. Affecting DC, siblings, parents, DGP.

It isn't something that the person can be held accountable for but the wounds are still there. Often if talked about will be furiously denied, like Emma in the article once (temporarily well) even the illness and saviours will de denied.

[StrangeLookingParasite]

The whole thing seems to have been crafted to demonstrate how superior he is. From the ridiculous over-flowery language to the examples of amazing things from he felt he had done for her, it just smacks of self-congratulation. Very odd and deeply unpleasant.

yes, this.

[SpunkyMummy]

From an outside perspective a girl that could have had a wonderful life decided to take her own and hurt him and the people he loves.

It's actually incredibly touching, imo.

It's raw, it isn't what one may want to hear. But that doesn't mean it isn't valid.

My mother has quite a few mental health issues. It's hard to deal. Because I love her so much it hurts. But sometimes there's also this unspeakable amount of anger. Why couldn't she just be "normal"? Why didn't our father see it earlier? What gave her the right to hurt this children this way?

Nowadays I've managed to let go of many of these things. Cherish her good sides.

But if she killed herself? It would feel like a kick in the face. And between the legs.

"Why did she do that after she made us all go through this? Why did she make us love her?"

Sorry, I can't explain. And I'm crying.

[ClopySow]

It's like holding on to someone who is drowning. Always drowning. Always holding. It is pure fear. It's exhausting. It's not nothing compared to anything

So well put. Living with someones mental illness is exhausting. Yes, perhaps i don't feel as bad as they do, but i'm constantly picking up the broken pieces abandoned by my ex for the sake of our children. It's exhausting, infuriating, scary and unfair. It dominates my life every single day despite splitting over a decade ago.

I don't think the article lacks compassion. It's an honest portrayal of how he feels. We'd really rather not hear these feelings because the truth makes us uncomfortable.

[crashdoll]

iPost There's a difference between struggling to show love and disparaging the character of a person who has died, especially when those "personality traits" were likely to be due to her mental illness. Many, many young women with anorexia have been sexually abused and it goes unspoken or unknown within families.

[toptoe]

He sounds confused to me. He has decided there is no answer to why she was like this. That it was part of her personality. A stubborness, perhaps - that's what he meant about the sweet bit I think.

It's sad, because actually there are probably lots of factors that contributed to her mental health. Part of it will be personality, as in how we deal with trauma - we act in or act out etc. But that won't be the final answer. Somewhere in her past she suffered trauma and that's the bit he is missing. Either one big event, a series of events, a drip drip drip of events. But something made her want to disappear herself slowly.

To me it read as someone who has not accepted that mental health is affected by external circumstances, which are processed by that individual and their defence systems kick in which has them stuck in a loop of mental illness. He seems to think that it is inherent in people's personality. He is not alone in this thinking. I've had mental health issues since early childhood, as did my mother and others in her family. The older generations decided that there was a 'negative' gene that was passed down and we were just negative people. They didn't consider the dysfunctional parenting and trauma we experienced as a result. This is what his piece reminds me of. An older generation who don't have the knowledge of more recent pyschology that looks at early childhood experiences etc to explain how a child can become depressed. I was also told in my childhood that children can't be depressed so I was oversensitive. Actually, I was depressed. I know that now as an adult. But those around me dismissed it as silliness, much as this guy dismisses her sensitivity as stubborness.

I would want to know her side. What happened to her as a young child, what were the experiences that upset her view on the world and people in it? I wonder if, once his anger at the mental health issues subsides, he will start to consider this. Or would it be too painful for the family to be introspective?

[Wellthatsit]

Why should the article have been tempered, or included 'just a little bit of empathy'.
The article is this man's account of how he feels. It is admirable that he hasn't softened the blow by putting some 'Hollywood style' closure or message of hope in there.

I too have experienced living with someone who is impossible to help, and seem unable to resist putting obstacles in their own way. When you get to the point where you begin to feel mentally I'll yourself you have to step back and shut down your guilt and your, dare I say it, empathy, just to survive yourself.

It's is how I read his account and I think he should be applauded for admitting, indirectly, that he screwed up, that he felt hopeless, that he judged her and felt angry with her.

[FindoGask]

I don't understand how people can read the same article I did and say that he shows no compassion or that the way he describes his granddaughter as a child is 'horrible'. His recollection of her expression when the owl lands on her hand; his description of her wandering through a garden - "luminous in the haze, joyous, incandescent and reckless as any rose." His love for his granddaughter is as obvious to me from that piece as is his bewildered pain; he's attempting to understand her illness and her death - as much as anyone can.

[corythatwas]

iPost, noone is saying that you have to express the right emotions. But why do you have to go to the lengths of getting commissioned to write an article in a newspaper with world-wide coverage, leaving your granddaughter clearly recognisable? This isn't a sudden outburst of uncontrollable grief in a cafe or a doctor's clinic. This has taken time to organise. Was there no time, during all that period, to reflect that presenting every single memory of his grand-daughter (including eating a grubby sweet aged 6 ffs) as part of the same negative pattern could do harm to other people who were at least equally afflicted: including the people who spent their life actually caring for the girl? Because that wasn't him, was it? He saw her occasionally, on holidays. He wasn't the one drowning on a day to day basis. The people who did are not, as far as I can see, writing in the Guardian.