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?

Mammals show empathy. That is a fact. It's not 'Hollywood' to suggest so. Humans are mammals.

And in those mammals that don't show empathy, there is exclusion. Is empathy a part of being a mammal? Yes, it is.

It's not meant to be a eulogy.

This is one part of what it was like for him. If you had asked all the protagonists for their account you would have all their completely different perceptions and judgements too.

It's called being human. And you can see it replayed in family lives everywhere.
Unless you are perfect.

Kondos I see what you are saying, I didn't mean that the feelings of living with someone with profound mental health difficulties were 'nothing' , they are very distressing and I'm sorry if you felt I was dismissive of them.

But my take on it is this: half my family have mental health problems that have affected the whole of their lives, half don't. I'm in the latter category and I really do feel very lucky. That's my way of making sense of it and stopping it swallowing me up.

This is a very interesting thread, so if nothing else and notwithstanding the writing style, I think his piece has generated a lot of good posts.

I still don't like it much though, he didn't mention mental health or illness hardly at all, it was all 'character, bad seed' as explanations (which he was careful not to identify as his own but threw in there anyway) and didn't seem to know anorexia is a mental illness.

^I shouldn’t have made her cry. I should have withheld my inhospitable corrective, deferred my display of liberal credentials, suppressed my pedagoguery, my self-aggrandisement, my vainglory...... And none of it explains the fact that she’s gone.

An exaggeration of her virtues honours her as little as an extirpation of her faults. In a life as short as Emma’s, every action is notable, every event historic. Besides, doing it doesn’t work. The greater our distortions and omissions, the more the recollection of her performance corrects them. What also doesn’t work is regretting the years she might have had. They never were hers. Twenty-one of them were, and are hers still to occupy and expend as she did. Any more are in the possession of some other Emma, the one we encounter nightly who departs at dawn.^

This is where you get the sense of how he really feels. He is kept awake at night by the ghost of her. The 'fact that she is gone' - is not something you say about someone you didn't love. It's what you say when you feel the fulity of the loss of a life of someone you care about. (on a geeky not it references back to the poem 'Stop all the Clocks'.)

apologies for the non-working of my italics and the spelling mistakes!

"I still don't like it much though, he didn't mention mental health or illness hardly at all, it was all 'character, bad seed' as explanations (which he was careful not to identify as his own but threw in there anyway) and didn't seem to know anorexia is a mental illness."

He makes it clear that she was ill - there's a whole paragraph about how sometimes she would accept she was ill, get help, and then get better enough to claim that she'd never been ill in the first place. There's a whole bit about her valiantly arguing for 4 hours to get out of "Toronto's prime psychiatric facility" before she could be diagnosed - his frustration at this is evident. It's fine to complain about his writing style but it seems a bit much to complain that he didn't make points that he obviously did. I mean, they're right there in the text.

The paragraph mentioning "bad seed" - that's not "thrown in", he's taking about how there's so many explanations for her illness and death but none of them mean anything except to the person doing the explaining.

I don't think I'm "perfect" but I can muster up some empathy for the person I loved and lost. In an article that would reach the masses, I would recognise her good qualities, as well as her pain.

Many people who lose a family member to suicide have limited understanding and compassion. Perhaps we need to step back and reflect on how we (as society) treat mentally ill people and how it might change the outcome. Sadly, this article isn't going to improve the stigma and shame.

Well, I've had a relative on my ex's side who killed herself, leaving two young children who then were sent to boarding school. She and I share dna, because her nephew was my husband. I don't share dna with her but my children are part of her dna.

She killed herself because of a controlling husband, this much is true. Whether it was mental health or abuse is not clear. Her brother, my FiL., since deceased, seemed to think it was abuse. And he tried many times to get her out of the situation. He was a lovely man and had many lovely memories with his sister.

He seems an egotistical narcissistic bully to me.

Yes - people who have mental illness can be very difficult to live with and to help (been there, done that), but he seems to "telling it like it is" and not beatifying her, as an excuse to be horribly spiteful about her feelings - he obviously didn't care or did that upset her, even when he knew his actions would have a bad effect on her.

His whole article is about how it has upset HIM that she was hard work.

There is no love, no empathy, no care.

No wonder she gave up.

They did live in different continents and from his own narrative, it sounds like he saw her for holidays every few years or so. Which is totally different to other people's accounts here on dealing with someone every single day.

It just comes over a bit to me like he hasn't earned the right to deliver the final verdict about her character in public like that (as Cory mentioned previously), whatever he feels. He wasn't there for most of her life.

*he obviously didn't care or did that upset her, even when he knew his actions would have a bad effect on her.

Should have "what he said" between "care" and "or"

Frisbymouse

To do the italics you have to have an "up" arrow either end of each paragraph you are quoting, otherwise it ignores them. Sometimes it ignores them anyway.

iPost, your posts are beautifully written, insightful and are helping me understand the effects of mental illness from the other side. (I'm the bonkers one in my family.)

They are quite the opposite of the attitudes in the Guardian article. And you have more reason to feel resentful than the Guardian writer. She was your MIL. Whereas he is talking about his granddaughter. Someone who has been a child for most of the time he knew her. She was barely more than a child when she ended her life. She might have turned her life around. He seems to have written her off from an early age.

I too saw great grief here, not lack of compassion.

He is trying to make sense of a life deliberately cut short. Of mental illness in a young girl who resisted help and learnt to manipulate those offering it. Leaving a family who will never recover from the scars

This article was difficult to read. As a teenager I suffered from serious depression. I was emotionally immature and lacked resilience - being completely devastated about a few words of criticism was normal for me. The reason for that wasn't to hurt the person criticising me - it was because I felt very deeply that I was a bad, worthless person, and that the criticism was proof that even the people closest to me, who were supposed to care about me, found me unlikeable.

I probably was unlikeable, being so unhappy all the time, and my parents had no understanding of MH issues and frequently told me that it wasn't real and I should pull myself together and get on with things. Which, in my mental state, was about as useful as telling a person with broken legs to just get up and walk, because look, everyone else can, so stop making a fuss.

So I feel a very deep compassion for the young person in the article (I could have very easily been her) but also for the grandfather, who sounds as if he doesn't have any real understanding of what she was going through and so was probably frequently very frustrated. Depressed people can be very hard to live with! Looking back, while I don't agree with the way my family dealt with my depression, I recognise that they were doing the very best they could with the knowledge that they had at the time - and that's all anyone can do.

I do question the remarks on her behaviour age 6 (!) and the decision to publish something so personal in a newspaper, but I can see both sides here.

I was moved by the honesty and openness in the article. It reflects his experience. Why should he sugarcoat it? Do we only want to read articles by those whose actions and feelings we approve of? There's a lot to be learnt from this article. Family members of those with mental illness may do things wrong and lack understanding. Of course they do-why would they know exactly how to talk to and help their relative? It helps to read such an honest account.

Startled I don't he had written her off - he's looking back though the lenses of her death - and picking over every interaction, every memory to try and find some sense or understanding.

Kidnapped He lived in both the UK and Canada, so you don't know how much he was involved in her life.

And yes he was her Grandfather - but he was also a father to her mother and her aunt. So as a father he was watching his child have to try and cope with and manage her daughters illness - and be able to witness the effects this was having on them as well. It just isn't so simple.

twokids thank you - I just had a preview fail :)

MrsF,

He moved to England in 1976. link

"I do question the remarks on her behaviour age 6 (!) "

Would you mind explaining what you object to in his description of the gumdrop-on-floor episode? I thought it was lovely. He describes Emma at 6 as fearless: she's not afraid of Niagara Falls "or of anything else" - therefore she's not going to do what she's told by granddad because she knows he's not going to be able to take the sweet off her. There's nothing censorious in his description at all.

My thoughts exactly, FindoGask

Exactly, findo

I agree with whensmyturn. He's writing about his granddaughter from his perspective. There was a time when mental illness wasn't as embraced and supported as it is now and I think most people are aware of that even if they can't relate to it. He's obviously angry, disappointed, shocked - and has the right to say how he feels about this. He will have watched the whole life of his granddaughter play out and impact on his own child and other family members as MrsFrisbyMouse says.

Where is the MN empathy that "Nobody tells you how you have the right to grieve and what your grief should look like"? Not here, that's for certain.

And why are posters critiquing his writing style ffs? Can't anybody just read past it - or not - to get to the points of the article. Not just on mumsnet then. You sound dickish and judgemental.

I still can't get over how much of this article is subtly underlining the fact that she was always like this, that she chose to behave the way she did, tiny instances from childhood of silly behaviours that somehow are supposed to belong to this narrative.

That and the fact that he was not actually her carer, not the person who did that grinding day to day business of keeping her alive, of getting her treatment, of advocating for her. He lived in another country, he met her rarely on holiday, and yet this is all about him, him, him.

If dd had been successful and my dad (who also lives in another country) had taken upon him to write something like this, interpreting ordinary incidents of her childhood in the light of what had happened, I don't know what I would have done.

Even that grubby sweet story isn't really about her- it's about how brave he was to take her to the Niagara Falls when he was afraid of heights ("this grandfather") and how oddly she then behaved about the sweet (pretty par for the course for a 6yo, I'd have thought). And it is immediately followed by the incident of spending her rent money, so we are clearly expected to connect the two.

It may be human to think these things. But since when was it a human trait that everything we think has to be published in a national newspaper with world-wide coverage?

He sounds vile. Maybe he ought to be asking himself what is wrong with him since he clearly doesn't have a shred of empathy for someone so mentally unwell.

I'm in disbelief actually.

He sounds bitter. I'm guessing that comes from the fact that his granddaughter caused great anguish and upset to his child and changed the dynamics of a once happy family.

He fails to see that she had a severe mental illness and so was probably as much of a victim and prisoner of her thoughts and actions as were the immediate family.

He writes in a over the top way as if he is trying to fit in every descriptive word he can find made it difficult to read at times.

I do agree with him on the point that his granddaughters suicide was probably inevitable though . As much help as there is out there some mental illnesses are so insidious so overwhelming that the poor person is forever fighting a loosing battle.

Cory - you've hit the nail on the head - I agree with every word of that.