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?

Ps I'm not blaming Emma for her choices, I know nothing beyond this article about her or her grandfather, just that he is also not to blame for every decision that she made.

kesstrel i hadn't thought of that but I thibk i agree. I have ASD, and as a child we'd go out and have a great time, then I would get home and have a meltdown. This always baffled my mum who would then vow to never take me out again. Then it made sense after i was diagnosed. To a lesser degree I still do it now. Being tired, overstimulated and not being able to recharge and regain my energy often leads to awful moods and tears after what was an otherwise lovely day.

Also with her committing suicide due to the rent payments -black and white thinking. There's no way round it, it can't be solved (although of course, it can), so the solution becomes suicide.

klassy I am equallly surprised that you can't see it. His self aggrandisement is how he verbalises the self loathing he must feel... it is his failure, his error, his fault, his powerlessness to do what all grand/parents should do.. protect, save!

Yes, she does sound like a pain in the arse. Who has lived with someone with any MH issues and never felt that about them? We all lose compassion occasionally, blame the person, not the condition. Point out the person who inists they have never felt/done this and you will have identified a liar, to themselves if not the outside world!

I look in the mirror now and see the woman who found SFIL pissed and passed out, MIL hanging. The woman who set aside a long abiding, nasty, family feud to help DHs family through the police investigation, coroners inquest, newspaper intrusion, so called friends making assumptions, slurs, spreading evil stories - missing the blindingly fucking obvious and setting blame o individuals where a health condition was the root cause. The woman who, whilst doing all of this, hated the bloody coward. Loathed her for what she had done to my DH, her family, herself.

I also see the woman who held all that in, supported everyone, arranged everything, allowed everyone else to grieve freely, without thought to what needed to be done.

I see the woman who, 16 years later, still blames herself for not having said something, done something, waved a magic wand. Unable to sleep without a light on, unable to forget the hateful things she thought about a woman whose life was utterly unbearable, whose mental health was already fragile, unable to reconcile those thoughts with her vision of herself.

Had I read this article back then I would have been able to forgive myself for having those hate filled thoughts. As it is I still struggle with it, sometimes.

As I said, I can see how others will not read into it what iPost, myself and others have. We all react differently to illness, death - and the written word. We all have different experiences, different visceral reactions to loss.

We are all right! We just don't all agree!

Hello folks
Thanks for the reports that some MNers may find this triggering.
Here is a link to our mental health webguide, which has some useful contacts.

wow, it does sound defensive and focused on the inevitability of her demise. But.. that doesn't mean that I suspect him of being abusive.

I found this article incredibly hard to read. It is the feeling that he sees her actions as deliberate, as if she is choosing to have anorexia, choosing to suffer from depression, just to hurt him and her family. He seems to come from the school of thought that says that people with mental health problems just need to pull themselves together and stop wallowing. Thay it is something you can switch on or off. That this child had any real control over how she felt.

She did not make choices about her illness anymore than someone with a broken leg chooses not to walk. She did not refuse to let joy into her life, joy was denied to her.

Yes, mental illness is a horrendous and difficult thing for everyone involved and he has a right to be hurt and angry at the world. However, there is a lack of understanding in this piece that I feel reflects a lot of the general stigma experienced by people with mental health problems and a kind of victim blaming that you would not see about someone with a physical illness.

Yes, Jeepers, he does very much blame the poor woman, rather than blame the illness.
I wonder if he'd lost her to cancer, if he does be more sympathetic. Or if he'd lost a grandson.

iPost. Brilliant brilliant post

He comes across as quite narcissistic.

WRT his claims that his granddaughter laid unfair blame her family for her problems - that is usually what is said by family members of victims of childhood abuse/toxic exposure.

Who knows?

Anyway - he came across as defensive, grandiose and charmless

I've read the first page, the article and the last page only as found it too confronting. I also found the trip to the owl sanctuary confronting My DS has ASD. He will be fully engaged with a day out or a trip out, and then whe he gets back into the car he just dissolves into tears and says that he hated it and 'please don't take me back there mummy'. He is 7.

I find the author contemptible in his active dislike. I find it contemptible that he is writing like this - like it was all about him and his experience- when his grand daughter has left behind grieving parents and friends.I just sort of think 'how dare he?'.

That is my visceral reaction.

He does sound like a parent of one of those of us who have sought support on the 'but we took you to stately homes!' threads.
Also agree he comes across narcissistic.
Imagine actually publishing this, about your dead grandchild. Who you allegedly loved. Pfft!

iPost, you write with such elegance, wisdom and insight.

He's a professional writer?! I'm sorry but it reads like something a first year university student who just discovered a right click function of synonyms.

Utter, utter, shite. I cannot believe he is paid to teach.

Giselaw , I thought his writing was grim too. I'm stumped as to why some people think it's beautiful. It's appalling.

The ASD thing definitely ran through my mind. I was wrongly diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and then bipolar before it became apparent that I actually have AS. I think many of us on the autistic spectrum suffer with our mental health because we struggle to fit in and feel like an alien. I don't know if this poor girl did have ASD but I definitely think that women with ASD go largely unrecognised because we don't often fit the stereotypes.

You can write about the effects of mental illness and/or suicide on relatives (as iPost and others have eloquently demonstrated) without plastering the details of a young woman's short, unhappy life all over the internet with photos of her as a young child. She has no ability to respond or put her side of the story.

We need to have sympathy for those affected by other's mental illness, but also for the unwell person themself and to keep some basic standards of decency and respect for someone who is unable to defend themself.

Victim blaming, exactly. That is how it comes across. He says she couldn't allow herself to be happy because she knew what the result of that would be - what exactly does that mean??

I read the article and he was expressing the frustration of being around a person who is unwell.
It may be mental health or something else but it is utterly exhausting.
I wouldn't blame the person themselves but all illness can be tiring to manage and for family it is can be really tough too.

Maybe the article reads differently if you read it in the paper, as I did, rather than online by clicking a link? I didn't find the language particularly florid, I thought it was restrained and dignified and quite unflinching in its refusal to reach for the cliched response in the face of loss. There was also a lovely picture of Emma as a child which made the words and the images they conjured especially poignant.

Bereaved people never get it right because there is no right way to deal with death. If the writer gets it wrong, we all do. I cannot condone the posts on this thread criticising the way someone is expressing, indeed even feeling, grief. By contrast, the thoughtful, measured posts of many, including iPost and ourBlanche are brilliantly insightful and I can relate to those feelings of inadequacy and abiding sadness.

Christ, I'm not surprised she did it if that nasty, pathetic-excuse-for-a-human grandfather is representative of her family. Poor woman.

A person who commits or considers suicide is incredibly vulnerable (understatement of the year, I know) and feels no hope. Certainly for me*, I knew for a fact that the world would be better off without me, I knew it wouldn't get better and I knew I was worthless, pointless, useless, and always would be.

I got myself into massive amounts of debt, I couldn't form relationships or maintain friendships, I couldn't clean my home... at least I genuinely felt like I couldn't.

Reading an article like that was deeply upsetting, but I am all too aware of the heartlessness people sometimes have to sufferers of depression, and in particular towards self-harm and suicide. Blaming the person suffering from mental illness does not help and it sounds like the author of that article still blames his granddaughter for the fact she was ill, in a way I suspect he wouldn't if she had died of cancer or in a car accident.

*I didn't manage it, by the way. Still alive.

I totally agree about the narcissism. My thoughts exactly.

I don't know how he had the gall to write:

Her description of her fellow students at art college as “retards” was offensive and a tad judgmental

And then proceed to judge her behaviour as:

Self-dramatisation, attention-seeking, shortcuts to fame, laziness, hormones, bad seed

Which he craftily bills as 'available explanations' rather than his own which they so obviously are.

A quick summary of his piece: 'I don't understand anything about mental illness but I know how it was for poor me.'

the face of loss

I didn't get any sense of loss: simply dislike, incomprehension, irritation and self-pity.

whatthe, he does 'get it wrong'. The eloquent posts on here show how it's perfectly possible to convey one's own feelings but with great compassion and love. This guy is a writer! Bloody hell! He comes across as absolutely awful.

I just can't see past the obvious victim blaming. He even suggests she was a benefit scrounger. The words 'bad seed' - who would publish this in an article?

I don't find it awful, he's writing it as a writer. Yes it slows down the reading process but I found it moving and worth reading to the end.