Right, it was nearly 23 years ago so some of it fades. He was at school at the time and we knew he was a bit of a depressive. He’d chosen to paint his bedroom purple which people said was worrying, but that was his choice and there were tiny signs that we found out afterwards but not, anyway it was a time of upheaval for us because my husband had been made redundant and our son Tom was in his A’ level year so there were you know stresses, and then we were out on a Saturday night in London and he was at boarding, part time boarding, nearby and we got back and there was a phone call to phone the school. And my husband did it straight away, and I just heard him say, Suicide And that was it.
I suppose I haven’t revisited it because it didn’t seem important, itit seemed important dealing with the stuff around me and I did try and understand; Tom was bullied at school, one master gave him a hard time, so that, you asked earlier about anger, that would’ve been relevant. I mean I remember saying to somebody that if I met the chap, he was only a small chap and I said I hope I don’t meet him cos I’d kill him.
Mm.
But you know I think it was only a contributory factor it wasn’t a cause, it was just you know another brick in the wall, which is back to the, hat’s that group I mentioned earlier? It was their theme song that we played.

Oh yes.

That we played at the end of the funeral.

Why was that
he funeral, the brick in the wall.

Was that a song that he liked?

Mm.

In particular?

Mm. So but it, it was relevant, I mean there were a lot of things that were difficult at the time, he wasn’t a high flyer at school so doing A’ levels was some stress I suppose, and then father redundant and we were thinking that we might go abroad at the time to live so there were a lot of; and unfortunately he used to come back from school, he only boarded sometimes, at 9 oclock when always the news was on, and the news it was when the Biafran famine was on, it was just awful night after night, I’m sure that must’ve, with hindsight had an effect on him.

In the house that day was my sister, and my brother-in-law, and well we, we’d known that my father was unhappy, to say the least, he’d, he’d made a second marriage, my mother had died about three years previously, and he was very devoted to my mother and he made a second marriage, which unfortunately was a disaster. He said himself he’d, he’d, he’d married in haste and was now repenting in leisure and it was a big mistake, he was very unhappy in his marriage. And then the, the next big thing was he was made redundant at work, and he’d worked very hard, he’d, he’d started off right at the bottom in this firm, metal refining firm, in Wolverhampton and had worked his way up to being the Managing Director on the firm. And the firm got taken over and the next thing we know he was being made redundant, and within what, three days of that happening he’d taken his life [sighs]. So we knew he was very unhappy with his circumstances, with the second wife where, you know, the marriage had been a disaster really and then this issue of losing his job, I think that was the, the final thing really, you know?

Mmm.

And it was a great surprise because he was a very strong person, a very tough capable man whod had a lot of blows and difficulties in his life, and I think this was the thing that we found so hard to understand, I mean I know now that depression and mental distress can hit literally anyone and all it takes is enough pressure and enough problems and in it the toughest of people will break.

Well he had previously attempted suicide twice before in nineteen ninety-four

Mmm.

and that was when he was first diagnosed with depression and anxiety, so really all that, all those years it’s been a case of, watching him, making sure he’s okay ‘cause he was always, always anxious, always anxious and he worried about everything, not like the state of the world or anything like that but he worried about the kids and if something, if, you know, is, if, that, whatever little crisis there was, oh I shouldn’t really say a little crisis ‘cause it was always a big crisis to him, you know, then it would just move, he would just move on to something else to worry about.

I found out afterwards in the, in the May afterwards when I was speaking to his elder brother that he had had mental health problems in the past. But we were married nearly 25 years and I knew nothing. I knew nothing. It was all very, very strange, totally unreal, totally unreal. And I also discovered that there were horrendous financial problems as well about which I knew nothing.

Do you think that had been worrying him?

Oh I think so, yes, I think so, but yeah that’s, that’s what happened.

Anyway I mean, what went on I don’t really know. I think I suspected he was depressed. I know I suspected he was depressed. Myself, do you know, during our various fights. But I think it came up probably fairly inevitably as a result of that kind of thing. I used to say, Look you’ve got to get help for this. I’m sure you’re depressed. You’ve got to get help. And this is about seven years ago. And I mean it’s seven years ago that we moved out of London.

But there was one thing you see, he suffered from what I believe to be paranoid delusions. He was locking up the window shutters in the middle of the day to stop people looking in the window. And we live in a very lonely, quiet street and nobody looks in the window. And if they do it’s a neighbour. But he, he had in his mind threatening kind of people looking in the window and he also had in his mind that if he went back to work in Europe again that the secret police would come from his country to take him back.

Had he ever sought any outside help from anybody, medical?

He wouldn’t take an aspirin if he had a headache.

So he’d never been for any sort of psychiatric help or counselling.

No.

With his GP?

No. Absolutely not. No, no, I mean I, he sprained an ankle once and went to a doctor for that when he was in Europe. And it also, it turned out. I mean I obviously I got back to my health visitors because I’d spoken to them that morning and they told me that he’d never actually registered [with a GP] although we’d been here by then four years. Yes because it was the beginning of 2005, four years.

Nobody would have known about him feeling depressed then if he hadn’t been to see anybody?

No.

It was 25th March 1964 that he died and I think in common with a lot of other people whove lost people through suicide it is engraved upon your memory. I remember that day, that was the day I remember from my childhood, everything changed on that day, we were just an ordinary family before, my mother my father and the two of us, we went on holiday every year, I struggled with the school work, and there was absolutely nothing abnormal about us, my father worked in a bank, he was a bank clerk. He drove me to school every morning, I was really unaware that he was suffering from very bad depression. There were a few clues in the time leading up to the time he took his life but I was just getting a bit lippy then, I was 12 years old and I really was thinking, Well why did you do that And I remember him; he’d got upset because I beat him at cards. Well that’s the wrong way round really isn’t it, and I thought, Well why are you getting upset but it was clearly a symptom of his depression.

And in fact my father’s depression as I later discovered, was post traumatic stress, from experiences that he had during the war. So anyway, I went to university, I dropped out, I took lots of drugs, and again you might say that I might not have done that, but on the other hand a lot of other people took drugs in the late 60’s early 70’s, so I might’ve done, I might not have done, if you see what I mean. You can’t, you know, say that event A has I certainly don’t regret any of it, anyway as regards the death I never talked to anybody about it that knew my father. But I did talk to other people, I talked to, I talked to friends, and I had this story and the story was one my mother told me when she got older, and she told me the story and again she said he’d had bad experiences during the war, he got depressed at Christmas 1963, when we were at our relatives, he got more and more depressed, it related to a breakdown he’d had after the war in 1946, it was 18 years without depression, then he got depressed, he was having nightmares, he was dreaming about sailors drowning because he was in the navy. He couldn’t go into work. Every time he went into work he came back shaking and in a terrible state. She was up all night talking to him. He was hallucinating. And all the time he was just taking me to school, and behaving quite normally.

David, my husband died, he took his own life in March of this year, March 2007, andhe jumped from a tower.He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder about five days before he died and what actually happened was that he’d got very, very bad.He’d been depressed consistently for the previous six months, which was a longer period than he’d ever been depressed for before

Hmm.

And I think we tried various different drugs.He had been onSeroxat andeventually was taking Mirtazapine.He’d also tried some mood disorder drugs like Olanzapineand it just felt like it had been going on for a long time and he was getting very, very desperate.And he had actually talked of suicide and he had written a letter to me probably two or three weeks before he actually died. But he, he confessed the letter to me and we sort of burned it deliberately together, as if to say that, you know, we’d talked about it and drawn a line under it and it wasn’t going to happen.And he said to me, You know, I’d never do it, don’t you?And I really believed him.

Hmm.

And maybe he believed it himself at the time, I’m not sure. But, anyway, there had been this, this threat of suicide.And as I say, just before it had happened, just before he died he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.What had happened was we had, we’d got him into a really good hospital in London.We suddenly realised that we had some medical insurance, through David’s work, and we weren’t aware it would, would cover this kind of hospital treatment.But it did.And he was desperate to go in.

We got him in there and he was diagnosed with bipolar.And I think neither of us really quite believed it at first because we’d lived with David’s depression for so long and, I think, my impression certainly of bipolar disorder was the very severe end of it, the manic depression.

Hmm.

And, and, I think that’s what most people understand about, you know, they see the sort of Steven Fry documentary, that kind of thingAnd you think about people that maybe take a lot of drugs or re-mortgage their house or whatever it is, you know. So it’s a sort of stereotypical view of it and it’s also the extreme end of it.But this particular expert explained to us that the latest thinking is that there’s a whole, a whole sort of spectrum of, a bipolar spectrum, and you can either be, you are either unipolar depressed, what they call unipolar depressed, which is what most people understand, the kind of futility, not wanting to get up in the morning, feeling like life’s just not worth it.And that’s one end of the scale and the other end is the manic depression.But you can be anywhere between the two.This is, this is the latest thinking.And they said, you know, they thought that David was somewhere on this scale.

But David was a very sort of unusual person and I think, he was a real perfectionist, and I think he felt that he had to be absolutely 100% better, because, you know, he said,when he said, you know, What if I, what if I don’t have it, any highs?What if I don’t experience my highs?You know, I think what I’m saying is the 50% better wasn’t good enough for him.

Hmm.

And, and actually the psychiatrist said, he said, Well we have had really creative people in here, we’ve had writers, and he said, you know, But we’ve, they’ve said that, afterwards they haven’t been able to write. But he said, They’ve been in here, you know, they, long enough that we have tweaked the drugs and with that and therapy and so on we have got them right again.

So there was, you know, they, they, you know, he was even addressing that concern. You know, we, we can get there with you. But I think David had got to the point where he had, maybe he had lost hope or he just got so exhausted, he got so exhausted by that point that he just thought, No. And maybe that combined with the sort of lack of sleep and so on, maybe that was why.

Fine, Alice Duncan was my oldest child, and she was a very lively, bright, pretty girl. You wouldn’t have imagined her being somebody who would suffer from depression. In her teens she got became quite sort of moody, but we didn’t think this was anything abnormal, and when she was 17 when she was doing her mock A’ levels, she became more difficult, and again we just thought this was you know teenage difficulties. Then one day I was at work and I was phoned by her school and she’d walked out of a mock A’ level exam, in a sort of zombie state. I took her to the doctor who said she mustn’t take any more exams. She was quite clearly suffering from depression. She could hardly speak. We had to look after her at home. She went to the local psychiatric hospital that dealt with under 18’s, as an out patient. Then she became psychotic and she’d just hit 18, which meant that the whole structure had changed. She had to be in the adult hospital and that we found incredibly frustrating and sort of wrong. We’d got this whole set up with the psychiatrist that she trusted and so on. Suddenly, just because she was 18, we had to have a whole new lot of people, and that was something that we always felt very annoyed about. And so there she was. She was in the adult psychiatric hospital, she was on various drugs, she was lying with her face to the wall. But then she seemed to get a bit better and they said that it would be alright if she was discharged. That was on the 31st July, and she came home.

Alex was away for one of those weeks and she talked, we talked a great deal and we talked about her illness. I never talked to her about what it was like to be manic. She never talked to her brothers about it either. I’d assumed she would have done. She was quite private in that way. But she did talk about how dark it felt you know, and how alone she felt in this depression. And she was also very remorseful about what she’d put us through. And of course you couldn’t say, Oh don’t give it another thought because it had torn us all apart, and I had tremendously resented the effect that her illness, her manic illness had on her brothers because it had sort of made their lives so ghastly. But she’d not been remorseful before, and now she was. And I remember her saying, I wish I could put the clock bac, and I said, But, but now we know that you have this illness, you have this problem, but we know how to deal with it.And you can lead a normal life. Read your K. Jamieson, you know it is possible to have a really really good life, as long as you can take the medication and can learn to live with it.

Anyway, she decided she wanted to go back to Glasgow and I said Please don’t, because you know you’re still low And she said, Yes, but I’ll be fine and I’ve got a lot to do, and I promise you I’ll see the psychiatrist right away She was a very determined person, she always had been absolutely, had her own very strong will and so she went back, and Alex put her on a train. She said to him on the journey to the train that she was finding it very difficult to come to terms with the fact that this was something that she was going to have to live with for the rest of her life.

Yes. So we’re talking about Rose and who died November, 2005. I think probably that the depression that she suffered from had started a long time before. But it wasn’t, I didn’t recognise the depression she’d had on and off for about ten years was the reason for her suicide. She had anorexia badly at fourteen. And she had a complicated teenage life, having affairs with older men. So there was a great imbalance in her character.
Hmm.
But it went with a tremendous verve and huge charisma and just she had more friends than anyone I’ve ever known and five, six hundred people came to her funeral which at twenty eight is quite something. So it was very complicated to know why it was that this huge imbalance was going on, that in the end led to this absolute despair.
She went to New Zealand in 2000, 1 or 2 and came back in 2003. And in the meantime she’d had a serious accident. Someone, a woman knocked her off her bicycle and she landed on her head. And had and sustained I think quite bad neck injuries and head injuries. And from that moment on felt that she, she couldn’t work. She thought she’d got ME. I think she actually had a serious injury.
Hmhm.
And things really went down hill from then.
But suicide was not something I’d even considered with her. I now think it was the result of the antidepressants, the mixture. And I have found out since it is quite a possible thing that people do it’s quite a quick reaction to taking antidepressants is suicide in some people. It can just flick your chemical soup the other way.
I came back and by this time she was seeing a psychiatrist in London but in a very ad hoc basis. And this was at a psychiatrist who had she seen her earlier I think might have made a real difference. But she worked for a charitable organisation. And it was too late. She immediately recognised Rose’s condition as being bipolar. But it was too late, because Rose had lost all hope by then.

Had she’d been ill for many years?

Well it’s a really good question actually because she had been, in this, in this particular episode of which we thought for quite a long time was just, it was just an isolated incident, we knew was from, well it goes back to November 2004, she died in June 2006, and she was actually diagnosed by the doctor I think sometime in early 2005, February March time, but a friend of hers in October 2005 reminded her of a time back when actually we’d first got together, in 1989, and she’d been sacked from a job, and she’d had a six month period where she had been, when we were told about it, very similar to the way she was in you know in, late on in , in this, this kind of bout, so, and that I mean again looking back on it I’ve sort of pieced it all together and really realised in my mind that she was actually bipolar and this wasn’t a sort of, this wasn’t post natal depression, sort of you know slightly delayed post natal depression or as a result of just you know we’d moved out from, from London, had children and she’d left her job, and we’d been in South Africa for 18 months. She was very reliant on her friends, particularly on her friends, and I think all of that had meant that yes, there were, there was much less, you know, far fewer friends in her life you know, on a day to day basis you know. She was extremely good at keeping in contact with friends, so yeah, I mean I actually found a book when I was clearing up called Depressio that I’d given her back then, and this was dated October 31st 1989, and after she died her mother told me that three of her aunts on her fathers’ side had also suffered mental health problems which would’ve been nice to have known about beforehand really but you know, hindsight is great isn’t it, in all these things?

Looking back is there anything you think could’ve prevented her death?

No, I don’t know really. It’s difficult to pinpoint any single thing, I think, when she saw the diagnosis of what she had and it said chronic it was somatisation, I think when she saw that it said chronic I think that was a sort of, and chronic meaning long term I think that was really, quite a big deciding factor for her.

Mmm.

But I think it’s, I think maybe, I don’t know I wasn’t there obviously when she was given that diagnosis, I think maybe sometimes the, medical profession when they give these diagnoses they’re trying to, do it to sort of help, either the treatment, or to demonstrate that they have some understanding of it, and I think it may be important for them sometimes to say, No we don’t actually know everything about this.

Mmm.

Or, What this diagnosis means is x, y and z.

So they actually gave her the diagnosis of chronic somatisation?

Yeah somatisation.

Mmm.

But then we looked it up on the web together, and we saw that it meant chronic and I think that was the thing that really worried her was the long term effects of it and I think she just wanted to see a way out of it and I think that was the thing the fact that she saw that there wouldn’t be any, that she perceived that there’d never be any rest or a relief from it.

Right, twelve years ago I lost my first son aged 23, he committed suicide and then last April I lost another son aged 35, who did exactly the same, and committed suicide. It’s very very hard. I felt a lot of anger and sadness. I was more angry with my second son for doing what he did as he’d always promised that he would never do this to us. But I also understand that it was harder for him, trying to cope without his brother, and I think as time goes on I’m beginning to understand more why Stephen had to do what he did. He suffered with a mental illness for ten years, paranoid schizophrenia.

Was this the first one?

The second.

The second one, right.

He found that very hard, he would always say that he talked to his brother, he talked to his grandparents, and towards the end before he died, he felt that he was losing his brother’s voice, and I think this was always a danger we were told by the hospital, that if that happened then Stephen could become suicidal, but we didn’t find this out until after Stephen had died.

By losing his voice, he used to hear his voice?

Barry used to talk to Stephen, which gave him quite a lot of comfort, and also my parents which were Stephen’s grandparents, but Stephen also spoke to what he called a demon, which would tell him to do really bad things. And Stephen said that he was being punished and the demon was taking away Barry’s voice. It was getting fainter and fainter and he could no longer hear him, so Stephen deteriorated even more, which I believe actually led to Stephen’s suicide. I know that he never came to terms with Barry’s death; he blamed him self, as they had actually made a pact to die together, and obviously Stephen didn’t go through with that, why, we don’t know. And I think Stephen carried an awful lot of guilt after Barry died.

Why did, why did Barry decide to die?

Barry had a lot of problems, they both got into drugs quite badly in their teenage years, which I think didn’t help their problems, because Cannabis does cause paranoia and both my sons suffered with paranoia, although Barry was never diagnosed as being with schizophrenia.

My daughter died three years ago of a heroin overdose. She had mental health issues and drug problems, and she’d, she’d been unwell for twelve years. Her problems started when she was about fifteen or sixteen, when she first used cannabis. She had a psychosis, a small one which we didn’t realise what was going on at the time. Didn’t really understand what she was saying. We thought she was distressed because we’d recently been divorced, and well not recently, it was about five years after. We had no idea that cannabis could cause psychosis, didn’t even know she was smoking it at the time. And then it sort of went away, and she had depression, her father took her to the doctor, he said it was normal sort of adolescent growing up; she used to sort of sit on the pavement outside the school and cry. And, then it seemed to pass a bit, and she did her A’ levels. And then she went to do a foundation year in Art.

And Charlotte only really had to smoke a very small amount of cannabis and it made her very ill, but she, she then was, at the end of that year, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, for about six weeks and they wanted her to stay longer but she left, of her own will, and then she started a degree course in October, but she didn’t make it to Christmas because she started hearing voices and was really not very well. And I said to her at the time, Leave, Charlott, because I thought, I still thought at that time that she couldn’t cope with it because after what had happened to her she needed a bit of a rest, but she was still using drugs, so then she came to live with me, and she, we, she was under a psychiatrist, and she went to, and I don’t know who she was now, but I think she was a nurse, a psychiatric nurse, and we used to go together, and we used to have to sort of fill in forms and. And do diagrams about how she felt about herself and how I viewed her, and how she viewed me. And she went there for quite a long time, and then they, they decided it would be good for her to go to psychotherapy. And she went for a very long time to psychotherapy. And she told me for one year in that time she didn’t use drugs at all, but she didn’t feel any better, she felt just as bad. She, she, she never stopped having depressions.

Well I suppose we’ll start with the day that he actually died, that was twenty months ago and I was at work and I was asked to go to an office, to find a policeman there to inform me that my son had died, jumping, and, that’s when the horror really began.But of course the story starts much earlier than that, it starts with realising that your son isn’t happy, that things aren’t right and not being able to make sense of it.One thing, from my point of view, which other people maybe whove had a bereavement of a similar type maybe haven’t been able to make quite as much sense of it; I think everybody whos lost a child will, in this manner, will have spent a long time trying to work out how much they might be at, if they’re being to blame.For Lori we had a reason, we discovered before he’d, two, two and a half months before he died, that he’d been sexually abused, so that, there is some sense, we can make sense of it, but that, just having that bit doesn’t explain it all.

My father decided to commit suicide when he was 78 years old. I think there’s quite a history to that decision though and the fact is that he was a very larger than life man, he was a very vibrant, active man, for all those years, he’d had a wonderful life as far as he was concerned, and as far as we were concerned. He’d done a lot of travelling, he was full of life and laughter and had given us a very secure and wonderful family life really, we always felt that there was happiness in the home. However when he was 18 and he was learning to fly, he joined the air force at that stage, he had a terrible accident, and he had to spend a year and a half in hospital when he was 18, and I think that gives us some of the background as to why, when he was 78 and was diagnosed with stomach cancer for the second time he decided that he didn’t want a lingering death, he’d already spent several years of his life being an invalid, and depending on other people, so that at 78 when he couldn’t foresee living much longer, he decided that he’d terminate his life.

At that stage, I mean also in his particular circumstances at the time, he’d been married to my mother for 50 years, and she had died in 1999 which was 2 years before he committed suicide and I think that was a factor. He’d obviously become deeply lonely.

Well he was in a lot of pain, and really he’d, he’d just had an aversion to hospitals having spent two years when he was younger in hospital, he didn’t ever want to spend time in hospital again I don’t think. So he made the decision to take his own life. I think the difficulty with that was that he chose quite a violent way to commit suicide, so therefore the friends didn’t understand why he’d chosen to go over a cliff, however we as his children, three of us, had almost been prepared by him, because he said if he ever had a terminal illness he would not want his death to be lingering or have extended pain in any way. He’d always said he’d go quickly and always said it would be over this particular cliff so it sounds strange but, but we weren’t as shocked by the way he chose to die, and also on the previous evening he’d actually phoned us all up, and more or less told us that he had decided not to go on with his life. I think one of the things why we all accepted it so easily was that you know we felt that he’d had such a full life.

No, obviously you kind of try and make sense of what happened and I think that’s one of the hardest things for, for families of people who have committed suicide is trying to make sense of the whole process and just what went wrong and what could’ve been done, but I, I have my own, I suppose the way I’ve made sense of that is that this was quite a long time ago, and Mum was on quite heavy medication at that time and for some reason just before Mum and Dad moved they started cutting down her medication and cutting it down quite quickly. And I think that was probably at a time where people didn’t know so much about withdrawing people from psychotropic medication. And I just wonder whether some of the things, because she started talking for the first time that she was hearing voices and people, somebody was telling her to kill herself and things, and that had just never ever been part of her problems ever before, and that at that period of time was she was just behaving very very differently, and I suppose the way I’ve kind of tried to make sense of that in my own mind is that maybe that was associated with the cut in her medication. But also during that time because they’d moved, probably about 20 miles away, she was almost between Gps, so she’d left her GP who was a very traditional family GP and he’d known my mother’s parents and he’d known my mother and he’d, you know was at the hospital when I was born so he knew us as a family, so I think she’d gone from a, a fairly supportive environment that, that all of her treatment was really handled by the GP, there wasn’t an extended team, to living in a new town, where she had lost that contact.

Mm.

And was under a new GP who was part of quite a large practice, and so I think the time at which her medication was being cut she was also in transition because they’d moved house, between health care teams as well, although during that time she was still being seen by her psychiatrist and she did have an appointment to go up to see the psychiatrist a few days before she killed herself so she had been for that appointment. And the way my father recounted that was that she did tell the psychiatrist that she was feeling suicidal, but I’m not sure whether he just didn’t believe her or, or what, but he actually, she had her appointment with the psychiatrist on the Friday, and she killed herself on the Sunday. So