What Other People Know

One of the strange things about having a child with mental illness is that you find yourself editing what you say to other people.  I'm certainly not ashamed about Julie's illness - I am way past that stage now!  If it were my decision, I would be going round shouting about this one from the roof tops because I think people ought to know more about mental illness, and be less afraid of it.  But at the end of the day, it is her illness not mine, and she is only at the start of her life.  I would like her to be able to make as many decisions as possible about who to tell and how to tell her story.  It is not really my decision to take.

Having said this, as soon as she was admitted to hospital, obviously her illness became an awful lot more public.  In the first few weeks after she had gone in I received a lot of messages of support, and also a lot of questions.  We had been living with her illness for over six months by that stage, but it had been largely invisible, just because the strain of getting through every day was so immense, that there was no time left over to talk to anyone.  Most of our friends and neighbours had probably assumed that we had just chosen to drop out of society and become very reclusive.  We did not know how to talk about it: it was a confusing time, with a lot of rapid changes, and we did not understand what was happening ourselves.  This meant that when Julie was finally admitted to hospital, it was the first time that some people quite close to us realised that there was anything wrong at all. 

It was a surprise to me to find that even some of the people who knew a lot about what was happening - staff at school, for example - behaved differently once she went into the hospital.  It was obvious that in some way hospitalization made her illness more real.  I had a great number of conversations that started with, "I had no idea it was that serious!"

My rule of thumb has been that I give more information to people who actually know Julie.  People who just know me, and have not got a relationship with her, usually just know that I have a daughter in hospital with a long-term illness.  No matter how much they press, I usually fob them off.  This is for the simple reason that a lot of people can't seem to resist the urge to speculate!  Once they hear the word depression, they go charging in with their own pet theory about why a fourteen-year-old girl should get so depressed that she has to be separated from her family for the best part of a year.  A favourite theory is that it is "the pressure of modern life".  These conversations are completely pointless if they do not know her, and can be inadvertently quite offensive.  It seems kinder to them and to me to avoid triggering them.