Bumps in the Road

Julie pulled off a pretty spectacular set piece last week.  She went into town on her own on the early morning bus (which in itself was something she had never done before); then once she was right inside the main shopping arcade she phoned her support worker.  She told him she had cut herself, taken an overdose, and was considering jumping off the car park roof.  There was no way any of us could reach her through the rush hour traffic: the only thing the support worker could do was call out the police and the ambulance service.  Then he hurried to try and make his way to her, while I talked to her on the phone to keep her calm and persuade her to stay in one place.

Not one of my wittier conversations: I was a bit stumped really.  Obviously I asked her if she was OK, if she was feeling sick, how much she had taken, that sort of thing.  Then hunting desperately for something to talk about, and not wanting to focus endlessly on the situation she was in, I started telling her what I was going to cook for dinner that night (risotto, since you ask).  I figured it was better to have a conversation about absolutely anything, just to keep her talking.  Fortunately, just as I was considering reading from the phone book, we were interrupted by the arrival of a paramedic.

Julie's set piece sounds a lot more dramatic than it was.  The cuts were pretty nasty, but she had managed to miss arteries and ligaments, so no long term damage and already healing well.  The overdose was the usual hapless packet of paracetamol.  The car park roof actually boiled down to sitting outside the public library, which admittedly is on the first floor, but not a very practical height for a suicide attempt.  Julie was tracked down within 20 minutes, checked over and stitched up in hospital, and back home by the evening, in a foul mood.

We were all disappointed, and out of sorts.  We were all wondering how we had got here again: had we missed something?  She had seemed so happy after her successful weekend away. That morning I had questioned why she felt she had to get that very early bus - but she had said she wanted to get to the library when it opened so she would have a whole morning to study.   It looked exactly like taking responsibility, exactly like taking on new challenges.  Later she told me she had been planning the whole thing for weeks; she had bought the blade, and the paracetamol weeks ago; she had swallowed the tablets before she even left the house, trusting to getting as far away as possible before they worked.

The difficulty here is always around trust.  If someone is not telling you these very serious plans, if someone is buying and concealing objects, lying about their intentions, then it is hard to trust them.  You can't trust them if they tell you that everything is fine and they have no plans to harm themselves; you can’t trust them if they say they are just popping to the shop; you end up resorting to frisking them after every damn shopping trip.  Without trust you are without any sort of anchor.

The hard task is always to rebuild that trust: to remind yourself of what you know about that person, what is undeniably true about them.  However small that knowledge is now, you have to hang on to it with both hands, use it to piece together the relationship of trust you once had.  You have to be able to trust them again.  You have to resist the urge to “protect them from themselves”, the urge to stop them going out alone.

But the really important task is for them to be able to trust themselves again.  That’s harder still.