Читать книгу Dyslexia and ADHD - The Miracle Cure - Wynford Dore - Страница 11

I will never forget the feeling of absolute despair when I received a phone call from Rosie to say my daughter had tried to kill herself. Although I was aware that she had been depressed, I had not realised just how bad things had become for her. I also failed to make the direct connection between her learning and attention difficulties and her unsettled state of mind. When, as a family, we talked about her depression, we discussed it as if it were virtually a stand-alone issue. We never imagined that the root cause of all of her school problems could be directly linked to her depression.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it is all so painfully obvious. We now know that what causes learning difficulties can have a detrimental effect on so many characteristics. For instance, nearly 90 per cent of folk who attempt to commit suicide show signs typical of learning or attention issues and as many as 75 per cent of people who have long-term drug addictions have signs of similar issues too.

For Susie, her decline and attempt to take her own life had been years in the making. Every attempt to learn, to develop friendships or to hold down a job had resulted in failure. It did not matter how much her family had tried to help her, life would never cease to be a struggle.

I had bought an apartment for her in Leamington Spa when she was 19, as she really wanted to live by herself and she and I both thought this would help her become more comfortable with the problems she faced. However, that only made things worse. Sitting in her flat by herself she says she would hear my voice in her head saying things like ‘Why can’t you get a job? Why can’t you stick at something useful? Why can’t you do this? Why can’t you do that?’ She would then start crying, but instead of getting angry with me she would mentally beat herself up for hours on end.

The mistake we made was to assume Susie had a choice in her actions. We told her she would have to learn to hold down a job, to learn to get on with people. We thought many of her failures in life came down to the fact that she could not be bothered to make an effort. Unwittingly, what we were telling her to do was the exact thing she could never achieve: she could not learn – it was not an option. The more we told her how she needed to behave, the further she retreated into herself.

Things quickly got out of hand and in a four-year period, during the mid-nineties, Susie had tried to kill herself three times.

The first incident (when she was 22 years old), as she now freely admits, was perhaps more a cry for help than a serious attempt at suicide. However, the message she was sending out was clear and calculated. By her bedside, she had written many little notes obviously intended for me to read. They read like a series of short, sharp statements designed to cut me deeper than the knife had cut her arm:

‘My life is terrible!’ ‘I hate myself!’ ‘Why are you always shouting at me?’

These were thoughts that had dominated her life but she had always struggled to express them. All around her people were getting on with their lives and she felt more and more left behind. Her decision to cut her wrists was an act of defiance at the way her life was going. It put her whole family in a state of absolute panic and anxiety.

By the time of the second attempt, Susie was 23 years old and was living by herself with hardly any quality of life at all. She was not eating properly and spent most of her time curled up on the sofa watching TV and drinking wine. On one particularly soul-destroying and lonely night, she decided enough was enough and, after consuming three bottles of wine, she rounded up as many pills as she could lay her hands on. Before she had a chance to do anything, the phone rang – it was her mother calling to check how she was.

Susie recalls wanting to tell her mum how depressed she was, but she couldn’t find the words. As soon as she put down the phone, she resumed the task she had set herself. She took a handful of about six headache tablets and had another bottle of wine. It was no small mercy that this had the effect of knocking her out so that she did not take any more harmful pills that night.

In the morning, she woke up with a splitting headache and in a state of severe depression. She spent the day wandering aimlessly about the house and in the end decided to keep the details of her suicide attempt a secret. It was not until her third and final attempt that we ever found out how close we had come to losing her on that night.

Things became progressively worse and Susie got to the stage where she could barely look after herself, let alone function as a social human being. Every day her mother and sister would phone her to make sure she had got out of bed and to check that she had eaten her breakfast. They would ask her about her plans for the day and try to motivate her as much as they could. Despite all their best efforts, Susie continued to fall deeper and deeper into depression. She felt patronised and was tired of being treated like a child. Of course, we were aware of this, but it seemed there was nothing else any of us could do. We knew we could not let her die, but we also understood that we couldn’t give her the inner recourse she needed.

The greatest tragedy of all was that Susie’s condition just couldn’t be helped. We were permanently waiting for the phone call to come through to say something had happened. None of us could ever fully relax. We all had that ominous sense that one day she would carry out a very serious, purposeful attempt to take her own life. Waiting was a torment that stretched out for months on end until, finally, the inevitable happened.

It was a Friday and my other daughter Rosie had been out with Susie earlier in the day and had a quiet drink with her at The Moorings pub by the canal in Leamington. Susie left early and went straight home. A few hours after she left, Rosie gave her sister a quick phone call before she herself went to bed. The phone rang a few times before she finally picked up. The noises Rosie heard on the other end of the phone were to remain with her forever. A mumbling, groaning sound echoed out of the receiver. ‘Rosie, I think I have done something silly…’ came Susie’s dying voice. Then there was the sound of a thud as she dropped the phone.

That night Susie had gone straight home from the pub with the intention of committing suicide. She had two bottles of wine, two bottles of Babycham and a mountain of pills. She filled one glass with the tablets and mixed it with the alcohol.

When Rosie and her friend Tania arrived at Susie’s apartment, they saw a scene that was very deliberately laid out. Susie had taken a blanket and two pillows, and made her own deathbed. After taking the deadly concoction of drugs and alcohol, she lay down and waited for death to overcome her.

When the girls arrived, Susie was semi-conscious. Next to her head lay four empty bottles and she held in her arm a teddy bear that Rosie had once given her. This bear had become her best friend and she wanted it with her for this final act. Rosie and Tania tried to pick her up, but Susie was in a delirious state. She struggled furiously and kicked out when they tried to touch her. In the end, the girls had to use heavy force to get her into the car and drive her to the hospital.

Thanks to Rosie’s speed in reacting to the situation, Susie’s stomach was pumped before the pills had a chance to enter her system. If she had been an hour later, it would have been too late. Rosie phoned me from the hospital. It was the phone call I knew would come one day, yet nothing can prepare you for it.

The journey to the hospital was horrific. Obviously, I did not mind going through red lights, or breaking the speed limit by a huge margin. All I could think about was how sad and tragic Susie’s life had been. The helplessness I felt was in stark contrast to everything else that was going on in my life. All the businesses I had were doing well and I had all the toys a man could want. I had many friends and had travelled the world. Yet my daughter, who was more important than all of this, enjoyed nothing in life. I suddenly understood why she had tried to kill herself, I could see her logic. There was nothing for her in the world. After 25 years of life, all she had known was sadness and loneliness. That sudden realisation sent a wave of guilt through me unlike anything I had experienced before. The thought of Susie’s despair tattooed itself on my mind and I knew at that moment my own life was going to change dramatically. I would never rest easy until I had helped her.

When I got to the hospital and went to the emergency ward where she was being treated, I stopped outside the door for a minute. I felt completely inadequate. What could I do or say, even at this time of most desperate need? Usually I can find words to help pick people up in certain situations but this time my mind was blank. There was no point in lying; there was no point in giving her false promises. She knew as well as I did that there was nothing available to make any difference to her.

‘The first thing I said to Mum was, “Oh, so I am still alive then?” I could see Mum was crying, but that did not change how I felt.’