Suicide Warning Signs

Something horrible happened recently.

A woman who I view as the most maternal and family-orientated person I have ever met suffered a second terrible tragedy in her life.

As if losing her husband at an early age and being left to bring up several children under five alone was not enough, a few weeks ago, she found the youngest of her offspring hanging from a beam.

This woman was like a mother to me for a hugely important period in my life. She recognised my anorexia and gave me her own dinner to ensure that she could watch me actually eating.

Her home was a haven to a streetful of teenagers, a place where love and family and doing the right thing were the keywords. Her elderly parents visited most days to help her with household chores and share the burden of raising her young family and they became our grandparents too. Caring and sharing and making us part of one big family. My abiding memory is of a white Ford Escort crammed full of seatbelt-less children, laughing and shrieking with pleasure, as she drove us to one event after another.

For this wonderful woman to have to endure another close death in such awful circumstances just seems so hard to come to terms with. It just seems so unfair. They say there were no real suicide warning signs, just a hormonal imbalance that one day exploded with the certainty that life was not worth living and tipped her wildly over the edge.

I cannot even begin to understand the anguish that her mother must now be feeling, but my overriding emotion is perhaps the hardest thing to bear – the knowledge that someone who was so maternal and so giving could still fail somehow in the whole mother/daughter conundrum.

Because if she couldn’t navigate those treacherous waters, there is so little hope for the rest of us mere mortals.

Depression is such a complex and misunderstood condition and can affect people in so many different destructive ways.

I hugged my own children today and reiterated that they could tell me anything- no matter what – and I would try to help them.

I just wanted them to understand how precious they are to me.

For help and advice on recognising potential suicide warning signs