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4 hours ago
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Christie
“Can you collect Rowan, please? It’s pastoral care at the school. We’re just a bit worried about her ... She seems manic.’
“Manic? What do you mean?”
“I think it’s best you come in.”
The first night I realised that something was seriously wrong with my daughter, Rowan, was in late 2021. We’d been through lockdown. Rowan had sailed through her GCSE exams with flying colours. Her future was bright. The world was waking up, like Sleeping Beauty after a long, long sleep, and the air fizzed with possibilities. Rowan, like all her friends, bolted into being 16 with enthusiasm and joy.
Everything changed suddenly. A few nights earlier, I’d found her smoking in bed, propped up on her pillows, without a care in the world. I’d put it down to teenage recklessness, poor impulse control and an immature frontal lobe. Bad behaviour. Fairly normal. I grounded her and confiscated her cigarettes. But she’d been off since then. Moodier. Snappy.
I arrived at the school to find her altered. Her eyes were different. Wild. Unhinged. Dark. She looked at me but didn’t seem to recognise me at all. She looked possessed. I quizzed her in the car. What had she taken? Surely this was drugs. My children had told me stories of friends regularly smoking weed before school and taking ketamine in parks, as if this was standard practice for many teens. Rowan denied taking drugs, of course, but the more she spoke, the more worried I became. Her words were not right. In the wrong order, somehow. She talked about time and feeling like the wind.
“What do you mean, the wind?” She laughed but her face looked tearful, as if her insides and outsides no longer matched.
“I plan to photosynthesise,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
At home, she became even stranger and more erratic. She sobbed uncontrollably. Despite – as a nurse myself – knowing already what they would say, I phoned 111. The nurse on the other end of the phone talked to Rowan and I listened outside the door as Ro said no, she wasn’t suicidal, but she did want to jump on a train to Brighton and go to the beach and die there, be absorbed by the sand until nothingness. Then she slumped on to the floor and rocked back and forth, howling. “I want to die,” she said. “I just want to die.”
At that point, I was praying it was drugs. Let it be drugs and, most of all, let it be temporary.
Rowan
That day, I was a bit hysterical. My hormonal mood swings had, somehow, become delusions, but I didn’t know that. I could hear my voice clearly. I felt like I was the truest I’d ever been and amplified. I couldn’t stop talking. Rambling. My friends were always off school with mental health issues. I was one of the calmer ones in my friendship group, because everyone my age is a bit crazy post-pandemic. We were the generation who all wanted to die but still had a 20-step skincare routine. About once a month, my best friend was taken from school to A&E by ambulance. Another went every couple of months and two lived in the hospital. That day, it was my turn.
The process for getting help for mental illness is strange. You are suddenly surrounded by adults offering no diagnosis but instead a step-by-step plan. It was suggested to me by various people over the coming days that the following solutions might cure my out-of-control brain:
Taking a warm bath
Listening to my favourite music
Putting my hands into a bowl of ice
Watching my favourite film
Some gentle exercise
Making a nice cup of tea
Meanwhile, my mum had been told to hide the kitchen knives and lock away the paracetamol. I was told that my sadness and my madness were most likely caused by smoking weed, as weed can trigger something that causes psychosis; but that didn’t feel right. Doctors then suggested I had anxiety, which didn’t make sense either as I didn’t ever get stressed out or worry. Also, anxiety, to my knowledge, did not explain that I thought I was the wind. Literally, the wind. The next pseudo-diagnosis, “low mood disorder”, came from a psychiatrist in A&E and it annoyed me, not because it was untrue – my mood was low and I had experienced suicidal thoughts plenty of times – but the wording was a bit insulting to me. It sounded like I’d bought Tesco own brand of depression.
Christie
We were sent home a day later with a waiting list appointment at the child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs), which did not reassure me at all. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) reported recently that the waiting list for Camhs was the highest it had ever been and had increased 39% in just two years. Rowan was now one of the 403, 955 children who were waiting to be seen for mental health support. So many families in crisis, like us.
Rowan was prescribed a sedative as a temporary measure, a sort of chemical restraint. Finally, she slept. I went into her bedroom and sat on her bed, watching her breathe. Her face, even in sleep, was etched with pain.
“Come back to me,” I whispered. “Please come back to me.”
At our first Camhs appointment, Ro did not speak at all. Every 10 minutes or so she’d shrug, slowly, as if moving her shoulders was painful. She was an empty shell of a human being. Eventually, she opted to wait outside and nodded a fraction that it was OK for me to talk with the team. I was holding back tears. I hadn’t slept in weeks, instead lying awake and worrying about her all night, listening out for every single tiny noise. We still didn’t know what was wrong. Or how to fix it.
Rowan
At that first Camhs appointment, aside from inquiring about a slightly off-key way of looking at the world, working out if I was a bit neuro-spicy, the team asked a lot of questions about my early years, especially about my relationship with Mum. It was like being interviewed by a team of detectives. I had a pretty happy early childhood overall, but there were also challenges.
Mum was a single parent from when my brother and I were four and seven years old, and with that, at times, I inevitably had unreasonable responsibilities. I remember her working all the time, and even when not working, she was writing, living in her own head. Sometimes, she would have to leave at 5am and wouldn’t be back until about 11pm. Sometimes, I just wanted her to be there after school, making me a jam sandwich or getting excited about sports day.
That I never directed my anger towards my dad, who was absent for almost my entire childhood, is an uncomfortable truth. At one time, I believed that even his absence, surely, was somehow my mum’s fault. Everything was. It was her job to keep me safe.
Suddenly, when I became a teenager, I did not feel at all safe. I didn’t know what I was doing and she sure as shit didn’t either. We were both making things up as we went. Realising that is a terrifying part of growing up.
My mum isn’t perfect, but she created a home where it was always OK to be different, however that looked. When I told her, around 13, that I was triple bi, she looked confused. “What do you mean? Triple bi?” Mum was wearing two dressing gowns, I noticed, and leopard-print slippers. She spent an extraordinary amount of time in dressing gowns. “Triple bi,” I said. I wanted to shock her. To get a reaction. “Biracial, bisexual and bipolar.”
Mum’s mouth dropped open a fraction, but then she closed it and pressed her lips together. Was she trying not to laugh? She was silent a few seconds, then she smiled and kissed me on the head. “You do you,” she said.
After that first appointment, we went to the Camhs centre fairly often, a soulless building. Mum said we were so lucky getting seen quickly, but it didn’t feel that way. The waiting area was full of dead-eyed teenage girls and hyper-cheerful mothers, sitting next to each other but a million miles apart.
In the end, nobody could label me or tell me what was wrong. It was nameless, existing only in dingy shadows. I had appointment after appointment that my mum would drive me to and from, trying so hard to not ask me questions or antagonise me in any way, which, of course, she did all the time. The final assessment I had before starting psychotherapy and coming off the medication that made me sleep about 18 hours a day was with a psychiatrist who looked about my age.
I had stopped going to school by then. Most days I just cried in bed, or slept, or scrolled through TikTok looking at other girls who were also mentally unwell. A lot of people posted from psychiatric hospitals.
“I didn’t have a single friend who was self-harming,” Mum told me. “Not in that way. Not when I was at school.” It’s not that mental health wasn’t a problem. They had eating disorders and depression and anxiety, but not to the extent that young people do now, not by a long, long way. Self-harm was not a thing.
That fact astonished me. I knew tons of girls who started cutting their arms at 12 years old. Tons. I was tempted at that age, but something stopped me, despite wanting to experience the relief it seemed to offer them. But then I was the oldest in my friend group to get a smartphone. I don’t think that is a coincidence. My mum refused to give me access to a phone and social media until I was 14. Even then, at first, she monitored my phone – the condition of having one was that at any random moment she’d do a “phone check” and I would hand the phone over to her without question. She’d check that there wasn’t anything dangerous.
But Mum had no idea what she was looking for. She struggled with the TV remote, let alone smartphone tech, apps and the dark web. I was never big on Instagram and didn’t go near Twitter or Facebook, which felt like a forum for older people. But TikTok stole a few years of my life, no doubt, and WhatsApp and Snapchat groups gave that time a dark texture, for sure.
I had secretly joined a group chat that Mum did not know about, which was akin to an online psych ward. We’d all stay up chatting to each other until 6am, before falling asleep and doing it all again the next day. If I was away from the chat for even five minutes, I’d have hundreds of notifications.
For about eight months during the final year of lockdowns, we chatted online constantly, addictively, to the exclusion of real life. All of us had mental health issues, posting pictures or videos of self-harm, and mental illness became a competitive sport. I don’t know how many messages I’ve sent to friends, or received from friends, trying to convince them to “not do anything stupid”. It’s wild to me now. It was a full-time job for a while, trying to keep my friends alive via WhatsApp messaging groups. Trying to stay alive myself.
Christie
For about a year when she was 16, Rowan barely spoke to me at all. She wouldn’t answer the phone, or texts, or my bright and breezy notes, and in person simply grunted. I tried keeping my cool. But after radio silence, I inevitably lost it fairly frequently and ended up shouting. It was like living with a stranger.
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Eventually, I remembered her love of the random, her odd humour. I opened Snapchat and scrolled through to find the most ridiculous filters. One that turned my face into a chicken nugget, another that made me morph into a piece of sushi. I would click on the image and send it off to Rowan. Nine times out of 10, despite not really speaking to me at that time, she would respond almost immediately. I sent her my face as an apple and the line underneath: How do you like them apples? She sent back a laughing face. I sent me disguised as a chip, or a horse, or a chipmunk. Each reply made my heart sing a little. A crumb of communication. A morsel of connection, aided by my degradation. Humour and stupidity helped us find each other in the darkness.
Rowan
The first time she sent me a Snapchat-filtered photo of her, her head was a piece of broccoli. She had added a Dr Dre soundtrack and written: New Year New Me. Nothing about Mum made any sense to me, but somehow this did. Despite being so angry with her for pretty much everything, I looked at the photo for a long time and I remember thinking that we would be OK. She was clearly unhinged. But something made me message back: a laughing face. This spurred her on. The only way I’d communicate with her was if she sent me a stupid meme or Snapchat version of her face as a horse or packet of chips or something. Sometimes, she’d write little quotes to go with the photo: Missing you, or Like my lashes? She was trying to speak my language, and sometimes it made me laugh, other times was just cringy. But all of a sudden, after not talking at all, there were dozens of photos of her on my phone, disguised as food, but her eyes staring at me. Mum as a dumpling, the words: You’ll always be my little dumpling. It was hard to think suicidal thoughts when looking at Mum disguised as a dumpling. Knowing she would always speak to me, whenever I was ready, helped a lot.
Christie
Of course, social media was not always helpful. The research is overwhelming: Smartphones expose children to harmful content, raise the likelihood of developing a mental illness and are highly addictive.
It’s strange to me now imagining the teenage landscape that I grew up in, on the whole, devoid of dangers that teens now face thanks to technology: self-harm, sexting and nudes, cyberbullying, easy access to (violent) porn. I can’t conceive of how it must feel for an argument at school, rumours, gossip, even violence to follow you home and continue all night. The notion of keeping a child safely at home, in their bedrooms, is redundant. I was a teen in the 90s and we had real-life flashers, a phenomenon that is baffling to Rowan. Because sexual predators are now online, operating virtually. Our children carry them around in their pockets.
Rowan
I have more than one friend who wrote every single piece of coursework using ChatGPT. I think about that a lot. It changes everything in terms of learning, education, purpose. If my friends can do that already, what will the landscape of school, and university, look like for the next generation? What’s the point of anything? But of course, AI is not my only, or even necessarily biggest, concern. It’s a time of existential threat pick’n’mix.
Climate dread is growing amid gen Z especially. Our world is quite literally on fire and yet the conversations we have with older people about what we want to be when we grow up are almost laughable. Alive. That’s what young people aspire to be. Living in a world where catastrophic fires and storms and tsunamis are not causing the biggest refugee crisis in our living history. We would rather not be extinct, thanks. Meanwhile, I was meant to attend my tap-dancing class?
Instead, like many teenagers now, I stopped eating, sleeping and going to lessons. My friends and I smoked a lot of weed in the woods next to school.
“Get up,” Mum shouted one day in February 2022, before aggressively opening the curtains. “I mean it, Ro. You can’t stay in bed. You will lose your school place. Do you know how lucky you are? How many kids would give their right arm to get a place at such a great school? Get up.”
“I don’t care,” I shouted back. “Maybe I’ll just stay in bed for ever.” I felt my breathing get quicker and quicker. I was never far from a panic attack. I curled up into a ball.
“You seem so overwhelmed,” she said, trying visibly to soften herself. “And terrified. What’s going on in your mind? How can I help?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I replied. I didn’t have the words. It was hard to articulate that paralysis I felt. I spent my whole time and energy trying not to think about killing myself. Every time someone would subtly remind me of apparently all I had to live for, a list would appear in my head: war, or climate, or AI, and slavery, colonialism, past and present genocide. The big things. And that was without the idea of joblessness, cost of living and the prospect of never being able to own my own house in my lifetime. I tried to focus on my breathing, or distract myself with TikTok, or Grey’s Anatomy. But suicidal thoughts swirled around my head, until my brain was a washing machine full of dread.
“Ro,” Mum whispered. Then louder: “Ro, you need to go to school.”
I sat up a bit and stared at her. She looked awful. Her eyes were red from crying and worry. I wanted to say I was sorry and hug her, but even though she was sitting right there on my bed, she felt so far away. “There are some things,” I told her, “that are more important than school.”
Mum got up and slammed the door behind her, and I heard her phone the school to say she didn’t know what to do and I wouldn’t be in. “The only reason I can give is that she’s mentally unwell,” she said.
Christie
Rowan sailed so close to being expelled. I was at school all the time, having meetings with educational psychologists, teachers, pastoral care teams. But all of life is seasonal. Eventually, after taking to her bed for months, in the manner of a wealthy Victorian lady, she got up.
It came from her, not me, her recovery. There were some small things I did do, though, that I feel helped me and helped her. I made a conscious choice to show up for her exactly as I am. I wanted Rowan to know all of me. The good bits and the terrible bits, in order that she feel safe enough to show me exactly who she is. I want to know Rowan. All of her. To encourage her to show up fully, as herself. That makes for a fiery relationship at times. But a completely honest one.
During the bleakest of times, when Ro’s future looked grim, I kept reminding her, and myself, that day always follows night. The sun always shines after rain. This too will pass. Even this.
Rowan
The world is no better, but I got better anyway. Many things helped me with healing. My friends. Time. Growing up. And my mum. She didn’t help at first, but after I started helping myself, she was essential. She didn’t understand, but even then, she always loved me despite that. Constant love is a powerful force. Something shifted as time went on. I started to take in the world once again, the good and the bad.
I turned to anger. It is far easier, it turns out, to work with anger than apathy. I used to think that my voice was so small there was no point using it. But I began to follow activists such as Mikaela Loach and Greta Thunberg, and think about movements like 4B, which originated in South Korea after the #MeToo movement and rejected sex and marriage with men. I found a community on social media that was not, this time, exploring darkness but searching for light.
Now I’m 19 and on the other side of this. I am studying classics at university and with hindsight I’m reflecting on the last few years. Mum says we don’t have any answers as to what caused my breakdown, but I think living is enough of a reason for a mental collapse. Maybe I was mentally ill. Maybe I’m very sensitive. Maybe I’m really angry. And maybe, just maybe – given the state of the world – that is entirely appropriate. I was not the only person suffering from mental illness after the pandemic. There were millions of teenagers just like me out there feeling like I was – totally lost. I hope my story helps them know that they are not alone. There’s a way back.
No Filters: A Mother and Teenage Daughter Love Story by Christie Watson and Rowan Egberongbe is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
