No mother should have to read their child’s suicide note. Here’s what it feels like to parent a child who wants to kill themselves

No parent should ever have to read their child’s suicide note. In 2021, my daughter Ella was 16 and had just had a nervous breakdown. I was cleaning out her bedroom and found a stack of notes she had written.

Some of them said – somberly – that they did not want to live. Another was a letter to all of us – myself, my husband and her older sister – saying that she was very sad, that she loved us, but that leaving us was for the best because she was such a burden. As a mother you would think I would collapse. But at this point we had traveled so far that all I felt was numb horror.

Unfortunately, our family’s story is far from unique. We all know there is a mental health crisis; in 2021, one in six children aged five to sixteen were thought to be likely to have a mental health problem, and around seven percent of all British children have attempted suicide by the age of seventeen, with one in four saying they had self-harmed. Our experience will therefore probably resonate with many parents.

When you care for a child with a life-threatening mental illness, you live in the moment, day by day. There is no room to think about yourself. Parents are the sideshow of any mental health care, left to fend for themselves – or not – themselves. But the impact of a suicidal child is devastating for the entire family, and because we don’t know how to support them, we find ourselves looking for answers.

Ella’s mental health problems started with physical health problems. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which causes parts of the digestive system to become inflamed, in early 2019, when she was just 13.

By the time we had a diagnosis, she was suffering from anorexia and OCD. I’ve realized that mental health issues are rarely simple; one element merges into another.

Finding the right treatment took a long time and before we succeeded, the pandemic struck.

During the first lockdown, Ella’s OCD started to manifest, with her constantly washing her hands, and then she gradually stopped eating. During the second lockdown, she underwent major surgery that caused immense trauma and pain. She later said that she thought she was going to die, and that she wanted to die because she was in so much pain. I now know that the psychologists she saw knew she was having suicidal thoughts, but that was not expressed directly to us.

Once a child turns 16, parents are no longer given information without their consent, as they are considered mature enough to make their own choices.

There are very practical considerations associated with parenting a sick child. I am self-employed and stopped working completely six months after her surgery and breakdown in 2021. With the help of my aunt, we were able to absorb this loss of income and keep Ella at home. I shudder to think what it would have been like if we hadn’t been able to do this.

But her older sister suffered greatly because my husband and I were not as present as we needed to be for her.

Then we realized Ella was self-harming and found knives hidden in her bedroom. We searched the entire house and hid everything sharp. I hid scissors on high shelves, and kitchen knives were rolled up in a towel and put in a saucepan. I didn’t let her out of my sight and slept on a mattress in her room for fear she would hurt herself again. I felt abandoned as a parent. It took a lot of time to navigate CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, run by the NHS) – what to ask, who to call out of hours if we had a crisis. They are woefully understaffed and underfunded, and they are struggling to cope with the hundreds of thousands of children who need support.

Once a child turns 16, parents are no longer given information without their consent, as they are considered mature enough to make their own choices

A lot of responsibility is placed on parents, and yet we are hardly qualified to deal with such serious problems. Sometimes the self-harm meant we had to rush her to the emergency room. They weren’t really deep wounds, but I felt like I couldn’t deal with them myself.

I dealt with it by putting my feelings aside and shutting down my emotions. We feared for Ella’s life so many times and eventually the brain is unable to process any more trauma. I kept hoping she would go back to school, but I got by by just doing what needed to be done. It was my husband who started screaming in the car.

There was a lot of friction in the family, and we are still mending as a couple. I’m an older mom, and if I were younger, I would have wondered why. It was grueling and I couldn’t do anything that was just for me. Only now, two years later, have I started taking up my hobbies again.

There were three things that ultimately saved Ella and us, all of which happened just over a year ago. At this point I was exhausted and desperate for solutions. We felt like we had reached the end of the road with medication and therapy.

The first was a twelve-session study of pain at King’s College Hospital using complementary pranic healing therapy. Led by Les Flitcroft, Founder and Director of the Institute of Pranic Healing UK and Ireland, this is an energy therapy and non-invasive healing technique based on the principle that the body has the innate ability to heal itself and which for Ella was completely transformative . . The second was a puppy. We placed eight-week-old Eric, a beautiful, sniffing Labrador, on her lap and he immediately put his paws around her neck. Eric gave her a reason to get out of bed every morning.

The third savior was as much for me, her mother, as for Ella. We heard about the Body & Soul charity through a friend of mine in 2022, and they invited me to their parents and caregivers’ course: Braver Together. I was hesitant at first because I didn’t think I wanted to be my daughter’s therapist or learn something new.

The aim of the 12-week program is to increase knowledge of symptoms and behavior in friends, family members, partners and siblings, and to understand their own responses to their loved ones. It draws your attention – begrudgingly – back to yourself and creates a sense of community with those who have felt equally alone and outside the system, which helps hasten a sense of healing.

I was able to separate myself from Ella’s problems to help her more effectively. I was only online for two hours a week and it gave me a lot of practical skills and tools. It was the first time I heard it recognized that there is no support for parents, and that there should be, especially for mothers. The lead therapist shifted the responsibility from us by pointing out that you cannot save someone. You must first equip yourself with the skills to help you cope.

Ella is now 18 and is much more stable. She is in remission from Crohn’s disease and anorexia and has fully recovered her weight. She has stopped self-harming and is back in full-time training. She plans to work in the NHS in some capacity because she was helped there and received so much kindness. Because she suffered so much, she would be a very compassionate nurse!

We recently had to clean out our shed. As I pushed the tools aside, I noticed a bag filled with needles, pins, and nail scissors—everything you can think of that is sharp—that we had had to take from the house. It reminded us how bad things had been, and how lucky we were that we had support to help us get through it.

I wish everyone in our situation was that lucky.

As told to Alice Smellie