Cautionary tales

I heard two stories recently that brought me up short.

I was talking to someone who runs an art and craft class, very easygoing, light-hearted, joking, banter up and down the class constantly, mostly between him and a long term attendee, I think mostly for the entertainment of themselves and the rest of us.

In class there was discussion about a stabbing that had happened a few streets from my house, where I walk every day. Just a few months before my husband had berated me for saying his name near an odd character who was hanging about oddly on that same street. I thought he was over-reacting.  

Can't you see that guy's involved in drugs? he said.

No, I replied.

Apparently the stabbing was drug related.  The teacher was sure the long term attendee would know more about it and, being a small town, he had narrowed it down and claimed to know, by some opaque process of elimination, whodunnit.

The conversation moved on to drugs. The teacher had a surprisingly wide knowledge of the different drugs in the city and how they affected the way people walked.

 - How do you know? 

- Because they've staggered past my door all day for years.

I paid differently to most of the others and we sometimes had an opportunity to chat.  

He said that the class had helped many people with mental health issues over the years.

- How do you know about them?

- Some of them talk about it, some of them don't. 

He was observant, seemed to have learned to pick up on cues over many years.

Why do they come?

- As it's an afternoon class people often come with chronic health conditions, and maybe can't hold down a job.

I supposed the art and craft is a kind of therapy for them.

- How does it help?

- The class is small, friendly.

 He didn't mention the art material or process at all. 

I soon realised the teacher had an astonishing amount of insight and experience around people with mental health conditions. I began to see the level of perception in the guy, who was, after all an artist. Several times he'd commented on my fear in class of the artistic process. You look traumatised! he had said, lightly, one day, referring to my fear of making, or so I imagined.

I wasn't surprised when he said the class had helped many people.  It's what you would expect from a business owner, especially someone in the art business running classes with an undercurrent of informal art therapy.  But I was surprised when he said a number of people who had come to class had taken their own life. 

- Isn't that contradictory, if you say class also helps?

 He said sometimes they've been coming, they're stable, then they miss a class and they go back down some rabbit hole of mental health problems and then he gets the news that they've taken their life.

Apparently the evening class had no or fewer suicides. The people who come to that one tend to hold down jobs.  

He said one of the worst things that happens is when people come off their meds voluntarily or because their body has learned to tolerate it and they need new medication. When they're off their meds they go haywire and then they go on to new meds or back and then there are all the side effects to work through. He said for a year their lives can be a train crash because of this and that it was an awful thing to witness.

 He had done a suicide prevention course to see if there were things he was already doing that were helping and if there was more he could do to help the people who came through his doors.

He talked about somebody who came to class with a great sense of humour, a  joker, a big character but who came when he was in a dark place. 

- He was a larger than life, jokey character but in a dark place?

- Oh yes, those characters can often be the most troubled he said with experience.

The joker would ask if there was a space and the teacher always made space for him.

Or somebody would just die, suddenly. He mentioned a parent who choked and died one Christmas. 

He said how difficult it was to then tell the class, do his normal work, go to the funeral and then people from maybe a year past who don't come to class anymore had seen something about the death, would contact him to ask about it, and so on.

How do you do all this, run classes, your other work?  Do colleagues in your business have the same stories?

He thought it depended on the level of empathy.   

Some days, when he had three classes, he said he would go home and barely be able to hold a conversation.  I imagined he was probably carrying a fair amount of secondary trauma from all he had experienced.

But just then, it was he who talked and talked. I had barely said a word bar ask a few questions. I wondered vaguely who was helping who.  The question didn't seem relevant.  I appreciated the lack of presumption.

He had done the classes for years, and was taking advantage of a change in circumstance to stop them and run weekend workshops instead.  I wasn't surprised. 

How do you know if people had got these problems?

He said often, they hang around after class. I shifted uncomfortably, but he was still doing the talking.  

- And then what?

- Well, it's clear they want to talk, he said, so I offer to make them a coffee while I tidy up, prepare for the next class.

I should say at this point, with some relief, I had never been offered a coffee.

I was struck that you would never think, to see him in his professional life, that this fun, sensitive man, carried the weight of this experience and sense of responsibility towards the steady stream of broken people who walked through his doors.  That he didn't judge, moralise, analyze, theorise.  He just did what he could to help.

Then he mentioned, let's call her Marie, who had come to class and who would apparently swear a lot.  She had some kind of mental health issue and was possibly delusional. The class would be talking about, I don't know, surgery and she'd say one week that she'd, you know, she'd been a surgeon and they'd say, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Marie, that, is that right? And then she talked about land the family had, but how she, the brother had got everything and she'd been left without. She'd be effing and blinding about that. And then another week they'd be talking about, say, teaching and she'd say, Oh yeah, I was a primary teacher once and they'd say, Yeah, yeah, okay, Marie. Then another week they'd be talking about the news, and she'd say, Yeah, I was a journalist once. And they said, Yep, sure, of course you were, thinking there was no way you taught children cursing the way you do.

One day mid-August she turned up and gave the teacher a Christmas present and a card. Then she turned up to a colleague's class soaking wet and half an hour late and with a belief that her house was being sunk in the river by the council. She lived alone. The teacher was worried about her, so he phoned a mate who was a paramedic.  The mate said, contact NHS 24.  Give them the contact details you've got, they'll look her up and someone will do a wellness check but you won't hear what happens.  After that she disappeared. It turned out she had been sectioned. She turned up three months later to class. About eight months after that, they found out that she had taken her own life.

So they went to the funeral, the teacher and the long-term class attendee. It turned out she was from a famous family. Someone who knew her spoke about her life, how she'd grown up in Africa and trained to be a surgeon. She did that for a while and then she got fed up with the misogyny of the industry and retrained to become a journalist at one of the national papers. After some time there, she decided her true calling was to become a primary school teacher. So she did that. And then eventually the weight of her condition overcame her.

 He made no other comment beyond that.

A few days later, I suddenly heard from someone I hadn't heard from in nearly a year. I had met her by chance a couple of years before. She was almost overpoweringly religious and had increasingly been encouraging me to go to Christian concerts in Glasgow, which I wasn't interested in. Then I received an intense rant against a local pub and all the things she was going to say about them in a review. I was beginning to think it might be wise to step back a bit.

Then in early April last year, she said she had been accepted at a local university to study in the autumn. I sent her another message at the end of April to, because we had a long-standing dinner reservation. I hadn't heard from her, so I thought she'd just decided to cool off the relationship. And I didn't hear back about the dinner. I assumed the brief friendship was over or other things had taken over in her life.

The rest of the year passed. It was perhaps towards the end of last year that I bumped into her in the street with her husband, holding on to him. I barely recognised her. I thought she had had a stroke or some similarly grave medical problem. She couldn't speak properly and was obviously very fragile. We said hello, exchanged some pleasantries, said it was nice to see them. They didn't say what had happened and I didn't want to pry.

The other day, out of the blue she invited me to have coffee with another friend I didn't know. She said she had discovered in 2021 that she had bipolar disorder but that had been living fine, without medication as far as I could gather. When I knew her, she seemed entirely normal. She painted my mum's nails. She was kind. She was smiley. She was enthusiastic. It had not for a minute occurred to me that she was bipolar.  Around the time of the pub review I did see clear streaks of aggression, a desire to punish, even what I thought was a kind of superiority complex. Certainly, I decided to be more careful in the relationship. 

Apparently she had been out visiting somewhere with her husband. Something had happened. She had to go to at least two maybe three hospitals and she was admitted at one of these for three months. She was now able to walk in the street on her own.  She still had some trouble with her speech due to the side effects of the medication. We were speaking in neither of our own native languages and I noticed that she mixed up this language with her own, which were admittedly similar, but in a way that she had not done before. She wanted to restart work, but just one day a week.  She was worried that the course she wanted to do might not accept her this year. I could see that she was becoming slightly stressed, and also tired after about 40 minutes of conversation. The other friend and I both suggested to her, one step at a time. Then I had to go to another appointment

I thought about Marie, and I wondered when she became the way that she did. Was it  harm from brother that tipped her over the edge? Was it the misogyny at work? Was it in the family? Did people have a role in what happened to her? Could she have been saved? What might have saved her? Or was it an inevitable path of neurobiology, genetic vulnerability, sleep disruption, medication effects and psychosocial stress?  Or was it these plus life events and the relationships she had with people in her life?  Or something else altogether.  I wondered if the teacher dwelt on those questions.

When I was about thirteen, someone my parents knew came to stay with us briefly for a night or two.  Her husband, an army officer, had left her and she was in a bad way. I remember a general vibe of unsettledness and unhappiness and angst.  The next day her room stank of cigarettes.  This was the most disturbing thing maybe because although everyone smoked then, people like my parents didn't stink out the guest room with smoke, when we stayed with friends. And manners were everything in those circles.  The cigarette smoke was somehow symbolic that she had already, in a some way, gone beyond the pale.  Not long after we heard she had taken her own life. I was shocked but part of me was not surprised.

I thought about my friend, who had been struck by bipolar disorder apparently in her early 40s. What was it that tipped her over the edge in 2021 then and what was it that did it again in 2025? Was it the stress of visiting the university? Did something in particular happen? Was she becoming more stressed generally or did it just come out of nowhere?

Certainly I felt a strong push from the stories: look after yourself. Stay on an even keel. Don't get upset or angry, don't let things get to you. Take care of yourself. Beware what you become attached to.