Bryony Gordon's Mad World Podcast with Jade
It is a concept we still associate with dreadful, outdated terms like “asylum” and “loony bin”, with images of men in white coats and masks, and terrified people sitting alone in sterile rooms.
How would you feel if your teenage daughter was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and kept indefinitely in a high security hospital to protect her from harming herself?
It is a scenario which is becoming a reality for more and more families in Britain. As the numbers of teenage girls self harming has soared (the NHS says there has been a 68 per cent rise in the past decade), so have the numbers being sectioned.
18-year-old Jade spent 18 months in FitzRoy House, a child and adolescent mental health inpatient hospital in Northampton. Jade now knows that she suffers from psychotypal personality disorder, but for most of her teenage years she had no idea what was wrong with her.
For too long she struggled to cope at home and at school, spending much of her time (at one point as often as once a week) travelling to and from A&E with her mum, Clare. But help evaded her time and time again. Faced with a wound she had sadly inflicted on herself, one doctor told her: “Why don’t you cut your teddy bear instead?”
Jade has experienced the full spectrum of the mental health system in this country, with all its failings, as well as its many strengths.
She was just 13 when she first realised the feelings which were ruining her young life were not “normal”, as paranoia began to overwhelm her, and everyday life became an unbearable struggle.
Now 18, she has been to the very brink of what mental illness can do to a person, and knows better than most the devastating impact of depression. But she has also come out the other side of it.
Bryony Gordon talks to Jade (who will appear in a BBC Two documentary, Girls on the Edge, on Thursday) about her experiences, and hears from her mum Clare about what it was like to watch her daughter go through years of turmoil before eventually being sectioned.
