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...
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