In my writing, I am examining the gap between system promises and family reality, the hidden costs of prolonged crisis response on family wellbeing, and the overlooked trauma experienced by those in supporting roles. I am particularly interested in how families navigate the tension between wanting help but being offered approaches that seem to diminish rather than restore their loved one’s agency and humanity.

 

Filing papers. Picking apples.

There were two things – one big and one small – that I’d never managed to get done in all the years I’d lived here, on the edge of the Welsh Border, in a sleepy valley falling slowly down towards the River Wye. Two boring jobs that were neither urgent, nor important. One, filing a mountain of reports and letters. Each one evidence of treatment and care or rather neglect, during ten years of crises, thirteen hospital admissions and many more missing person searches for my daughter as she lived her chaotic young life in and out the states of mind we commonly call psychosis. The other job, a race to get the apples in before the squirrels got them or they fell rotting to the ground.

I’d avoided the paper sorting task because every paper, every email, every report of my daughter’s contact with the mental health system was evidence of failure. The system’s failure to give her any help or support, other than medication that she would not or could not take. My failure to get her the purposeful support I knew she needed to get her back into her life, without drugging her until she was numb.  The sheer volume of my disordered documents offered their own, sullen resistance to being put in order, each time I tried they seemed to spawn duplicates or shuffle themselves into meaningless, out of sync disorder.

 “February 2019, From Community Mental Health Team, X is doing well, she’s back at college and hopes to apply to university for next year. She says she will try to stop smoking marijuana, says she doesn’t know why she does it, but knows that using it was the reason she was admitted to hospital. She wants to stop taking her medication monthly as a depot injection and change to pills. She would like to have more control over her medication, but we advise staying on the depot for a few more months. Her friend Leonard is visiting. Her mother is happy for her to live at home and support her.”

 Leonard. I had almost managed to forget him. The short guy from Paris with ill-fitting clothes, limp and grey from overwashing. His lank, thinning hair was long like an old rocker compensating for a receding hairline. There’s an edge of goading antagonism to him, one that comes out with every unrolled ‘r’ and slowly translated word. This is the guy that she would run away to Paris with, only days after this meeting with her psychiatrist. Leonard. The boyfriend who abused her, locked her out of his apartment and left her, raging, despairing and psychotic, on the street out in the banlieue. She was picked up that night by a stranger, a man who, thank god, was kind. Knowing she was in serious trouble, eventually she managed to call home. Of course, I dropped everything and went to help her.

It was harrowing. One visit to a distant and decrepit A&E, two missed flights, and one night spent sleeping in the Yotel in Charles De Gaulle, we eventually boarded a flight and got back from Paris. A kind friend picked us up at the airport. She dropped me home so I could catch some rest, and took my daughter straight in to see the psychiatrist before she headed back to work. The British Consulate in Paris had phoned ahead and told them to expect her. But as one brief paragraph in the ensuing complaint noted, the community mental health team turned out to be too busy for this drama. The psychiatrist was not available, the nurses were all busy, the receptionist told her to wait – leaving her to wander off into the city.

Reading this short and impersonal page, knowing how many people were involved to get my daughter home, makes one short breath after another catch in my throat which is now squeezing tight to stop a flood of tears. My mouth has gone dry and my heart clenches, hard and desperate, ready to beat out the old anxiety from that day hard and relentless into the night.

But I stop myself. I remind myself  that it was years ago now, and I’m only reading a letter. I look up and remember to bring myself back into this room. It’s warm and familiar, there’s a cat sleeping on the rug, a houseplant wilting for want of water. Nothing is happening and I am safe. I let the moment lengthen. My heart slows. The old panic softens as I move these memories and the papers that carry them, from my hand to the file where they belong, 2019.

I keep going, more letters, more reports, 2022, 2021, 2020… I only look at the dates now, not wanting or willing to face their contents.

Over the years, each new crisis and each hospital stay has merged one into another in my mind, like the mess of papers in boxes.  All my feelings of fear, anger, despair, outrage and grief are petrified in each printed page, all laid down like fossils beneath the layers of my angry complaints and endless concerns. This is why I’ve been deaf to them nagging at me from the yellow lever arch files. Why I’ve left the archive boxes with their ill-fitting lids, piled at the bottom of the bookcase and pushed away under the stairs. I’ve not wanted to lift the lids and let those furies out.

Only now, when she’s living in a rehab unit in another town and still under the Mental Health Act, can I face this avoidant, trauma ridden procrastination. So, I sit down to do the job. The one I don’t want to do.

Another long stay behind locked doors it’s not what I’d wanted or hoped for her this time. I thought she’d be coming home, but the team wouldn’t hear of it.  I wonder if another parent would be relieved. Instead, I’m caught up in endless worry about increasing medication and decreasing freedom and again feel powerless to put things right for her.

But now my worries were not for her survival, they’d become more complicated. I’m ill from an old Covid infection that’s left me unable to work and exhausted, augmenting the burnout from a nervous system stuck in fight, flight or freeze for all these years. I had to admit to myself I couldn’t have her home without considerable support, and even then, it would be hard. But getting this funded from a council’s social services budget without her team’s full backing was about as realistic as relocating to the moon. Even so, it just didn’t feel right to be bored and alone, here in the comfort of my home, with three cats and a lonely hen, while she’s in a city she doesn’t know, on another ward, with people she doesn’t have anything in common with apart from diagnoses, being fed a cocktail of drugs and meals of jacket potato with tuna. And so I find myself consulting Youtube astrology channels late at night, hoping that there’s some conjunction with the moon or some final plutonian transit that validates this lessening of responsibility, this off-loading of mothering to explain the shift in my life and hers. Is my karma all spent, is my job done? Do I have permission to rest?

Now, despite nights worrying about where this will end for us both, I have long and empty days.  Instead of a 40-minute commute to see her in hospital mid-week, then picking her up at the weekends, the car idles while the weeds grow on the drive. My diary is empty without the horrible hospital meetings with the doctor stonewalling my objections to his predictable solutions: more drugs and a longer period of detention.

In this void, life is offering something new. Time. Enough to get bored. Enough to do the small jobs, the ones that aren’t urgent and aren’t important.

I punch holes in another mental health tribunal report, clip the pages together and put them into a dated file. The shredder is eating up the duplicates and throwing out dust onto the rug. The past ten years’ paper trail of adventures into and out of altered states of mind are being forced into order, stripped of the drama that went with them.

Like the time she disappeared to London taking with her a wind-up alarm clock, the Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, a pyramid paperweight and a fraying length of pale-yellow silk in my grandfather’s old leather overnight case. All of those objects, but not a coat or a phone charger, bank card or money for a hotel. I can’t remember how she got home that time, if a friend got her to a train or if it was the police again. Or the time she went to Oxford. The priest who’d found her weeping at a bus stop, long after the buses finished for the night. Not knowing quite what to do, he paid for a hotel room and food, then persuaded her to give him my number. But I couldn’t get there quickly enough, by the morning she was already in the assessment suite at the Warnford Hospital.

As the files fill, I see how all these mad and dangerous adventures, with all of the meaning they had for her, get boiled down into management speak. She’s just another case. Just another risk to be managed. The bleak and dispassionate clinical diagnosis, the treatment plans and the over-optimistic discharge plans devoid of substance or funding or simply left blank. So many words and so little responsibility, care or compassion. So many words that say nothing about her at all, apart from labelling her sick.

Life lived in and around psychiatric units is a family life lived outside of time. Birthdays and Christmases pass without celebration. Nobody ages, we’re all frozen in time. The experiences that should be building her into an independent adult have been lost to the airlocked doors and plastic cups. And for me the years when work was just getting exciting, a time when I was enjoying competence and confidence, those days were cut short. My priorities changed and time seemed to stand still, I said I would wait for things to get easier. But I never did get back to work full time.

Now, for the first time in years, I’ve noticed summer slowly cooling. Autumn sneaking in on the breeze, marking these last fine days. How the apples are weighing the branches down as they ripen to red on the gnarled old tree.

I’m working to a different rhythm, one that lets me win the race against the squirrels to gather the harvest. I now have a bounty of apples, bright waxy skins unscarred by their nibbling teeth, or discoloured with white spots of rot on browning bruises. Too many to eat so they’re stored in the larder in boxes. It seems my next boring job will be the job of peeling and coring, before preserving and freezing. A small job, neither urgent nor important, but one that’s already waiting for me.

Normal life seems to have returned, at least for now. The house is quiet and my mind is also finding some peace, despite a deep tugging grief. I’m getting this life here back into some kind of solitary order. Living the kind of life most people would call normal. But for me it’s not normal, it’s all new.

 

First published as “Frozen in Time” on Mad in the UK https://www.madintheuk.com/2025/09/a-carer-blogs-on-system-failures-filing-papers-picking-apples/