Living with Depression

One by one, we fell prey to a force beyond control

Why would four children from a privileged family all succumb to the same devastating mental illness? Rory Clements meets a young author with a happy ending to her disturbing life story.

When you meet Tabitha Suzuma, you could not guess what terrifying secrets are concealed beneath her friendly, open exterior. She smiles in warm welcome as I join her for coffee (she opts for apple juice) in the echoey halls of Bibendum on the Fulham Road and then tells me her family's history.

It is a deeply unsettling story of children caught up in madness. In her darkest hours, Tabitha wandered around King's College London, where she was an undergraduate, gazing up at the highest buildings. Occasionally, she would walk to the top of one and look down, trying to gauge whether the fall would kill her. Her greatest fear was not of death, but that she would survive, injured and in pain. She would have used a gun to take her life, had she had one. Pills worried her because she imagined being left alive with organ damage. Finally she tied a plastic bag around her head to suffocate herself, but woke later, the bag having come off.

What sets Tabitha apart is that she is one of four siblings who all attempted suicide. Her father, too, has been plagued by severe depression that may have contributed to his children's problems. Yet, remarkably, this is a story of hope, of a family which has clawed its way back to health. Next week, Tabitha's first book, a novel which draws on her experiences, is to be published by The Bodley Head. Her siblings are now settled in loving relationships and in careers. Tabitha says they are all happy for her to give this interview, to try to break down the taboo of mental illness.

The children were brought up in a large house in London. Their mother is English and worked as a foreign-language teacher. Their father is Japanese and worked at the embassy before becoming a freelance translator. They had five children of whom Tabitha, at 31, is the eldest. The youngest, a boy, is 17.

Tabitha was an anxious, fearful girl and her childhood, she says, was "tumultuous", with a mother who was bewildered by her difficult children and a distant father who locked himself away at the top of the house for days on end. When Tabitha was 14, she started becoming increasingly withdrawn and told her mother she was quitting school. Instead, she studied at home and gained grade As in French and English at A level. Although she didn't understand it then, Tabitha now realizes that clinical depression had kicked in. "Just brushing my teeth or having a shower became unbearable. There were long periods when I didn't leave my room. Depression is not just the black dog. It is a very strong desire not to live."

It reached crisis point at university when she wrote a suicide note and tried to suffocate herself with the bin bag. She was 22, but still didn't know she was depressed. That realization came on holiday a little while later. "I looked out of the window at this beautiful sunset and it made me want to cry. I thought, this is not normal. This is an illness and maybe it's that thing called depression."

That acknowledgment was the start of her journey back to mental health - but there was worse to come for her family. One of her siblings had already attempted suicide four years earlier. "The depression happened about the same time for all of us, in our teens, one by one, except the youngest, who, ironically, is the one who inspired me to write a book about a musical prodigy with manic depression."

What, you wonder, could have caused this storm of mental illness in four middle-class children from the wealthiest corner of London? Were they, in some way, infected by their father's depression? And why was Tabitha so scared as a child?

"A lot of counsellors have focused on the question of whether it is learned behaviour from my father," she concedes. "But, for me, that is the least likely cause."

At the end of the interview I feel none the wiser - but within hours Tabitha phones and admits that, as a child, she was terrified of her father's rages. "I am sorry not to have been more straightforward," she says. As if a dam has broken, Tabitha's tale of her unhappy childhood floods out. She says her father was not habitually violent, but would have outbursts during which he would lose control. "He would explode when his meals were late. He would throw things down the stairs when guests stayed too long. He found my sister reading in dim light. He told her it was bad for her eyes. She replied that she could see her book fine and so he struck her across her face. He was very sensitive to respect and I suppose he felt her answer to be somehow disrespectful. When he tried to give us Japanese lessons he would fly into a rage as soon as we got anything wrong. I remember being summoned to his room for the mandatory lessons feeling I was going to faint with fear. None of it was ever serious enough to land us in hospital and these were not regular beatings. But even when he was in a good mood, we rarely wanted to do anything with him because we were so afraid of him. We hid behind our mother and I think this hurt and angered him and made his depression worse."

Yet there was another side to him. "Looking back, I realize he loved us 'in his own way'. Every night, after we were asleep, he would come and tuck us in. It was his way of showing affection. He worked hard to provide for us and was always generous and made sure we went to the best schools and took our education very seriously. My mother tried to make up for my father and was very hands-on, taking us out and entertaining us constantly. My father didn't like this and thought she spoiled us."

Yet, even after revealing all this, Tabitha still insists there was no direct link to the children's mental illness. "I don't think it was much more than a contributing factor - but I do think there's a huge genetic component," she says. "However, the rages were definitely the cause of my childhood terror."

The curious thing is that the family still functioned. "We had lots of friends around to play," says Tabitha, who is practised at concealing the truth about her family. "I spent a lot of time hiding it; there are good friends that I have now who, if they read this article, will be shocked."

Tabitha says that in the difficult times her mother desperately tried to help but couldn't really imagine what their depression was like. "I would say, 'Mummy, all I want to do is die.' To have your own child say that to you must be awful. She tried to get us help but there were months of waiting lists on the NHS, shuffled from psychiatrist to psychiatrist."

Tabitha has had relationships, both good and bad, but is now single and concentrating on work. "I would like to get the message across that there needs to be more openness and knowledge about mental illness - not just with psychiatrists but with doctors. The first doctor I saw told me, 'You're smiling, so you're not depressed.'

"The other message is that if you stay alive, there's hope - there's a chance of getting better. By ending it, there's no chance. One thing that all this did is that my siblings and I are extremely close because we speak the same language. We often say that if any of us had been an only child we wouldn't have survived."

A Note Of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma is published on 4 May by The Bodley Head (£10.99)