Dot
Dot was devastated when her, apparently happy, 15 year old daughter told her that she was cutting herself. Dot thinks that her daughter was helped by counselling. She herself was helped by getting information about self-harm from experts that she worked with at the time.
Dot’s daughter, now 32, started self-harming at the age of 15. She seemed to be a happy and successful teenager so Dot was devastated when she found a note her daughter left on the kitchen table before walking to school one day saying she was really unhappy, hated herself and her body, felt a failure and had been cutting herself. Dot immediately got in her car and followed her, catching up with her before she reached school. Her daughter willingly got in the car and went home with Dot where they talked about what was happening to her. Her daughter had been to the GP and Dot thinks that either the GP, or her daughter’s friends, prompted her to write the note, or somehow let her mum know what was going on.
Dot was devastated by this news, and still feels the shock of it when talking about it 17 years later. She worked in a hospital with experts on suicide and self-harm so was able to get information about self-harm from them, which she says was enormously reassuring. She thinks it would all have been ten times worse’ if she hadn’t had access to that information. She talked to her then husband about it, but not to anybody else, including her other two children or any of their relatives. She feels that a Helpline or some other contact with people who didn’t know her daughter would have been supportive.
Dot thinks that her daughter’s self-harm, through cutting, was fairly short-lived and, although they talked together about her feelings and problems, her daughter never talked about how she cut. The GP referred her for counselling which Dot thinks helped her. In later years her daughter suffered periodically from low mood/depression and has been prescribed anti-depressants. Although she seemed to stop cutting, Dot thinks her daughter self-abused’ in her later teen years by drinking too much.