[Laughs] Why? Which is all I, I’ve spent months literally just saying, Why? And it’s really unhelpful because, as I said, there isn’t, I don’t think, it’s almost, [my daughter] would look at it as, Why not?

Which is a really huge worry. I’m sat here now trying to think, behind talking, and I’m just thinking, Why is my little girl doing this?

It just came. It, honestly, it just came from what felt like nowhere. That one day we were okay and then theres this deterioration. Over the summer, summer period, absolutely fantastic, had a great time. Went back to school in September, started to withdraw a little bit, started to be a lot quieter, lost a little bit of weight but nothing that alarm bells rang. It wasn’t that she wasn’t eating. It wasn’t that she wasn’t doing anything. It was just that she were a little bit more bad tempered. She were a little short with people but she was fourteen and she was starting her GCSEs and, you know, you put up with it. Her dad blamed me because hes saying that, you know, you know, I condoned her behaviour. I didn’t condone her behaviour, you know. She sits there sulking. I said, Shes not sulking. Shes tired. So I sort of justified the withdrawal for her being a teenager and saying, Just leave her alone. Shes a teenager.

So I left her alone and then that’s sort of what happened and then I sort of started looking at the music she listens to and I started getting into my head that it’s to do with that oh it’s this Emo music that they’re all and actually, you know, shes done a presentation at school. So something is said to somebody, shes picked up on something somewhere or somebody said something because she had to do a presentation at assembly and she did it on the stereotypical types of music and what people perceive and I thought, You’ve picked up on something somewhere. That’s her way of getting it out and, you know, I know her really well.

But the reality is there wasn’t anything, that nothing caused it in the sense she listened to her music and thought it. What gets me is where they get the idea from? How do they know about it? Where do they get that idea from? How do they know about it? Where do they even get that idea from to think, that’s what I’ll do? But then it’s all over the internet, isn’t it, and it’s all over, it’s out there. So but no, there was nothing.

I think that, basically, was what her self-harm behaviour was about. It was she hated herself. She thoroughly hated herself and the only way she could find of expressing that was to deface herself, if you like.

So that’s it really. That’s her story, my story.

When it first started and was there any particular trigger to it do you think or how had she heard, I mean how would it become part of her thing that she could do?

It’s very difficult to say and I never really asked her. I never really asked her what started, at the very beginning, what started that behaviour, why. Her older sister, who also had an eating disorder and was also very depressed, said to me a long time later that she tried cutting herself. I don’t quite know what that means but that it didn’t do it for her. Those were her words. She said, I tried it but it didn’t do anything for me. So she didn’t get any of the positive reinforcement that clearly the other one was getting. My other daughter was was getting something from it, some stress release or some expression of anger or something she was getting from it. My youngest daughter also cut herself a little bit. She was aware of her older sister and whether there was some kind of, I’m feeling angry. It obviously worked for her. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was with her but the behaviour stopped much quicker. It never became entrenched in the way that my middle daughter’s behaviour became very clearly a way of her coping with distress and it didn’t with the other two. But I don’t know what started it.

My wife, for example, would still say that a lot of his behaviour can be attributed to teenage hormones and growing up, and the normal difficulties of adolescence. But because [our son] has had all these psychiatrists and people dancing round him, telling him hes suffering from a depressive disorder and all the rest of it, he now uses that as an excuse. And, in fact, jokingly, I mean when hes not angry, hes said once or twice, Well, if I don’t, with a smile, hes said, Well, if you don’t give me some nice presents for Christmas, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

[laughs]

And this kind of thing. So she feels that if from that first day we hadn’t involved the medical services, I mean initially the GP, who then brought in the CAMHS, the crisis people, who then brought in the CAMHS, other people. If we hadn’t done that [my son] my son might be less prone to using his illness as an excuse not to go to school, not to do homework and not to eat the food which is put in front of him or whatever. Something which he doesn’t feel like doing, says, Oh, you can’t make me do that. I’m depressed or I’ll get worse or I’ll have an episode.

And so, when it started, was there anything else going on at that time?

Yes, there was Shes had a funny time at school, since going into the into the senior school and she was very, very happy in the junior school, lots of friends. Senior school, she started pushing some of her friends away but also taking up with boys and her first boyfriend was quite a troubled character himself. And I think they sort of egged each other on. He was definitely, I think he would call himself an Emo and he sort of introduced [my daughter] I think, all teenagers are a bit prone to this I think. I think I was, you know, you sort of grab hold of an idea and a whole the music and the look and it was all very, very dark and very, very gloomy and their sort of relationship was a bit like that. He was quite an unhappy boy and they seemed to sort of encourage each other, in a way, to be unhappy but [my daughter] was very, very, very keen on him and he wasn’t very nice to her and I think, although I’d never blame him, but I think that that set of circumstances probably is what put her in such a gloomy place, presumably, alongside, you know, the hormones and everything else that’s kicking in at that age.

Certainly, with my daughter, I think the separation of myself and her father had a big impact on her, more than we thought it had because shed always been a very happy-go-lucky, nothing fazed her, nothing bothered her, you know, take it on the chin all the time and I think it affected her a lot more than we thought it would. Also, she was going through puberty, which is a, a hideous time for any teenager.

So she was what eleven, twelve

Eleven, twelve.

when you separated?

Yeah, yeah. Also, the school changed from being a school to an academy, which in itself wasn’t an issue, but because her particular year had had a couple of years of getting away with a bit more than they probably should have done. Then the academy came in and it was crack-down and their year had a lot of issues with learning to toe the line again. I think that didn’t help and her friends, shes had a few, one of her friends had a death in the family and needed a lot of support, another one of her friends moved away very suddenly, which she wasn’t expecting at all. Wed also witnessed an accident at a, a racing meeting where a, a man had died, which we saw. You know, it was close to us, which shed never talk about. And just little bits and pieces and things like that and I had I had a very bad time for a while. I was quite, quite low, which I think affected her obviously, not that she lived with me at the time and I think that didn’t help as well because I’d moved out. So I think it’s a lot of things just all happening at the same time and, and overwhelming her and she didn’t know where to go or what to do.

And then in June of last year she had just got back to school, she had got back to school, with a staged c-, return, and shed been back to school probably about a week and she, something dreadful happened to her. She was sexually assaulted. And that’s when it just completely kicked off, you know, in a big way. She was sexually assaulted, and it went to court and everything. She had to give evidence in court, because he pled guilty up until she, he pled not guilty up until she gave her evidence and then he pled guilty then. So the good thing about that was that he was actually dealt with and, you know, he was punished and everything, but not in a way that I thought was enough. But she was very brave and dealt with it really well and gave evidence against him.

But that incident, you know, that one incident of, of being sexually assaulted, it was good that she was believed and it was good that it was proved in court and everything like that, but it had a massive effect on her. So up until that point she had been depressed, she had had some self-harming, some sort of rebelling kind of thing, but nothing outrageous, you know. And that just tipped her completely over the edge. And she just, I didn’t know what to do with her at all and it just got worse and worse. And she, was seeing a team at CAMHS, children and adolescent mental health services, who deal with sexual assault. And so she was seeing all the right people, and she still sees them more than a year later, she still goes there once a week.

But there was also a previous incident, which we all believe had contributed to the self-harming, was that in February this year she told me that, no, actually, she hadn’t told me in February. This was when it was going on. She told me in about the summertime, the June, that a boy from school, who shed befriended, he was an older boy, and they’d kind of struck up a gaming relationship to start with. They used to play online games together and then he asked her to go into Skype conversations with him, which she did. And this kind of snowballed into her kind of being groomed to take off her clothes in front of the Skype camera and perform acts of a sexual nature in front of the camera and she, eventually, told me after this had been going on for probably about six months I think.

And we contacted the police and the police arrested the guy from school the day after and they seized all the equipment and were quite confident that everything was seized and all the stuff that he had on her was destroyed. And we thought, at the time, that she was okay about it all but, looking back on it, I don’t think she had enough support after all this had gone on. I made the decision at the time with the lad that we weren’t going to pursue it through the courts because the main thing for me was that all the stuff had been destroyed. He was obviously, had problems of his own and I didn’t particularly want it carrying of for months and months through the courts and thought it would be best for everyone if it was just put to bed.

But I think that’s had a massive effect on her and shed hidden a lot of it and when we actually did get to be talking about her cutting she said, Nobody realises how upset I am and how down I am and I put on a brave face.

Now hes not, when I say the last time he self-harmed was five months ago, he hadn’t self-harmed, in the sense of cutting for three years prior to that. So he is capable of going long periods of time without doing it. It’s just learning how to manage the triggers. Now we know what some of the triggers are in relation to, you know, it could be family arguments, it could be the PTSD he suffers from, flash-backs, were only just getting to the start of dealing with those issues, alongside, obviously, the new psychiatry and things like that. So it’s all about time. It takes time to get through this. It takes time to understand. Everyone has different mechanisms for coping and everyone has different reasons for doing what they do and it’s, I think the biggest part for self-harmers is learning what triggers they have. What sets them off? Why they do what they do? Because there is a million different reasons and I think what a lot of people tend to forget is they forget to actually find out and ask.

A lot of people think it’s just an addiction, that they do it just for the sake of doing it. Some folk that might be the reason but what I’ve found is a lot of the time it’s not. Its deep-rooted psychological damage in respect of it could be someone suffering from PTSD or it could be someone suffering from severe flashbacks. It could be someone suffering from, you know, abuse. It could be that they are, you know, borderline schizophrenic. It could, it could be anything. It could be depression. It can be absolutely anything but it needs to have, people need to take the time to find out and that’s why I think self-harmers don’t get a lot of the help that they need because it does it does take time and it takes effort on everyones part. It’s not just the person who’s self-harming

And for people who self-harm, well, that’s a generalisation, but certainly for my daughter, who self-harms, I realised that she couldn’t hold those emotions for any length of time initially, at all. She had to do something immediately to make herself feel better and it looks as if it’s a destructive thing against her own skin but actually, of course, kind of bizarrely it works, doesn’t it, for people who harm themselves? It releases endorphins. I learned the reasons why it was effective, even though I hated it and couldn’t condone it, with my, my, you know, my thinking and my understanding of it made some kind sense to it. And I found that when she realised that she was very poor at coping with her emotions at that instant and she started to hold the emotions for a little bit longer and I supported her and helped her to do that, we were making some progress.

And thinking more about it, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion it’s part of our culture, to some extent, in that we take for granted, at least in books, people biting their lip in frustration or anger or as a way of deferring pain from another part of the body or pinching yourself. And I thought, well, you know, maybe this is just a continuum.

And, and, actually, is part of everyday life and that we should just learn to see it as something he does when hes upset. If it helps him, then perhaps it’s not something to get too upset about and we just make a point of reminding him to keep the knife clean.