Why I’m teaching my daughter how to be unhappy

We’re in the park, at the swings, when my daughter says something that takes me by surprise. “Look,” she says, pointing at the sky. “There is a baby cloud, there is a daddy cloud, and there is a mummy cloud.”

“So there is,” I reply, looking briefly at the sky because I am trying to stop her from falling off the climbing frame.

“And the mummy cloud is sad,” she continues. “The mummy cloud is not happy.”

It’s funny what we see in clouds, isn’t it? Circus animals. Countries. Clinically depressed parents. I gathered my wits, tried to work out how to respond to this, but by the time I had taken it all in she had thrown herself down the slide and was climbing on to the see-saw.

I hesitated before writing this column about mental health, because I’m aware that I bang on about the subject a lot, and have been banging on about it a lot over the course of the last week on account of the fact I have just had an entire book published on the topic ( Mad

Girl, available from all good bookshops now, et cetera, et cetera).

But then I’ve been so floored by the response I have received, so shocked by yet another report coming out about the dire state of this country’s mental health services, that I simply couldn’t not write about the topic again. If it bores you… well, lucky you. Go and read about Brexit over there, or Euro 2016 over there. For everyone else, welcome! Pull up a chair. Make yourself comfortable. Judging by the stories I have heard this week, from endless people forced to suffer mental illness in silence, we could be here some time.

Last Saturday, I went to the Hay Festival to talk about my book. I was nervous because I’d not spoken about it before, and I wasn’t sure of the response I would get. I could not have predicted what would happen when the lights went up for questions from the audience – people in tears, revealing battles with depression, fears that nobody would understand them. A mother destroyed by the suicide of her son. A teenage girl paralysed by loneliness. A therapist who lived in Wales but was forced to work over the border in England because of the complete lack of funding in her home country. As the week has gone on, and I have spoken about the book at other events, I have heard more and more stories like these, from seemingly normal people whose lives have quietly been torn apart because they did not feel they had the words to describe what they were experiencing.

And each one has convinced me of the need to talk about our experiences with mental health – again and again and again, if needs be. Because only by talking do people start to sit up and listen, and only by talking do we ensure that we are not ignored and fobbed off with empty government pledges that are nothing more than hot air rising from the benches of the House of Commons (if this week has taught me one thing, it is that mental health absolutely

doesn’t have parity with physical health, thank you very much David Cameron).

Also this week came the report from Cambridge University that found women were twice as likely to experience anxiety as men – though having met plenty of men who suffer from panic attacks and depression, and knowing that suicide is the biggest killer of young men in this country, perhaps females just felt twice as likely to admit to it than males. Then came another damning report, Missed

Opportunities, which found that young people in the UK wait an average of 10 years before they receive proper treatment. Ten years. The mind truly boggles.

This is the thing with mental illness – if it’s caught early, it’s often very treatable. A decade of suffering later, it isn’t. Which brings me back to what my daughter said at the swings the other day. Though it stunned me, I’ve decided that knowing mummies and daddies sometimes get a bit sad isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I wrote this book because I didn’t want my daughter to grow up in a world where people felt unable to admit to mental illness – if you’re aware that life doesn’t always bring joy, then you’re better equipped to deal with the times when it inevitably brings you sadness.

Later that night, I was reading my daughter a story in which a princess lived happily ever after. I stroked her forehead until she fell asleep. As I lay there next to her, breathing in every second of that precious moment, I resolved to teach her not just about how to be happy – but how to be unhappy, too. Because only through accepting both will we find true contentment.

‘Knowing that mummies and daddies get sad isn’t a bad thing’