‘I didn’t know how to cope with my desperate Dad’
Matthew Wythe knows how crucial it is to help men who feel desperate. Margarette Driscoll hears his heartbreaking story
It was around 3.30am when Matthew Wythe’s mother shook him awake. He was 16 years old and all the certainties of childhood collapsed as she told him his father, Richard, had tried to commit suicide. There was an ambulance waiting outside and she couldn’t be sure how long she would be at the hospital: she was relying on him to look after his nine-year-old sister, Louise.
Matthew, now 20, still thinks of that night with a sense of disbelief. His mother, Melanie, had woken up without her husband by her side. “She went into the kitchen and found him lying on the floor. There were pills around. He could just about mutter a few words and said ‘I just wanted to end it all’. It was a complete shock.”
Richard later made three further attempts to end his life. He had managed to keep his deep depression a secret from the family, but in retrospect, Matthew says, there were clues; his father would barely speak when he got home from work as a building site manager and had taken to going to bed at 8.30pm. “It was weird but we just thought: ‘He works hard, he’s getting older, he’s tired’,” says Matthew. None of them realised this withdrawal was a typical feature of male depression.
“Dad and I used to play golf and snooker together. He was the one who used to instigate a game of golf at the weekend and that stopped, so I guess that was a sign, too,” he muses, “but I just thought he was busy, and I was revising for my exams, so it probably suited me.”
Family life went on as normal, though Matthew now realises he, his sister and mother became closer as “Dad faded into the background”.
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month show that three in four of the UK’s 6,188 suicides in 2015 were male, part of a consistent pattern over the past few years. Research by the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), a charity set up in 2006 to prevent male suicide, has found that fewer than half of men who contemplate ending their lives speak to anyone about how they are feeling. One in three say they didn’t voice their feelings because they simply did not know how to. Others were afraid of causing a fuss or making their families worried.
Among the most common reasons for men feeling vulnerable are failure at work or school, money problems and low self-esteem. “CALM is pushing for more in-depth understanding of the challenges facing men and how services can best support them,” says James Scroggs, the charity’s chair of trustees.
Suicide – or attempted suicide – is difficult for any member of the family to understand; Matthew felt confused and distraught that his father was no longer someone he could look up to for strength and support. In the aftermath of the first suicide attempt, he was in turmoil. “I didn’t see Dad for 48 hours and I went through a huge number of emotions, from hatred and anger to sympathy and guilt at not having realised anything was wrong.”
When Richard, now 47, came home, “we hardly spoke for about six months. He never really mentioned what had happened or explained. I think he felt a little bit ashamed.”
He learnt later that Richard’s problems could be traced to childhood. “I knew he’d had a hard time. He’d grown up in care and had been depressed as a child, but I never knew the full story and had no idea how much it had affected him,” he says. “Growing up, I thought of him as a pretty happy guy. As a teenager, you’re just tuned into your own life – you don’t put any thought into what anyone else might be feeling.”
Matthew, who manages a lettings agency in Guildford, Surrey, was in the middle of his GCSEs when the first crisis occurred. Ironically, he says his father’s problems improved his grades; he was “always in the library” during his A-level studies in order to be at home as little as possible.
But crisis followed crisis. “Dad started taking anti-depressants and for a while everything seemed fine, but every time you thought things were back to normal, it would happen again,” says Matthew.
“You could see Guildford railway station from an upstairs window, and one day, just over a year after the first attempt, when Mum had been trying to get hold of Dad for hours, I looked out and saw three ambulances and a police car by the station. I went to her and said: ‘Do you think by any chance they might have something to do with us?’”
Matthew drove there to find his father in the back of an ambulance. “I thought: ‘Oh, God, here we go again’. It was a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. Living with it is so draining. For a while, I went from sympathy to a sort of disdain for him.”
Richard made another suicide attempt with sleeping pills shortly afterwards, and in 2014 went to the edge of a motorway, intending to throw himself under a lorry. Since then, a mixture of anti-depressants and therapy has stabilised him.
Matthew will be running his first marathon next year to raise money for CALM, which operates a free helpline and webchat service, publishes a quarterly lifestyle magazine to entertain and inform young men, and offers bereavement counselling to families who have lost someone to suicide. He still lives at home, partly to support his mother, who “has been amazing throughout”, and partly because his father – thanks to talking through his problems in therapy – now feels more able to be open with his family. “My mum is the one who talks him through the bad times. She’s a naturally cheerful and optimistic person and I think her focus has been on keeping everything as normal as possible for us. She’s never really opened up about how she feels and how she’s coped,” he admits. “Her focus is on making sure there’s food on the table and our lives run smoothly. It must have been really hard on her but it never shows, she’s always tried to shield us from the worst of it.”
His dad still has bad days, Matthew says, but “the difference is everyone knows now – before, he was covering it up”. “Everyone’s learning to deal with it, which makes things easier. I think I’m changing, too. It used to be that if he’d mentioned he was having a bad day I’d find the quickest way to get out of the house, but now I make a point of sitting down and talking to him about it.
“Dad now likens depression to alcoholism – even if you’ve stopped drinking, you’re still an alcoholic, but in recovery. He sees his depression the same way – he thinks he’ll have bad days for the rest of his life.” Crucially, though, “he’s a recovering depressive”. For the Wythe family, that’s all that matters.
‘I went through all the emotions, from hatred and anger to sympathy and guilt’