Recently, and not for the first time, I felt a thick throb of recognition when Caroline Flack’s mum Christine talked about the loss of her beloved daughter ahead of a new documentary about Caroline’s death.
“Her work was her main coping mechanism,” Christine told The Guardian of Caroline’s life-long mental-health struggles – which included suicidality and self-harm – making it clear that her career as a TV presenter was both an escape valve and kept entirely separate from her private difficulties. “She was really ashamed. She didn’t want to be known for that.”
Her words sent me back 11 years to my own suicide attempt while I was at the height of my career in magazines, editing Time Out New York and living in Manhattan. It was not my first; I’d struggled with depression and self-harm since the age of seven.
When I eventually wrote about it, years later, this was the main thing people were struck by: how could I be so successful, living a life that many others might want, and at the same time, secretly be in psychological hell?
What they didn’t realise – what Christine observed so heartbreakingly about Caroline – is that your career, success, can be both the problem and the solution. That you create two lives – one public, one private – and work frantically to keep them apart.
I thought work would save me, convinced each “dream” job would fuse my mental fractures, make me feel that I was worth something. That each award would fill the absence in me, the one I didn’t realise then was due to Complex PTSD, after a childhood of repeated physical and sexual violence.
Yet, the harder and longer I worked, the more I achieved on one end, the deeper I was propelled into illness on the other. Between long hours, blackout drinking, cutting, and performing professionally, it was only a matter of time before, much like a rubber band pulled too wide and tight, I snapped.
When I intentionally overdosed on prescription pills and alcohol, and was then sectioned, my immediate priority – not in the hours afterwards, but the minutes – was making sure no one would know. My professional exception was the magazine’s deputy editor who I (unfairly) asked to cover for me and tell execs I was hospitalised due to my endometriosis. After being released from the psych ward weeks later, I was back at my desk by 730am the following morning.
While this was the most tricky smoke and mirrors act, it wasn’t my first. There was the night two years prior when I cut my arm and needed serious treatment, but didn’t dare go to hospital in case they held me and I’d be forced to explain to work. And the one 10 years before that, when I overdosed for the first time and swore my immediate boss to secrecy so my “reputation” wasn’t obliterated, and my new life and career in London media whipped away.
Not to mention, over the years, the totally-not-me bangles and bracelets I wore stacked up to cover my cuts, the dissociation episodes I’d literally work through (my brain disconnecting from both my body and the world until I’d lose touch with reality), even as I thought I might be forced to jump through the office window to stop the unbearable distress of losing your mind and fearing it’s gone forever.
In today’s seemingly mental health friendly world, this may all seem surprising, even melodramatic. But the shame and stigma of mental ill-health – especially for women – a decade ago was overwhelming. I still believe it would have been the end of my career had I fessed up, or written about it earlier than I did in 2020. And I knew back then that I wouldn’t survive the shame.
This is what we now know Caroline felt at the prospect of her self-harming being made public – police bodycam captured her seriously injured and bleeding – during her upcoming trial for common assault against her boyfriend, texting a pal: “I don’t think I can cope with the shame of it all.”
With her profile and the media’s track-record in its treatment of her, I cannot imagine the sheer, blinding, all-consuming panic she must have experienced. The feeling that she couldn’t live through it, that there was no way out.
Before my suicide attempt in New York, I vividly remember thinking: “If I survive this, I’m really going to want to die. And if I don’t, thank god I won’t be around when my secrets are exposed.” The ones that would be told either way via the self-inflicted marks on my body, the dark words on my phone, the different versions of my life that I’d sold to my friends and family being put together.
And I was sure of the consequences of this exposure: people who once respected me, rated me, trusted me, loved me, would no longer feel that way. Would reject me. Would think I was, well, mad. And bad. A liar, a fraud, selfish, stupid.
Today, 11 years on from that suicide attempt and five years on from Caroline’s death, I know three things: that those “consequences” aren’t true (well, not for those who matter anyway), that I was lucky to be locked up when neither I or those who cared for me could protect me from myself, and that mental ill-health is now more spoken of.
But – and this is a big but – I’m not sure how much brighter the big, full picture is. How much better we are. We coo “be kind” and then scream abuse at each other through anonymous online avatars; tell people in world-ending pain that they can be fixed just by “talking to someone”; inform those accessing medical diagnosis and care that the increasing stats show they’re not ill but simply lacking “resilience”.
And I’m deeply frustrated to say that we still need our successful women, especially those in the public eye like Caroline, to be shiny and smiley and sadness-free – certainly flaw and f**k-up-free. We still subject them to insane, unsustainable scrutiny. Do you, do we, actually want to understand the darkness and difficulty (and yes, joy, too) women like Caroline hold? Women like me?
To know us, any of us, is to understand the messiness, the complexity and the contradictions. Only then will we be seen, really and truly as we are – not who we’ve been forced to carve ourselves into being – and only then will we no longer need to hide, to be swallowed by the quicksand of shame.
In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
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