Brighton journalist Julie Burchill has movingly described her late son’s painful last years struggling with mental illness in a typically candid feature for the Sunday Times.
The writer revealed earlier this month that Jack Landesman had taken his own life aged just 29 on Facebook after years battling depression and drug addiction.
In yesterday’s Sunday Times, she catalogued the many attempts she had made to try and get him to seek help, and how each time he had abandoned medical treatment in favour of street drugs.
She said: “The next 10 years were a cycle of hope and despair, as he kept taking his meds, improving, then, when feeling a bit better, promptly abandoning them and taking off to smoke skunk.
“(In my opinion, people with extreme mental-health issues should be forcibly injected with the medication which helps them — screw human rights. How grotesque that the state incessantly nannies and lectures and taxes the non-mad over what they ingest, and lets the insane do as they please!)
“He read a lot of holistic hippie rubbish on the internet about how “bad” antidepressants are — while just starting on his long vocation of consuming filthy street drugs by the bucketful, ironically.”
She also spoke of how he tried to get his life back on track by studying at the British Institute of Modern Music in Brighton, only to drop out two weeks before graduating in 2009 after smoking too much dope with the friends he had made through his recovery.
She said: “Again, the heartbreak of hope. Yes, my boy was going out and meeting people. The downside of this was that he was smoking vast quantities of dope, and people with mental illnesses are probably not improved by a drug that can be harmless to those who are tough and sane.”
She added: “I began to suspect the actuality of his “illness”, which seemed to be especially incapacitating during the daylight hours, when he had me kowtowing around him like a superannuated Stepford wife, but somehow miraculously lifted as the sun went down and the smell of marijuana rose along the Brighton esplanade.”
And she described how she herself “caught” his depression, after the strain of trying to look after him led to her own depression.
In response to Ms Burchill’s call for those with severe mental illness to be forced to take their drugs, Vicki Nash, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Mind, the mental health charity, said: “Under the Mental Health Act the state can step in and make decisions about someone’s care and treatment when they are unwell.
“Being detained under the Mental Health Act is one of the most serious things that can happen to you in terms of your mental health and should only be done as a last resort.
“Every effort should be made to involve people in decisions about their care so that they participate willingly and with autonomy even when they are at their most vulnerable.
“If the state must step in, people should still be treated in the least restrictive and coercive way possible. Above all, every one of us has the right to be treated with compassion and dignity if we find ourselves in mental health crisis.”
The fee for yesterday’s article has been donated to the charities Calm, which works to prevent male suicide (CALM: Campaign Against Living Miserably) and Sobs, which helps those bereaved by suicide (uk-sobs.org.uk).
