Mental illness doesn’t define a person, but it can heavily influence family dynamics. Photo / 123RF
Twenty-five years after her mother’s death, Sophie Scott reflects on how her parents’ undiagnosed mental illnesses shaped her.
Our house was filled with music and hilarity. But it was also full of unspoken anxieties and undiagnosed mental illness. I wouldn’t truly understand it until long after my mother’s death, when I was just 14 – a death that left that once loud, vibrant and painstakingly well-kept house in quiet disarray.
Throughout my childhood, Mum hosted fantastic dinner parties for charitable causes. Guests saw her in her element: effervescent. She was like a movie star, funny and sharp and off-piste with her wit. In a different time, she would have been an actress, but the only stage she had to perform on was the domestic one. So she became an all-singing, all-dancing homemaker who walked down the street belting out show tunes with my father and went through phases of painting everything in our house gold, including family heirlooms.
But what was bright and beautiful in company was too much for the banality of day-to-day life. She seemed to need to remain in constant motion. I don’t think I ever saw her sit down in the house. You couldn’t have a conversation with her inside those four walls. The only time she watched television was when she was ironing, in front of horror movies. The house was run like a military operation, always with some domestic mission to accomplish: every day she would clean it from top to bottom, each week polish a chandelier, and prepare for weekends away by putting plastic food wrap on the shelves to protect them from dust.
Mum would have been happy to hear people say “It’s like a hotel here”, but I didn’t want to live in a hotel where any mess would cause her to snap. I wanted to kick off my shoes and chat with my mum. But in our family, you didn’t sit at the dinner table and have a discussion. Instead, we would write songs together and perform them, or share music that touched us.
Both my parents were really moved by music. Crying while listening to symphonies was an acceptable way to show emotion, even to gain approval. But suggesting to Mum that she seek help for her apparent anxiety, OCD and ADHD, as my older sister often tried to, was not.
The issues that held our family captive were never allowed to be articulated. Like so much else in our lives, they lived in the abstract – yet their presence was overwhelmingly physical.
The atmosphere rubbed off on me. For as long as I can remember, I felt as if I was standing on a precipice, waiting for the next bad thing to happen. I had horrifying night terrors all through childhood and would sleep on my parents' floor until I was in double digits. My recurring nightmare was of the house being attacked. Mum took me to doctors and even homeopaths to help me but the dreams went on and stopped only in the last five or six years. I didn’t think I was anxious but every night betrayed the truth.
My darling mum was first diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 4. She beat it but it returned in my early teens and eventually killed her. So that threat of “something bad” coming in unbidden was always there and I believe the spectre of her cancer exacerbated her obsessions. She tried to control her environment because she couldn’t control her body.
The slightest change to the fabric of the home could cause Mum to go from humming with frantic energy to vibrating with distress. I can still remember the way she would almost pant as she marched around the house busying herself. Unfortunately, we all frequently did different things to unsettle the balance. I would rebel and pretend I didn’t care. My sister, who is now a psychotherapist specialising in anxiety and intrusive thoughts, would try desperately to “fix” her by suggesting therapy, coming up against a brick wall every time.
And Dad … well, Dad had his own preoccupations. He was a lawyer and the rest of the time a composer. If it wasn’t about his legal work or his lifelong project, a musical he’d written about Italian unification, he couldn’t hear it. On the one hand, there were the most dramatic rows when, in a frenzy of hyper-organisation, Mum would simply chuck Dad’s legal files in the bin but, on the other, I remember her performing vignettes from his beloved play, bringing them to life for him – indulging the fixation that brought him joy. He was a very talented composer but his obsession left no space for anything else. Both my parents were wonderfully creative and magical in their thinking but they forced us all to live in a make-believe world as a result. Dad lived until he was 80 and never a day went by that he didn’t talk about bringing that musical to the stage.
Mum’s life, however, was cut short when she was 52 and I was 14. We all came unstuck. Dad drifted from us and our once-pristine house became a shell. Something about the silence of it haunted me for a long time – even now, I don’t enjoy spending time around people or in homes that are very quiet. I find it eerie.
Her death broke our hearts and broke my sister, too. Vikki was 28 when Mum died and I moved in with her. The age difference is unusual, I know. I think Mum coped better with just one child at a time and it made her part-surrogate mum, part-soulmate to me. But Vikki was soon overwhelmed by our family’s propensity to obsession.
Looking back, I can see that Mum had, at the very least, OCD and Dad was simply obsessive but Vikki succumbed to something called “Pure O”. This form of obsessive compulsive disorder manifests in intrusive thoughts. She was racked by an illogical guilt that she hadn’t “saved” Mum. Whether from the cancer or mental illness I don’t know, but the two things became one in Vikki’s mind.
The weight of it was almost unbearable. I couldn’t keep listening to her ask me to convince her that she was a good person every night. I found that utterly mad because she was – she is – an amazing person. It had a domino effect. My sister was destroyed by her perceived failure to rescue our mum, and now I had to rescue my sister.
Almost overnight my mother’s death and my sister’s survivor’s guilt turned me from a naughty schoolgirl into a star student. I’d always believed I was the only “normal” one in the family and now I had to prove it. I became very insular and isolated myself from everyone apart from my best friend, Florence. People don’t speak about mental health and even less about death, so I felt like a leper at my all-girls school. When Florence was busy, I would hole up in the art room. I didn’t feel safe among other girls my age; they felt like aliens.
Despite all this, I believed I was fine – that I had let it all rinse off me like water off a duck’s back. Of course, I was wrong. Water finds a way in through even the tiniest crack and that’s what living among illness did to me, in the end. My sister, all credit to her, did what our darling parents had never been able to and got herself help and healed. But in my late 20s, I burnt out. It wasn’t some spectacular burst of flames but a fizzle when I realised that, in holding everything up, I’d lost myself. I snapped over a minor disagreement with my sister in the car and opened the door threatening to fling myself out. I was so overwhelmed.
What saved me was seeking help. I spoke to a psychiatrist and returned to the therapist I’d first been to before Mum’s death, who helped me redraw the blueprint of my life. I had already begun training in psychotherapy, and as I studied it further and eventually became a psychotherapist myself, I realised I could channel the saviour complex I’d developed into helping others without sacrificing myself: a way to turn my pain into purpose. I wrote my book You Are Not Alone In This as a beacon of hope for those supporting loved ones with mental health challenges.
Now that I’m married and a mother, I see that I’m like my own mum in many ways, good and bad. I worry about the state of the house and the state of the world. I’m still that little girl who had night terrors, fearful something bad is going to happen, this time to my daughter. But anxiety is passed on, whether biologically or through learnt behaviour, so I’m very conscious to model that, no matter how afraid you are, you don’t let it rule your life.
I’ve worked a lot on myself and processed my childhood and reached a place where I am truly happy and fulfilled. I want my daughter to experience the world and enjoy it to the full. Unfortunately, I think my parents’ obsessions made their worlds much smaller than they needed to be.
My sister put me into therapy a week before Mum died, and thank goodness. I took the bus from school, in my uniform with my big bag on my back and I had no idea what I was meant to talk about, but I don’t think I’d have survived without that outlet. If you can find one person to explore your messy feelings with, you can start to shed the shame and secrecy that keeps you stressed.
One that is uniquely yours. I didn’t manage to do this as a child but, as an adult, from my career as an entrepreneur and magazine founder to becoming a psychotherapist and author, I found direction in things other than propping up my family. Doing so helped me become my own person.
Don’t diminish your own feelings. Take up your share of space and, brutal as it may sound, draw boundaries around conversations. In the end, not feeding my sister’s obsession contributed to her breaking the cycle herself. Mental illness is just one aspect of a person, but if it’s all you both talk about, it’s all they start to feel they are – and that does you both a disservice.
You Are Not Alone in This by Sophie Scott is available now.
As told to Libby Galvin.
Kickstart the day with rich slices of brioche with cheesy bèchamel sauce and fried egg.