No parent should ever have to read their child’s suicide note. In 2021, my daughter Ella was 16 and had just suffered a nervous breakdown. I was tidying her bedroom and found a sheaf of notes she’d written.Some of them said — bleakly — that she didn’t want to live. Another was a letter to all of us — myself, my husband and her older sister — saying she was really sad, she loved us but leaving us was the best thing because she was such a burden. As a mother, you’d think that I’d break down. But, by this point we had already travelled so far, that all I felt was a numb horror.Sadly, our family’s story is far from unique. We all know there’s a mental health crisis; in 2021 it was thought that one in six children aged five to 16 probably had a mental health problem, and around 7 per cent of all UK children has attempted suicide by the age of 17, with one in four saying they had self-harmed. So our experience will probably resonate with many parents.
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