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'DEAR JENNIE ROBERTS'

By Nick Child

Jennie Roberts wrote a book 'Dear Psychiatrist' (1995, Lutterworth press; Cambridge) on her experiences of trying to get her son helped. At a tragically young age Tom killed himself. I reviewed the book in the same form as she had written it.

Dear Jennie Roberts

Thank you very much indeed for persevering to get 'Dear Psychiatrist' published. It is an important and very poignant book of a letter. Your thoughtful generosity in communicating what Tom, you and your family went through is contrasts with some of the professionals. Other families could, for sure, tell a similar tale of grief and frustration in the pursuit of coherent sense, advice and help for their child. Your family's potential for achievement and joy is apparent even through your carefully moderated and enlivened critical account of what blocked it.

Your struggle to communicate and integrate Tom's life in the face of his communication and other difficulties - posthumously diagnosed as Aspergers Syndrome - required at least basic respect, integration, communication and help from the various agencies. Instead, as you dramatise it, you found yourself in a sustained courtroom experience straight from Alice in Wonderland.

What a tragic shame that Tom and you had pulled through all that to a more settled young adulthood, only to find in his suicide and his suicide note, so clear a communication of what it had been like for him in earlier years - a communication yet again that left no chance of responding.

You have reason to be angrier. Your simple appeals to those involved locally remain unanswered. As a child psychiatrist myself, I can only respond on collective behalf of all child and family mental health and other services everywhere, by apologising for our failings with you and everywhere. As a helping professional yourself, you'll know some of the difficulties on the agencies' side of things - workload, short resources, limited knowledge and limited training in a complex, multifactorial, multi-agency, and difficult field. But this is no excuse. I was reminded of the need for professionals to be humble, to talk to other professionals more, to be partners with clients, to be very careful when legal processes impinge, and to be able to say "I don't know" as often as it's true.

I hope that we are all learning and improving. To help this, your book should be read widely and routinely in all disciplines and trainings. Though your family may not have needed family therapy as such, you certainly needed all the helpers involved to be working within a more inclusive and communicative "family-systems approach", as we would call it.

Yours sincerely

Nick Child
Child and Family Psychiatrist
Child and Family Clinic, Motherwell.

nick.child@virgin.net