EPISODE 16: DENISE COLLINS
[Andy Miles] Hello and welcome to “Akathisia Stories,” a podcast co-production of MISSD and Studio C.
MISSD, the Medication-Induced Suicide Prevention and Education Foundation in Memory of Stewart Dolin, is a unique nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring the memory of Stewart and other victims of akathisia by raising awareness and educating the public about the dangers of akathisia. MISSD aims to ensure that people suffering from akathisia's symptoms are accurately diagnosed so that needless deaths are prevented. The foundation advocates truth in disclosure, honesty in reporting, and legitimate drug trials.
On this episode, we hear from Denise Collins, whose husband, John, died in 2018, nine days after going on the antidepressant Citalopram, better known in the United States as Celexa. Earlier this year, her book, What Happened To John?: A memoir of enduring love, mental health, and suicide, was released and is available now in paperback and for Kindle. Denise spent three years researching, writing, and doing her best to recover following the tragic death of John and her experience of becoming a widow. The book opens on what Denise calls Day Zero, Monday, the 29th of October, 2018, a day that began "quite unremarkably," she says, but later that day, two uniformed police officers appeared at her front door. "In that moment," she writes, "I was blissfully unaware that life as I knew it had ended and that a living nightmare was about to begin."
[Denise Collins reading from her book] Staring at these strangers, these aliens so totally out of place in my home, I couldn't make sense of what they were telling me. From what sounded a long way off, I heard my voice pierce the white noise flooding my head, roaring so loud it obliterated every other sound, even the barking dogs. I was screaming.
His life was finished and so was mine. I was still breathing. My heart still beating. My body was alive, but life as I knew it had ended at the same moment that train hit John.
Simultaneously, I was in more pain than I’ve ever experienced and also numb.
For the rest of the world, this was just another ordinary day. Other people were absorbed in mundane activities. Waking. Working. Shopping. Looking after children. For me it was the beginning of a life I neither expected nor wanted. A life I had no idea how to live. It was the first day John was no longer in the world. He was dead. I was his widow. Everything had changed.
[Andy Miles] My thanks to Denise for reading those passages from her memoir. We’ll hear my conversation with Denise shortly.
MISSD is an authentic, grassroots nonprofit and accepts no funding from pharmaceutical companies. All MISSD programming and educational materials are freely available to anyone, anywhere. Please support MISSD by sharing this podcast and consider making a tax-free contribution at MISSD.co.
Denise Collins is an independent psychological therapist, coach, and trainer with over two decades experience. Since becoming widowed she also trained as a “Happiness Facilitator” using evidence-based positive psychology approaches, and as a grief educator, with David Kessler, using the principle that healthy bereavement requires us to grieve fully and also to live fully.
Her website, denise-collins.com, is aimed at what she terms "corporate clients." She coaches female executives on developing their authentic leadership style and building a sustainable work/life balance.
Her specialties are:
Guiding People In Discovering and Celebrating Their Unique Personal Power (UPP©)
Supporting Those Navigating Life After Loss
and Teaching Resilience And How To Embrace Change.
Denise can be contacted via the website, denise-collins.com. She promises to personally reply to all emails and messages. We spoke recently over Zoom.
DC: It was announced just this week, actually, that in the U.K. there are now 8.5 million people taking antidepressant drugs, and that has gone up by 500,000 people in the last year. So 8.5 million people. So there are an awful lot of people who take these drugs, and there are an awful lot of people who are fiercely protective of these drugs. You know, I personally – the people that I’ve come across, in terms of John’s story and the book, have been very interested, shocked, kind, but I’m sure there are an awful lot of other people who would – as they do with the academic evidence – disregard it. I mean, I don’t think we know the full extent because I think what happens a lot is that the negative side effects of the drugs are mistaken for increasing symptoms of mental health issues, so it’s the case, you know, that they don’t look at – if someone’s deteriorating or experiencing the negative side effects, the doctor is very unlikely to think, well, is it potentially a problem with the drugs? They’re much more likely to say, oh, well, we just need to adjust your dose or we need to change the particular drug that you’re on. So although we don’t know the full extent, you know, it’s reckoned about one in 100 people will experience severe side effects. That’s a lot of people. So for each one of those people, you know – and that was one of the reasons that I wanted to write the book because, to a certain extent, if you quote statistics of people, they don’t really care, you know, but to tell a story about a real person puts it into some kind of perspective. OK, maybe – even if it is “only” – in inverted commas – one in 100, for John, for me, for our family, friends, everyone that was impacted, that one person is everything.
AM: One in one.
DC: Absolutely. One in one that can’t be replaced.
AM: Yeah.
So you met John in 1985 and married him in late 1986.
DC: Yes. Yes.
AM: Can you talk about your early impressions of John, the kind of person he was, and then why you decided he was the one for you.
DC: (Laughs.) John was – we met at a gym and there was actually another guy at the gym who was much more flash and loud, and John was his friend. And John was kind of always there and he was very easy to talk to and he was really friendly and we became friends. And it was an interesting one, really, because we sort of spent some time together, you know, not a huge amount of time but we spent some time together and then I was – this actually isn’t in the book but I’d gone out with a friend, another friend of mine, and he’d said to me, are you dating anybody? You know, is there anybody special? And I said, well, no, not really; there’s this one guy that kind of, you know, always seems to be there and it was only when I was telling my friend about him that I thought – and he said to me, oh, do you like him? And I went, yeah, I like him. And I thought, actually, I really like him. Yeah, I really like him! (Laughs.) And he was really funny, really easy to get along with, had a really optimistic and positive attitude to life. When I met him he was in remission from cancer and he had – he said that going through that experience just really made him incredibly positive towards life, and quite stoic, in a way, in terms of if you’ve got a problem and there’s something you can do about it, do it; if you’ve got a problem and there isn’t anything you can do about it, accept it.
AM: And would you say that that sort of philosophy kind of guided him through the years that you knew each other?
DC: Yeah. I mean, not, you know –
AM: More or less.
DC: More or less. You know, we were together for 33 years so we had ups and downs and we fell out and we fought and then we made up and we loved each other, and sometimes life was just ordinary and nothing much was happening, sometimes he would get worried about things, sometimes I would get worried about things. But I would say that he – yeah, he could see the funny side of things; that was one of the great things about being with him that he had quite an irreverent sense of humor and could be very silly in terms of humor.
AM: And do you think other people who knew him would talk about some of the same traits, like his humor and that sort of thing?
DC: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Friends of our kids, even after, you know, John died would say, you know, always loved coming to your house because John was just a riot. He was just so funny. Yeah.
AM: And backing up, then, again to that time when you first met, you were at that time, both of you, only kind of in your mid- to late 20s.
DC: Yep, that’s right.
AM: And you by then had a son from a previous marriage.
DC: Yes. So I got married for the first time when I was 18 and I had my first son when I was 20. By the time I was 21, that marriage was over.
AM: So, I mean, by the time that you were both in your mid- to late 20s, you had been married and divorced and had a child; he had had cancer.
DC: Yeah.
AM: So your life experiences were not insignificant at that point.
DC: (Laughs.) No. No. He’d also traveled; he’d lived and worked abroad. Yeah. So even then – I mean, I think I was 24 when we met, 23, 24. He was three years older than me.
AM: So you had a couple of kids yourselves.
DC: We did.
AM: Liam and Phoebe.
DC: Yes.
AM: So in 2018, John was prescribed an SSRI and a sleeping pill.
DC: Yeah, at the same time.
AM: Yeah. After he was struggling, having received the bad news of his twin brother’s cancer returning in stage four. You write that you’d been on antidepressants for years, so while you knew that they weren’t “happy pills,” you hoped the doctor might give John something to take the edge off and help him sleep. So your experience hadn’t really, you know, shown these drugs to be too worrisome, but they didn’t work for him.
DC: Yes. I’d been on and off antidepressants for years. Year and years and years. And I think, on reflection, what they did do was to numb a lot of my emotions and to possibly make me less empathetic and a bit more dissociated, and it’s only been after – you know, it’s really only been since John’s death that I’ve kind of reflected on that and since coming off of them completely myself.
With John, he wasn’t sleeping and after getting the news about his brother – it was a very short time frame because he died nine days after starting the prescription. So he got the news about Jim; he wasn’t sleeping; he was feeling anxious, sleep-deprived. I was actually going away to do some work for five days and I said to him, why don’t you go to the doctor to see if he can give you something? John did consult the GP surgery. He didn’t – he wasn’t actually seen in person. I didn’t know this until after he died but he wasn’t actually seen in person; he was given a telephone consultation and the doctor prescribed sleeping tablets and antidepressants on that same prescription. And I do wonder if that was significant because both of those drugs – the Zopiclone, which is the sleeping tablet, the Citalopram, which is the SSRI – both have side effects, and actually, one of the side effects – one of the side effects – of the SSRI is sleep disturbance, and, you know, one of the side effects of the sleeping tablet can be anxiety, and you’ve got two chemicals that are possibly reacting.
AM: And in reference to the doctor not seeing him in person, as you say in your book, if John was sick enough to be given powerful psychiatric drugs, how come he wasn’t sick enough to warrant a face-to-face appointment?
DC: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, when – after John’s death, when I questioned the GP about this, the GP actually said that he had no concerns that John was suicidal when he prescribed those drugs, that he considered – and this is really, really amazing. The doctor actually used the word “stable.” “I considered him psychologically stable,” which begs the question, OK, well, if he was psychologically stable, why give him an SSRI? Which, to me, references this wider problem that I believe there is with these drugs that they are given to people who are distressed. So John was distressed, which I think is a normal reaction to receiving bad news. I don’t doubt that he felt depressed. I don’t doubt that he felt anxious –
AM: As anyone would.
DC: Yes. Because feeling depressed, “I’m feeling anxious,” are not signs of illness; they’re actually signs of a normal response to abnormal levels of stress.
AM: So, as you said, he went on these drugs and nine days later he was dead. During that time, you made the observation, looking back, that the drugs didn’t seem to be helping him.
DC: Yeah.
AM: But there was no level of alarm that had been raised in terms of his reaction to the drugs in those nine days.
DC: No. Again, hindsight is a brilliant thing and there were a couple of occasions during that nine days where I thought he seemed more agitated but put it down to the situation. On reflection, I think it’s possible that actually he was showing signs of akathisia.
AM: And what would those have been?
DC: Well, the increased agitation, the increased, you know, inability to kind of sit still and to just chill. So, you know, small things like getting really, really, really upset and irritated that he couldn’t find a parking space. Then, when we went out for a meal actually with his brother, you know, literally, “OK, right, that’s it, right, well, we’ve all had dessert, I’m going to pay the bill.” Well, hang on, you know, we’re all just sitting here having a conversation, you know. So they might have seemed small things but they were out of character.
AM: But at the time it wasn’t an obvious red flag where you were –
DC: No. You know, I honestly can’t say that, you know – I think if that was the case, you know – you know, I guess I can only speak from my experience, but I guess when anyone dies by suicide, everyone’s left thinking what else should we have done, what else could we have done, what did we miss? But if I’m being totally honest, yes, he was more agitated and more distressed, but we put that down to the situation.
AM: And when you got the terrible news from the visiting police officers, there was no connection in your mind between who he was that morning when you said goodbye and that action; there was just no explanation that you could think of.
DC: No. There really, really wasn’t. Not at all. It was completely unexpected, completely out of the blue, which again, following John’s death, after speaking to other people who had lost family members in similar situations, that was a reoccurring statement that came up from other people, you know, this was out of the blue, this was out of the blue.
AM: So as you started to do that research you did come to the conclusion that this must have been the drugs.
DC: OK, so, I had no previous concerns about antidepressants, about SSRIs. In fact, you know, during my career as a therapist and a coach I would actively encourage clients to go to their doctors, to see if they needed, you know, medication, antidepressant medication. So it’s not like I kind of immediately thought well, it’s the drugs. Because it was completely out of the blue, I started to look into – to kind of try and find out if there was anything that I didn’t know about, so I contacted the doctors to get a hold of John’s medical records to see if there was any physical problems. You know, I did think, you know, was he ill –
AM: Like he had gotten a diagnosis of –
DC: Yeah. I also then thought, well, OK, did he have any financial problems? Was there that? So went through the – looking into finances. There wasn’t anything there that I didn’t know about. We even managed to look at his emails and his phone records, and there was nothing. And literally the – it was almost kind of by – it was part of that process of looking, OK, well, what was different? What had happened? OK, he was on these drugs; let’s look at these drugs. And it was as simple as let’s google Citalopram and suicide, and bam – (laughs) – there’s information, there’s stories, there’s, you know, websites.
AM: An endless stream of them.
DC: Absolutely. And books that had been written on, you know, on the efficacy of these drugs, whether or not they actually do work or whether it’s a placebo. It was just a torrent, an absolute – it was like a tidal wave of all of this information, that kind of connected dots between these drugs and what happened to John.
AM: And backing up just a little bit, at that time – for example, maybe that morning in a conversation or something, were there references to things that you were going to do in a few days or anything like that?
DC: Yep. We had a trip to Prague booked. Liam’s birthday was coming up, Phoebe’s birthday was coming up. So we were kind of talking about just different things and obviously talking about Jim and, you know, seeing John’s family and stuff like that. It was all very – we were also – I mean, I’m not sure I talk about this in the book, actually, but we’d also made the decision to hire a personal trainer and we were going to start doing some physical workouts together. And it was interesting because that was how we’d met; we’d met in a gym, you know, years and years before.
AM: So clearly there was just no evidence whatsoever that John was contemplating anything like an end to his life.
DC: No. I mean, literally his words to me when he left – he was a self-employed plumber, he was going out to do some estimates, and he said to me, if they’re small jobs, I’ll do them; if they’re not I’m just going to do the estimate and I’m going to come back. Yeah. There was no indication.
AM: You mentioned earlier that consulted with his doctor and that sort of the thing, the bank statements, to look for clues. You also looked for a suicide note, which the police had not found and in your case you thought maybe he had left something for you in a certain place, and you were wrong; there was nothing.
DC: There was nothing. John had driven to the station in his car and he used a diary for, you know, a physical diary to write his jobs and things down in, and the diary and the pen was on the front seat of the car, as it would be because he always had it with him, so he had the means to write a physical note, if he had chosen to. He had his phone with him; he could have sent a message, if he had chosen to. And I – you know, I did wake up one morning and thought, right, if he’s left me a note, I know exactly where it’s going to be. It was one of those thoughts; I just literally woke up with it, so my brain was obviously processing even when I was asleep; I just woke up. We’ve got an envelope that is a fire-proof envelope that we keep special documents in like copies of our will and passports and things like that, birth certificates, and I thought if, you know, if he was going to leave something he would have left it there. And clearly there wasn’t anything.
AM: So you write in the book of the first minutes after hearing of your husband’s death: “Part of me didn’t want anyone else to join me in this nightmare. If anyone else knew, that would somehow make it real, and if it was real, well, I didn’t want to inflict this pain on anyone else.” As much as I’m sure you don’t want to relive that afternoon, what would you say, thinking back on it now, four years later?
DC: It was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare.
AM: You wrote that everything was “a blur, like frames from a movie shuffled out of order, out of context.”
DC: Exactly. You know, when you see those images where, you know, there’s a figure standing still when everything else around them is just moving in a blur. It just – it was a nightmare. It felt completely unreal. And in the midst of that, there was crazy, bizarre thoughts like – well, Liam and Claudia are supposed to be going on their honeymoon; I wonder if we can not tell them and just let them go. Yeah, crazy.
AM: So you’re a psychological coach and in our previous conversation you said that that fact makes you feel worse about the whole thing, having had 20 years in the mental health field and not knowing anything about the relationship between these drugs and suicide at that time.
DC: I think there’s a couple of layers to it. You know, the first layer is the guilt, the shame, you know, why couldn’t I help the most important person in the world to me if I’ve made a career of helping other people? The second element of that is the lack of knowledge and awareness about the drugs and adhering to that thought that is so prevalent, which is, you know, these drugs are “harmless,” that they don’t have a downside to them. Yeah.
You know, one of the things that I’ve done since losing John is that I’ve actually qualified as a grief educator and one of the things that was taught on that course is that guilt is very often an emotion that the bereaved feel because we can’t bear to think that we were powerless, so it’s almost rather than accept that you’re powerless to change something or powerless to prevent something, you’d rather feel guilty because it’s almost like, you’d rather feel guilty for somehow feeling responsible than accept the fact that you’re powerless.
AM: And how did other people close to you respond to what you came to see and believe that, you know, this had been the drugs?
DC: I think some people – well, I know that some people were incredibly shocked at the amount of acknowledged information that there is available. You know, it is not disputed that these drugs cause akathisia. It is not disputed that these drugs cause some people to kill themselves. The only thing that’s disputed is how rare that actually is. And so, you know, it wasn’t just me; it wasn’t just a widow driven crazy with grief trying to find some reasons. You know, I was able to point people at the, you know, the huge amount of evidence that there is there. So some people were incredibly shocked. I’ve had some people who have had said, you know, as a result of hearing John’s story they’ve come off of medication or they’ve not gone on these drugs in the first place. Some people were more skeptical and some people kind of thought that maybe I was making excuses, either for me or for John or, you know, whatever.
I think the logic that’s often used is that if someone is taking this medication, it means they have a mental health problem. If someone dies by suicide, it means they had a mental health problem. And the step that’s actually skipped is, well, what relationship do these drugs potentially have? So it’s a kind of circular logic, you know. So someone who is distressed, as opposed to depressed, is prescribed these drugs, the negative side effects of these drugs causes them to become so disturbed that they kill themselves, but because they were taking the drugs, the reason for the suicide is cited as mental health issues. So you’ve got people who don’t have mental health issues who are being given these drugs. People are given these drugs for all kinds of things.
The amount of people who are given these drugs for pain, physical pain – so a lot of people are prescribed these drugs if there is a physical pain that either – the cause can’t be found or there’s a consideration that well, it’s a chronic condition so that’s bound to make you depressed so we might as well give you an antidepressant just in case. You know, it’s so nonsensical to me that for a very long time – and I’m not sure that the pharmaceutical companies still say this, but for a very long time, it was, well, mental health issues are created by chemical imbalance in the brain; these drugs balance the chemicals; therefore, it treats the mental illness or mental health condition. I’m not sure the pharmaceutical companies still say that because it’s not true. (Laughs.) But it’s become part of common knowledge, and so the pharmaceutical companies don’t have to say it anymore. We say it to each other! Doctors say it.
I went to a conference where Dr. Sami Timimi, who is a consultant psychiatrist within the NHS, said something which I quoted in the book which really resonated with me, and he said depression and anxiety are descriptions, they are not diagnoses. And I think the wider problem is that we are — it’s somehow implied that if we are feeling anxious, if we are feeling depressed that there is something wrong with us, that we are somehow sick or broken, rather than it may well be a normal response to an abnormal set of circumstances.
AM: Which kind of gets back to distressed versus depressed.
DC: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, OK, if you are in psychological pain, you don’t want to be in psychological pain; you want to get out of that. So we are encouraged, actively encouraged – you know, “talk about your feelings, go and seek help.” Unfortunately, the help that’s given more frequently than anything else is a prescription and in some cases there will be very severe adverse side effects.
AM: Well, if there are so many more people because of the vagaries of the last couple of years who need help and who feel depressed or anxious –
DC: And these people are feeling depressed and anxious for very good reasons, you know.
AM: Right. And if there is this backlog of, you know, available practitioners who can see them because, you know, there are a lot of people who are feeling in these ways, what can they do in lieu of getting that help? I know you’re not antidrug –
DC: No, I’m not.
AM: So, you know, what are some other things that, you know, people at this time could really benefit from?
DC: You know, it sounds really cliched to talk about some of these things, but the first thing, I think, is to normalize these feelings because if we turn people, distressed people, into patients who are sick, rather than seeing them as distressed people with problems, then we stop looking for solutions to the problems. People who are distressed for good reason – so, you know, people like John. John was worried about this brother. John was worried about the impact that his brother’s death was going to have on his family. These were very real worries, very real concerns. People are worried about their jobs, people are worried about whether or not they can pay their utility bills, people are worried about all kinds of things.
AM: And in John’s case, I would imagine he was also worried about his own cancer coming back.
DC: Absolutely, you know, because how can you not look at your twin and not reflect it back to yourself in terms of “what if?” What if?
But, you know, if we focus on the person in terms of, “ah, well, OK, well, the answer to the way that you’re feeling is to give you medication because you have a “mental health issue,” we stop looking at the other solutions. So I think, you know, the very first thing is to normalize these feelings, as unpleasant as they are, to normalize them rather than pathologize them. I think if you then normalize the feelings, you can then start to look at other things that you can do. You know, we are whole human beings. You know, we are not just kind of what goes on in our heads. We’re not just the mental health. There’s also the emotional, there’s also the spiritual, there’s also the social, there’s also the relational, you know, there’s all of these things, and I think the first thing is to stop turning people with issues, problems, very real stresses into patients who are sick, in need of a prescription. You know, yes, we need – absolutely opening up the conversation about how we feel and what we’re thinking is a good thing, but if the only solution that’s offered or the solution that’s offered most frequently is pharmacological, it’s – what’s that quote from – I think it’s Maslow: You know, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, so if the only tool at the disposal is drugs, then everything’s going to look like an illness.
AM: So it’s 2022, John died in 2018, and you said that the book took about three years to write, so just doing the math, it sounds like you got to work fairly soon on writing that, and you wrote as part of trying to process emotions and had found John’s wasn’t an isolated case, so you felt compelled to write the story; if people got to know John, you said, people might care about this issue. Have you found that to be the case?
DC: The writing – I started writing as a way of just trying to process my thoughts and my feelings and the experience and what was going on and trying to deal with the initial shock and numbness and disbelief, so the writing initially was never intended to be for any kind of public – you know, to be shared.
AM: Did you think at that point you might share it with family?
DC: No. I had no plans at all at first. But it really wasn’t until I started to make the discoveries about the drugs and the link and I was just incensed that there was so much information that was available within the field of academia, within medical circles. You know, these things are known about. You know, I can’t tell you how many professionals that I’ve spoken to and told John’s story to and they’ve said, yeah, you know, would really hate to say it but it’s not the first time we’ve heard this story and it’s not that unusual and yes, we know about this. And I was just furious. I was absolutely furious because I just thought how can this be known and yet it is not known by the majority of people who are writing these prescriptions, and certainly not by the majority of people who are taking them? And that was why I started to write the book. And I worked with a writing coach and an editor when I made the decision it was going to be a book, because I tried to do it on my own and it – you know, I just couldn’t do it. And so I worked with a coach who helped me to organize my thoughts, and she said, very early on, you’ve got to decide what kind of book this is; you know, is this book – are you trying to write, you know, an academic book? And I went no! For two reasons: one, I’m not qualified to do it, and two, there’s loads of them out there and nobody reads them, apart from other academics. And she said to me, in order to make people care about this issue, you have to make them care about John, and in order to make them care about John, you’ve got to tell the story of who he was so that it’s not just the story about his death, it’s a story about your life. And I thought that was important because John was much, much, much more than how he died, and he was an incredibly resilient person. You know, was he flawless? No, of course not. Nobody is. We’re all human. But he was incredibly resilient. And I do not believe that he would have died if it hadn’t been for those drugs. I absolutely think that that was what led to his death.
In the book I describe the response and the reaction I got from the prescribing doctor, who was very concerned and, you know, even in my grieving state actually said to me, should I be contacting my legal representative – (laughs) – which I thought was an interesting response to a grieving widow. He also said, in no uncertain terms, oh, well, you know – in a very dismissive way – depressed people kill themselves. You know, and also said that when he gave John the drugs that he had no concerns that John had – was in any danger of harming himself. He described him as psychologically stable, which begs the question, why did he prescribe the drugs? But that’s another thing.
AM: And when he said that, that depressed people kill themselves, did you push back in that moment and say he wasn’t even depressed?
DC: Absolutely. And the response that I got back was, you know, so are you saying that you think the drugs were the reason he died, and I said yes, and that was when he said, should I be contacting my legal representative? Because I think the only – you know, my desire to have a conversation with the prescribing doctor was to talk about the things that I was concerned about. His response to that conversation was to be worried that I was thinking about suing him, which there were enough victims already; what would be the point? I mean, it would be probably incredibly difficult to prove that kind of causality, but yeah.
So writing the book, I didn’t set out to write a book; initially the writing was to help me to try and process what’s going on. I then was so angry that I just wanted to get the story, the message out there in a book, and the book – you know, people have said to me, was it cathartic? Was it therapeutic? And I would say that the writing, especially in the early days, was cathartic, but producing a book brings its own – (laughs) – stresses, and so, you know, once the book was actually finished I haven’t really done very much to promote it – I haven’t done anything, really, to promote it – and I think that’s because I need some time to process having written it, I think.
AM: What’s the most important thing someone listening to this podcast or reading your book could take away from your story? What do you want people to really know and remember?
DC: I guess that human experience or the experience of being human is messy and we have good times and we have bad times and we have happy times and we have sad times and it doesn’t mean that we’re sick; it doesn’t mean that we’re broken; it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with us.
AM: And as you point out in your book, it’s often the case that we’re having the happy and the sad times kind of at the same time –
DC: Overlapping
AM: – because that’s life.
DC: It’s life, you know. It’s life. And I think, as well, that is important to understand that all drugs have side effects. All drugs have side effects and be aware of them, because if you’re not aware of them, you cannot really make an informed consent to take them. So even – I don’t expect doctors, I don’t expect GPs to know all the side effects; I do – I would hope that doctors would say look, please read the leaflet that you get with these drugs and if – and maybe ask your nearest and dearest to read the leaflet as well so that they can be on the lookout.
So what do I hope that people will take away from this book? That to be – to feel depressed, to feel anxious doesn’t mean that you’re – that there’s anything wrong with you, and also to be aware – I’m not anti-medication but I am very much pro-informed consent based on information, because if you take the drugs and you experience the side effects, then you know what’s happening, but you only know what’s happening if you’re alerted to the side effects. And if one person can be saved, if one family can be saved, potentially – I mean, I think that’s already happened, again, just anecdotally from people that I’ve spoken to; I think that’s already happened because of reading the book, because of knowing about John’s story – that’s something. It’s a big something because even a conservative estimate — if it’s one in 100 people that this happens to, for that person, it’s 100 percent of their experience, for that family, it’s 100 percent. It’s not just about statistics, is it?
[Andy Miles] What Happened To John?: A memoir of enduring love, mental health, and suicide is available as a paperback and on Kindle from Amazon. You can find the link in the podcast notes for this episode, as well as on her website, denise-collins.com.
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I'm Andy Miles, and I'd like to thank Dennis Collins for her time and candor, and I'd like to thank you for listening.