This morning has been really tough for me.
It has been tougher for my ten year old son.
He is a wonderful boy. Clever, witty, cute, inspiring, friendly, caring are but a few words that describe him. He suffers badly though. Not from some terrible life threatening disease thank God, although he has gone blind pretty much in one eye, but from something that is painfully debilitating. He suffers from panic attacks. Panic attacks so severe that they leave him retching over the toilet, farting like a trooper, shaking like a new born lamb in the middle of a snowfield and having palpitations that would confuse many a cardiologist . They are the most awful things to watch and they centre around one thing ........school.
Now some of you will say he is just doing this for attention, for another day off after Christmas. Oh how I wish that were true. I genuinely wish that it was as simple as that. The psychologist in me yearns for such a simple solution as that, it begs for one. Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that for he has suffered these attacks since being attacked at school by a teaching assistant. An attack that was witnessed and brushed under the carpet by a school, a headmistress and system that makes the Stephen Lawrence inquiry pale into the background.
Without a shadow of a doubt there is institutionalised racism out there in the ranks of the power brokers in our society and without a doubt there is insitutionalised bigotry out there when it comes to mental health issues. Especially when it goes against the mantra of a system that is supposed to be caring.
To give you a brief outline, my son started school at 4, he went to the brightest of schools in the whole of the Trowbridge Area, the one with the most accolades and a headmistress lauded by the system as the next best thing to the Messiah. He had difficulty settling in and on one day when he was saying goodbye to his mother, having that last reassuring and comforting cuddle he was suddenly confronted by the school secretary and a teaching assistant ordering her from the premises for no reason. He was then physically snatched from his mother's arms by the teaching assistant so violently that he was left physically bruised for days and psychologically traumatised. His mother was then not allowed to speak to him as he screamed in physical pain and was frog marched out of the school.
A complaint was made, the headmistress then started on a cacophony of lies backed up by Governors so weak that a feather duster could have blown them down and a LEA that refused to intervene and left him to evaporate in the ether
The upshot of this was he ended up being forced into home education.
Last year he finally went back to school. He went to a school where he was nurtured as he should have been from the start, to a school that I have only the most grateful of thoughts and eternal thanks towards because the Headmaster and his team understood how traumatised he had been and how he needed very careful handling. Within weeks he was starting to blossom and his progress has been nothing short of miraculous to the point where he led the narration in the nativity concert this Christmas, a moment that any parent would have been proud of. He left school a happy and contented child.
Unfortunately though this morning the old fears resurfaced and he suffered a wobble. A wobble so big that he locked himself in the bathroom crying and retching. He is calm now and I am confident he will be there at school again tomorrow for it is the fear of going not the actuality of going to school that now causes the problem. Although he has had a wonderful Christmas surrounded by those who he loves the fact that most have them have now departed has left him feeling a little vulnerable.
So the point of this story? Well quite simply for those of you out there struggling with the January Blues remember that mental health challenges can affect anyone of any age at any time and in any given situation. It is not something that we should shy away from discussing but it is something that we as a society need to be more tolerant and understanding of. And we should never allow a system to beat down an individual to the point where they feel useless or impotent.
All it needs for evil to succeed is for one good man not to stand up.
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