story featuring a grown-up behaving in a similar way – with the illness described and named – may turn on a lightswitch in their head.
When, in Broken Soup, fifteen-year-old Rowan’s elder brother Jack drowns in a tragic accident, her stricken parents respond in different ways: her father by walking out, her mother by taking to her bed. This leaves Rowan to look after her eight-year-old sister, Stroma, and attempt to keep a semblance of normality. Rowan does her best, bringing her mother food, and trying not to bother her too much – because when her mother does emerge, she’s moody and unpredictable. When she meets Harper, an easygoing American boy travelling the world in a revamped ambulance, she has something else to think about apart from her miserable mum. Meanwhile, the girls’ father hovers on the edge, doing his best to avoid the remnants of his family and the emotions that come with them (see: parents who can’t talk about emotions, having). But when their mother makes a failed suicide attempt, their father finally sees that his family needs him and steps into the breach. Rowan finds that her complicated family is actually rather wonderful. Teens will appreciate the illustration of how even a capable girl like Rowan can’t be expected to manage it all alone.
Another coper – a boy this time – is fifteen-year-old Laurence in 15 Days Without a Head. Laurence’s mother, a single parent, has taken on two jobs to make ends meet, one at the chippy down the road, and one as a cleaner. This means she has to get up at 5am, leaving Laurence to get his six-year-old brother, Jay, to school before going to school himself. Sometimes his mother doesn’t make it out of bed at all – or doesn’t make it back from the night before till two days later – in which case Laurence has to do her cleaning shift too and never gets to school at all. So when she fails to come home one evening, it’s not a huge surprise.
But once ‘Whensday’ becomes ‘Blursday’ and Blursday becomes ‘Lieday’, things start to get desperate. Stomachs are complaining, cockroaches are crawling around the kitchen, and the teachers are beginning to comment on Laurence’s propensity to fall asleep at his desk (see: daydreaming, being accused of; over-tired, being). Eventually Laurence is so desperate for cash that he dons one of his mum’s dresses and a wig and totters down to the post office in a pair of her shoes to try to withdraw money from her account. How the brothers bring their mother back from her self-imposed exile we will not reveal, but this tragicomic story shows that while trying to pretend everything’s OK is admirable, depression is generally too big a problem for anyone to solve by themselves.
SEE ALSO: parents, having • parents, too busy • parents who are splitting up, having • sibling, having to look after a little • unwell parent, having an
depression
Painful as it is to think of children suffering from serious depression, it does happen. If you know a child who seems to be in a dark, locked-in place, attempting to cheer them up with jolly stories will probably just leave them feeling more isolated and out of sync with the world. Show them they’re not alone – and that you’re prepared to hold their hand in this dark place – by sharing stories that don’t attempt any simple fixes but reflect back how they might feel, and show that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
The Red Tree is about a little girl who wakes up with the feeling that she has nothing to look forward to and that nobody understands. Shaun Tan’s skilful illustrations capture the atmosphere of depression in ways that perhaps only images can: being stuck inside a thin-necked bottle and left on a pebbly beach in the rain, for instance; or standing on a chair in an empty field with a jumble of letters spilling, unheard, to the ground. There are no pat solutions, but the story ends on the image of a red tree sprouting from the floor of the little girl’s bedroom, its glow lighting up her face. At last, there’s a glimmer of hope, life, colour . . . and her face bears a little smile.
The author and illustrator William Steig believed that art, including children’s books, helps us to know life in a way that ‘still keeps the mystery of things’. His own books very much live up to this. What meaning we’re intended to draw from the events in Sylvester and the Magic Pebble is not clear, but by the end we know we’ve shared something about how trapped and helpless we can all sometimes feel. Sylvester, a young donkey, loves to collect unusual pebbles and one day he finds a flaming red one, round as a marble. To his delight, he discovers it’s a magic pebble: as long as he’s holding it, his wishes come true. He rushes home to show his parents – but on the way he comes face to face with a hungry lion and, in a panic, he wishes himself into a rock.
As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he realises his mistake. The pebble is now lying on the ground beside him but, as a rock, he has no way of picking it up; and without touching the rock, he cannot wish himself back to being Sylvester. Indeed, as a rock he is completely powerless – he can’t shout for help, or even let his parents know he’s him.
It doesn’t take long before he plunges into despair. With nothing else to do, Sylvester spends most of his time asleep, surfacing for brief moments only to remember all over again his seemingly endless plight – a state that shares much with depression. The pictures, in simple, bright colours, show the rest of the world going on without him, blue skies or grey. For a whole year, Sylvester is trapped (see: stuck). We feel not just for Sylvester, but also for his parents, whose grief Steig presents without sentimentality: they have lost their boy; nothing could be worse. But they haven’t forgotten what he was like, and they haven’t stopped loving him – and it’s their love, in the end, that leads them back to him. This book shows that however trapped and unlike themselves a child may feel, their special grown-ups still love them and want nothing more than for them to get better.
Siblings and friends of depressed children may find it hard to understand the change in the behaviour of their brother, sister or friend – and how to tread the fine line between intruding too much and leaving too much alone. In Virginia Wolf, a picture book inspired by the relationship between the depressive novelist and her artist sister, Vanessa, we see what it’s like from a sister’s point of view. ‘One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish,’ it begins – and there, in a lovely bedroom full of books, we see a pair of wolf’s ears sticking out from under the duvet. In this lupine state, Virginia finds even the sound of the birds too loud – and can’t bear the bright yellow of Vanessa’s favourite dress. Soon, her mood is bringing everyone else in the house down, too: ‘Up became down . . . Gloom became doom.’ Vanessa doesn’t give up trying to think of ways she can help, and eventually her artistic skills come to the rescue. Happily, there’s no second ‘o’ in this Virginia’s last name, allowing us to separate her in our minds from her real-life counterpart who, in the end, was less fortunate. Not only does this Virginia stop feeling wolfish but she becomes so much better she feels rather ‘sheepish’ . . . Isabelle Arsenault’s delicate artwork, taking us from the smudged darkness of depression to an optimistic garden vision of ‘Bloomsberry’, complete with floating petals and leaves that say ‘hush’ in the wind, brings with it the assurance that the dark mood in the house will eventually lift and a depressed sibling or friend will return to being themselves.
SEE ALSO: anxiety • heard, not feeling • indoors, spending too much time • sadness • screen, glued to the • suicidal
