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ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2)

2025/2/9
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James Longman: Lizzie 是我父亲大学时代的女友,她的出现为我父亲的形象增添了色彩,让我看到了他年轻时的美好一面。她讲述了许多我父亲年轻时的故事,让我了解了他生病前的样子。通过 Lizzie,我仿佛回到了过去,重新认识了我的父亲,这对我来说意义非凡。她让我看到了父亲不仅仅是一个患有精神疾病的人,而是一个曾经充满活力和快乐的年轻人。与 Lizzie 的会面,以及她后来介绍我认识的父亲的其他朋友,都帮助我更全面地了解了我的父亲,也让我更加珍惜他。我非常感激 Lizzie 为我带来的这些,她为我父亲的生命注入了新的色彩,也让我对未来充满了希望。 James Longman: Liz Morrison 是我父亲最后的护理员,她告诉我父亲是爱我的,这对我来说意义重大。多年来,我一直生活在对父亲的误解和遗憾中,认为他的离世是因为我不够好。但 Liz 的出现改变了这一切,她让我知道父亲一直爱着我,只是因为疾病而无法表达。她告诉我,父亲曾多次希望靠近我的学校,只是为了能离我近一些,这让我非常感动。Liz 的话语让我放下了多年的心结,也让我对父亲有了更深的理解。她让我明白,父亲的离世并不是因为不爱我,而是因为他无法战胜疾病。Liz 的出现,以及她所说的话,是我写这本书的原因,也是我希望通过这本书传递给其他人的希望和力量。

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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. For this episode, we're rejoining for part two of our conversation with the international correspondent James Longman, discussing his new memoir, The Inherited Mind.

This is the second part of our two-part episode, ABC News' James Longman on family, trauma and reporting from the frontlines. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed. Now it's time to rejoin the conversation, recorded recently at the Kiln Theatre in London. Here's our host for the evening, broadcaster and barrister, Rob Rinder. Well, I'm going to, I'm sure people here will be buying the book and reading it and

I was going to quote from the letter, excuse me, the account that she gives. I urge you to. It is quite extraordinary. There are other characters as well, people who knew your dad. You call them, well, voices from the past and guardian angels as well. One of the voices from the past is somebody called Lizzie.

Can you tell us who Lizzie was and why she was important? In my last week at the BBC, I got an email from someone who'd heard me on the radio. And she said, Hi, James. I think I heard your voice on Radio 4. And I've just Googled you. And yes, you are the person I think you are. You're John's son. And John was my boyfriend at university. And he was my first real love. And I wanted to tell you about him.

She wrote this wonderful email. Then, unlike the NHS, BBC emails are not retrievable. So I lost it, and I couldn't get into contact with her. A few years later,

I was in, I don't know, I think I was in Indonesia or something. And I get an email from Lizzie and it was actually, it was during COVID. And she had said, I followed you all these years. I didn't know if I should get in touch with you again, but I, I, you know, put it down to a dotty old lady getting in touch from the past and reminiscing about her own past. But if you'd ever like to talk about your dad, I'm here.

And I jumped on it and we met and we had a two hour walk around Hackney marshes. We were excited or nervous. Oh, I was so excited. So excited. I felt like I was going back to my, I felt like I was, I was going through back through time. I mean, we had this amazing walk around the park and she painted all the missing color from his life.

what he was like when he was 21. She injected into his memory something very simple, which was fun. She turned him into the person he really was, rather than this sick, schizophrenic person who ended his life. It was extraordinary. What a gift. Then she introduced me to the other friends from art school. She painted this amazing picture of Camberwell in the 1960s, this heady time of

of meditation and living in slummy flats and just his life before me, before his sickness, which was really important. That's one of the things that you so beautifully described there, breathing life back into him. One of the things that strikes you reading this book and the relationship, the beginning of your knowledge of your dad is he died. He had mental illness, the beginning, middle end of his story, all full of toxic memory, like a dark handprint on your heart.

yet there was no color a life before and So that relationship with Lizzie and later guardian angel Liz who writes your dad understood what was going on his mind But the pushes and pulls of his life undermined it tell us who Liz was and why that was important So when I found these notes The last page was the moment that he ended his life and it's written in this kind of scroll and it says was phoned by

coroner's office to be informed that John Longman was dead and it has an asterisk and the date and October 96 and it's signed with Liz Morrison and I looked back in the notes and that was his last carer. He was social worker So again, I went back to the NHS I said can you find this person this countrywide search went out and then they found her and she lives 20 minutes away from me But she lives around here. She lives in Ken's arise. I

I don't know. Liz may be here tonight. I don't know. She came over and she's this kind of North London. She's got a raspy smoker's voice. She's supposed to speak a side hat. And she's got blonde hair up in a ponytail and green eyes. And I opened the door and she just gives me a hug. And this was the woman who looked after my dad towards the end of his life. And she was able to do something really, really important, which was to tell me that...

my dad wanted me. And I didn't know that until I met Liz. Can I ask you, it's not really described in the book. I'm aware of that encounter and that's what she said to you. I wonder, given your immediate impulse because of your work for objectivity, reporting for being clear-headed in the face of trauma and horror to tell the story to us, I wonder in that moment, private moment, when she says to you, your dad wanted you,

What does that do to you? Yeah, it was, yeah, it was, I was, I think all of like years of feeling sad, you know, just kind of just lifted off, you know, they just lifted off me. She told me that, so I was, I was at school in central London when I was a kid and he wasn't really allowed to be near me. He had to be near me with my mom. Like he was always on visits and,

And she said, she remembers one time he asked her if he would, if she would take him and drive near my school just so that he could, he could be near me. And he, maybe he saw me playing in the playground or, you know, seeing Hank being happy with my friends, you know, and maybe he saw that. And, um,

And then I spent a long time thinking that having a kid and me being my mom and being forced to take part in the world was going to damage him and was not good for him because he had schizophrenia. But I, Liz, in that one meeting, that one moment was able to say he really wanted to be in your life.

And it was, she doesn't, she can't know what that means. I mean she could because she works with people with mental illness and she's an extraordinary human being who gives me hope that people like that still work for the NHS and she is by the way still working. But that was the thing I needed I think. That's why I wrote the book. And I wonder at the end of that encounter and the discussion with experts, we're going to come back to a couple of them in a moment.

When somebody dies, it's said that doesn't end a relationship. You've built a relationship with your father for us in this book. Having discovered all these things and the connections he had, what's your relationship like with your dad now? I'm just very proud to have been, to be his son, to be honest. Because I've met all these people who've told me all the ways, all the good ways that I'm like him. Because I was really worried about all the bad ways I might be like him. Good and bad is a really silly way to describe mental illness, but...

The things that were going to, you know, the negativity, my depression, all of these things I really worried were echoes of his life. And now I think, well, maybe they were, but his Lizzie, Sarah, Frank, all the people who knew him when he was young, Liz, Pat, the social worker, all these people from his life have been able to sit across from me and say, you are like your dad in these really great ways.

That has been that's been really powerful part of the reason I love this book and I suspect anybody who has the thinnest interest as we all should in understanding ourselves and unpicking

Our own minds and thinking and reflecting about mental illnesses. It's a book that's brimming with hope With learning about our own pasts in order to think about how we might break cycles but also looking at the science in a way and filtering it for us to see what's possible and Going a little bit backwards in the book Inflammation technology and healing from the brain. Is it possible? I was struck by this particular paragraph by dr. Zahn

Dr. Zahn's work proves this on a biological. Over 70% of respondents in his trial demonstrated improved connectivity in their brain and a recalibrated management of guilt. And this is a kicker. Stop me in my tracks. Just by repeating the phrase, I forgive myself.

It doesn't sound like science, but it is. Strange, isn't it? Yeah. This was an fMRI scanner I went under in 2016. Dr. Zahner's doing some amazing work at King's College looking at parts of the brain that generate guilt. Freud said, "Really, the overactively depressive brain feels guilt a lot more than other people. Most others might blame others for feeling sad, whereas a depressive person will blame themselves."

He wanted to see where the brain was generating guilt. I went into his scanner and there are all these artificial ways you can tell your brain to fire in the guilt department. These are very technical scientific terms, by the way, I'm using. You've just quoted, it was actually his research assistant who tried that phrase out.

There are a lot of phrases you could say. You make yourself feel guilty. You lie there and you say, "I didn't see my grandmother enough in the hospital when she was dying," or "I don't have a good enough relationship with my mother." Your brain will fire up the guilt. The first phrases they were using were like,

Perhaps you were too busy to go and see your grandmother. Give yourself a break. Or your mother's a bit difficult. But there's always a way around that response. There's always a way to rationalize what that response is. So it doesn't work that well. But if you say, I forgive myself, it just turns it off. It just turns off the guilt. And I thought, this can't really be science. Are you crazy? And I got out of the fMRI. I walked around. And he showed me my brain. It was doing less guilty things.

I thought it was amazing. A broader question. I wonder what your hope is, let's say, for where science is. Or excuse me, your view is for where science is in respect of mental health, acute depression, and schizophrenia. Well, I think we have a lot to be very thankful for. There are lots of incredible scientists doing some amazing work. There's one example I'll give on schizophrenia, for example.

They are finding out where on the genome variants that code for schizophrenia are found. Chromosome 6, which is the same part of the genome that codes for our bodily immunity, our physical immunity.

It might be that we start to believe that schizophrenia, for example, is as much a mental illness as it is an autoimmune illness, an autoimmune condition like MS or lupus. Again, these illnesses are not things that you can easily treat. But what you can do is you can change your lifestyle and your habits, and actually you can treat those things in much the same way. Hopefully, people will start to look at schizophrenia as being an autoimmune illness. That will do two things. It makes

Responding to it medically better because you can then target medications that will help. You can live holistically as well as part of that. But also reduce stigma because it's not all in the mind. And we shouldn't have hang-ups about people who have these illnesses. And I'm incredibly hopeful about the strides that science is making. What I feel less hopeful about is our ability to think deeply about people who have mental illness.

I hope we can do that more. We talk a lot about mental health.

One person for the book said to me, "A crisis is public, but wellness is private." You don't often hear about people who have these illnesses who are leading lives out in the world. We should hear more about that. We should normalize conversations around people with significant mental illnesses, rather than this big focus just on mental health. I don't know about you, but I constantly see #mentalhealthawarenessday and #eatsomeblueberries.

That's great. I don't want to belittle it because it's really important that we think very strongly and deeply about how we go about in the world. But stress-induced depression, for example, is not the same as...

a clinical depression or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. I think we need to make a lot more room for people who have significant mental illnesses and think a lot more deeply about how we can help treat them. Pat, one of my dad's carers, worked in Shenley, a big psychiatric unit, which was shut down and they started Care in the Community. The book talks about how Care in the Community has

essentially failed because the money that was supposed to follow this care never went there. So there are people who are not experiencing the care that they need and we need to choose, I think, politicians who make different decisions. And to add to that another element that when people do present in serious end-of-life crisis that often because of how poorly our mental health provision is resourced that those spaces tragically are

are not safe. Perhaps a conversation for another time. The other thing that I, and I suspect others will take away from this book, is empowering people to have the courage to push the dark door of trauma open.

When you inherit the inherited mind, a story, I think, for example, of my grandfather, who was a survivor and then Holocaust survivor, and there was a knowledge learnt like language, the dark molecules around him in whispers that you don't ask the difficult questions. But by having the courage to

do what we can to push against that can bear enormous emotional fruit and help us in our lives. And you say this, if you're wondering about your own family's history of mental illness, the best advice I can offer is this, ask them, find out,

Don't let these issues remain buried as half-remembered secrets, as my family has done. These secrets live inside you, but they're confester and corrupt. Your family history then becomes a stone to weigh you down, rather than a tool with which you can better understand who you are today." Beautiful. I wonder if you've got a hopeful message from this book, from your journey.

those who are experiencing shame, guilt, confusion, wondering how to begin, how can the inherited mind, your story, your book, help them help us? The thing my dad lacked when he needed it was community. And he didn't need people to tell him what to do, to take the right meds. He had all that. What he needed was a community to hold him up. And the reason I'm okay is

is my dad, is my mom, I think protected me when I was a kid. I don't think I developed schizophrenia because she protected me. But the reason I'm okay today is because of my friends and the people who I love in my life. Some of them are sitting here and my husband, and that's the only reason I'm okay. It's not to say that I, I couldn't, it's not to say that you should live for others, but making other people part of your existence has to be

the way that you live a healthy life. It just has to be, we're not meant to live alone. We're not meant to be isolated. You're meant to share your feelings. You're meant to share your life with other people. And for me, you know, you were our wedding, which I didn't stop crying at. There's just one thing. Cause you know, sometimes I see you on television and

be it in the Israel-Gaza border or in Russia, Ukraine, wherever you are. I meant to ask you, I wonder, how is he not afraid? How is he not terrified? I don't want to waste the opportunity in front of a whole crowd to ask, this is a book of such fearlessness. Has there ever been a moment in your work

facing bombs and rockets where you've felt afraid? And if so, do you think some of the things that you've inherited have protected you from the sort of fear I feel sure I would have? Goodness. Uh, I have been in some dangerous situations and, uh, when I was

When I was 24 actually, I was stopped at a Syrian checkpoint and I was on my own and I had all of my... I had all these photographs and videos that I'd been gathering and I just... In that moment, what happens is all your organs just move south and you just feel like this part of your body is empty. I just felt so sick. That's a sort of scientific term for shitting yourself. Yeah. Okay, right. Yes, right. Yeah.

As we know, I am a scientist. That hollow feeling here, just utter real nausea, that did...

hit me and it hit me at an age where I was starting out as a journalist. So I carry that nausea with me wherever I go and I try and avoid it. So it's a little bit like when you sting yourself, you don't want to go back there. So I avoid being scared. In terms of what it did for me writing this book, I've never felt shame in talking about these things. I don't know what it is. I just haven't. I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of. I'm very

I have confidence in who I am and what I do and who I love and my friends. There's nothing for me to be ashamed of. What I wanted was for my father's life to not have his death, to not have been for nothing. And you've done that with beauty and with intelligence and love. So before I open this to the audience, I'm going to ask everybody, please, to give James Longman a round of applause.

I was told I need to stop crying in public, but I knew I would fail. So, I'm going to open this questions from the audience if there are any. And we'll take sort of three at a time. Can I see? Yes. Yes, madam over here. Thank you. Hi, James. Hi, Rob. Thank you so much. That was amazing to listen to. And I have got through most of your book and it's just amazing.

Unbelievably inspiring. So, congratulations. Something that you said towards the end was about you're okay because of your community that you have around you.

I've noticed over the past couple of weeks since you released your book that you've been sort of sharing people's thoughts about the book. And something that really struck me when I read it was there was almost certain sentences that you wrote that struck so true with my own experience using my dad that it was almost like he plucked the words out of my head.

And I wonder whether you knew or whether you still know kind of a one impact writing this book might have had on other people within the community that have lost somebody to suicide, but also

whether you realized what the reach of that was, i.e. how many people are affected by suicide loss before you're writing it. Yeah, I'll answer that. But please do answer. Beautiful question. Thank you. And I'm so touched that you feel the book has spoken to you. I was doing an interview in New York the other week and the sound recordist was putting my microphone on.

And he lent into my ear, knowing that the microphone obviously wasn't on because he was a sound recorder, said, my son has schizophrenia. And no, I haven't told anybody, but we're going bankrupt because we put him in a hotel room. And he said,

He doesn't really want to talk to anyone. I don't know what to do, but I'm so happy that you wrote your book. And then we did the interview. I actually told, I didn't say who it was, but I told the interviewer that he had said that to me. We finished and then he ran out and then he said to the interviewer, that was me. He was talking about me.

And, um, so if I've given people permission to, to, to, to, to be who they are and to tell other people how they're feeling, what's going on in their lives. And that's great. And I feel very, very lucky that that's happening. I have to say, when you write something like this and then, um, it deals with these sorts of topics with no warning whatsoever. Some people, I was in a coffee shop and someone just came up to me and just went, well, my dad killed himself. I was like,

Okay. Do you want a croissant? I don't know. So, but as you've noticed also, I deal with a lot of the stuff with sort of a fair amount of humor, which you have to, and the book is not depressing for that reason. But yeah. Thank you for that lovely question. Yeah. What you spoke about, particularly around removing stigma and

and the shame associated with it. When I was 12, I used to tell people that my father died from a bad back because in the lead up to him taking his own life, he had a bad back, he'd slipped a disc. And I wondered what your thoughts are about the word you use. You spoke about suicidality and your thoughts on that word. Like I was...

I would use the word suicide and now I'm not sure how I feel about it and I just wondered what suicidality is and your thoughts on people ending their life in that way. I think we've, I mean I say my father ended his life. I don't use the word committed because I think that's unnecessary. I also feel quite strongly that I don't want to live in a world where we're like language police. So I think

Think whatever word feels right to you is the right word, honestly. Well, but it's interesting because you have You've chosen to use the language take his own life As opposed to committed suicide which was okay with but not committed suicide But the point always struck me when you use that language in the book and talk about him that he had agency and that somehow that that matters

I wonder if you can speak to that. Yeah, because I think people... I don't know. The stigma around suicide is that somehow it's an act done in order to hurt other people. And it isn't. It's an act that a person often makes. It's a choice they feel they have. No, they don't feel they have a choice. And they do it in order to unburden other people.

So whatever word we use, I hope we're cognizant that that is the fact of suicide, that it's not done to the people who remain alive. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and I think the surviving parts of families need more support in this country. And while you are absolutely right, the most important thing is love and probably listen and listen.

have a good sense. Also to see the trauma for the surviving parts of the family is enormous and

I haven't read the book, so I don't know, perhaps it's part of the book, but I would love to see you try to explore your mother's part too. Because I think she's a good example for the complexity of what happens afterwards. And what would she do if she was in the scanner and would say, I forgive myself? I would love to know. And God, if I could get her in that scanner, I'd tell you.

But, you know, a lot of the time you just have to do what you can do. I sometimes say that suicide is like a bomb going off. It kills the person and then it injures everyone nearby.

And for me, making sense of the relationships with people who remained was really important and that of my mum. The book is, yes, it's about my dad, but it's really also about family and about what happens to a family when something like that happens. And all the damage, the real life damage that happens, but what you might be able to do to heal it. And there's no answers. I'm not, my relationship with my mother is not great, to be honest.

And a lot of people, some of my friends, his relationship is really good with my mom because he's basically like a human shield. Also, she prefers him. Yeah, much, much. It's true. As she should. But it's about being honest about these things, you know. But yeah, there's no one answer, but hopefully the example of...

her dealing with my dad's death and me making sense of how she dealt with it has made me better able to make sense of her. If that wasn't word salad. No, it makes sense. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Don't forget, Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers can listen to the event in full and ad-free.

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