Christie Watson started to suspect something was wrong with her 16-year-old daughter when she found her in bed, smoking cigarettes, at two in the morning.
Rowan was propped up on her pillows, puffing away, when Christie stormed in, trying to find out why the house suddenly stank of smoke.
Rowan, who had just passed her GCSEs with flying colours, seemed not to understand what the fuss was about. To her, it was the most normal thing in the world to be wide awake in the middle of the night, chain-smoking, in the home she shared with her mother and younger brother.
Christie, a nurse turned award-winning novelist, was furious. ‘I said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ And all she could say was, ‘Why are you so stressed? Stress is not good for you.’ I thought it was bad behaviour, but looking back, I can see it was the start of something major.’
Christie confiscated the cigarettes and put it down to teenage recklessness. But over the next few days, her previously joyful daughter was moody and snappy.
A few days later, she went into Rowan’s room to find she had painted a six-foot skeleton on the wall during the night. It was, notes the writer, a little bit different to the unicorns and rainbows that Rowan had previously loved to paint.
The very next day, she received a call from Rowan’s school. According to the pastoral care team, Rowan was ‘manic’, and when Christie arrived to pick her up, she found her daughter ‘altered’ – wild-eyed, fists clenched, a girl seemingly possessed.
On the drive home, Rowan described feeling like the wind, and said she was planning to ‘photosynthesise’. Christie suspected her daughter was on drugs, having heard stories of her friends smoking weed and taking ketamine.
Rowan denied it but ‘the more she spoke, the more worried I became. Her words were not right. In the wrong order, somehow’.
At home in south London, Rowan began sobbing uncontrollably, howling that she wanted to die.
As a former nurse, Christie knew there was only one thing to do: take her daughter to A&E, and pray to God that she was on drugs, ‘because then it would mean that this state she was in was temporary’, explains Christie, with heartbreaking honesty.
It wasn’t. Indeed, Rowan was in the midst of a psychotic episode induced not by drugs (she was tested on arrival at A&E and the toxicology report returned clear), but by hormones, and the very real stresses of being a modern-day teen.
That episode marked the beginning of a year-long period of mental illness that would leave both Rowan and her 48-year-old mother on the brink.
So terrible was their experience that they have now written a strikingly honest book about it, in the hope it might help other parents and children.
No Filters is about Rowan’s mental health crisis, but it is also an eye-opening account of the mental health crisis gripping young people more generally.
Just last week, a study from researchers at University College London found a 65 per cent increase in the decade to 2022 in the number of five to 18-year-olds admitted to acute hospital wards for reasons related to mental health, with the biggest rise in girls aged 11 to 15 either self-harming or suffering ‘starvation’ owing to an eating disorder.
Indeed, one of the most astonishing things about Rowan’s mental breakdown is that, among her peer group, it wasn’t unusual.
She mentions friends whose eating disorders have led them to be fitted with feeding tubes or who frequently self-harm.
Her best friend was taken to hospital from secondary school by ambulance around once a month.
‘We are the generation who all wanted to die, but still had a 20-step skincare routine,’ Rowan writes darkly of the children who have grown up on TikTok and Snapchat.
‘It was a messy time,’ nods Rowan, now 19, when I meet her and Christie to discuss it. ‘We were all a shambles, pretty much. I was definitely one of the better ones, because I didn’t have to go to the hospital as much. I was very lucky in that way.
‘Which is surprising, because to me it felt like the end of the world, and yet I was one of the better-off ones. I think that’s terrible.’
Rowan says self-harm ‘started becoming more common for my friends from the age of 12’. It shocked her, but soon became part of normal teenage life.
Things started to come apart during the pandemic in 2020. Despite her mother’s best intentions to keep her and her brother, who’s three years younger, out of their rooms and away from their phones, Rowan secretly joined a group chat that she describes as ‘akin to an online psych ward’.
There, her friends would share pictures of their self-harm, and discuss their depression. Indeed, posting pictures or videos of self-harm ‘became a competitive sport’.
‘From the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep, I’d be on it,’ Rowan says. ‘I was glued to the phone. It was a sort of constant bombardment. I mean, if you went to the toilet for five minutes you would come back to 500 messages.’
Eating disorders proliferated. She and her friends pored over pictures of ‘women who had visible collarbones jutting out… and heads that looked almost alien’. They dived into ‘pro-eating disorder websites, jotting down tips and tricks’, and followed BBL (Brazilian butt lift) diaries online. Many of the girls experimented with ARFID – avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder – avoiding entire food groups in order to lose weight.
Horribly, they also became obsessed with the thought they might choke on certain foods and therefore stopped eating them or ‘in some cases [stopped] eating at all’.
She thinks violent porn in which women are choked during sex might have something to do with this trend, writing: ‘As far as I know, the link between the fear of choking leading to disordered eating and
the rise in violent and misogynistic porn has not been studied. But it should be.’
Keeping her suicidal friends alive via WhatsApp became, she only half-jokes, an almost full-time job.
‘I don’t know how many messages I’ve sent to friends, or received from friends, trying to convince them to ‘not do anything stupid’. ‘
And, as the world opened up and Rowan turned 16, things really began to unravel. ‘Most days I just cried in bed, or slept… I just realised that everything was optional,’ she says. ‘I didn’t technically have to do it. And that was the worst realisation I’ve ever had.’
After the episode at school, she sank into a near-catatonic state. ‘There was nothing going through my head. I wasn’t even on my phone. I just kind of sat and stared at a wall for months on end.’
Christie says Rowan barely spoke to her for a year. ‘She wouldn’t answer the phone, or texts, or my bright and breezy notes, and in person simply grunted. I tried keeping my cool. But after radio silence, I inevitably lost it fairly frequently and ended up shouting. It was like living with a stranger.’
In A&E, where Christie took her after the episode at school, doctors said she was most likely suffering from ‘anxiety’ and advised Christie to lock away her kitchen knives and paracetamol.
Rowan was given a leaflet. ‘It said I should do nice things like go for a walk, or have a bath, but I was in real crisis and I didn’t think that a bath or a cup of tea was going to help me. It felt very patronising.’
To Christie, all this was a terrible shock. She had split with Rowan’s father when Rowan was seven and worked hard to give her children the middle-class upbringing that she herself had lacked, growing up on a council estate in Stevenage.
She’d left school at 16 and gone into nursing, dreaming of becoming a novelist. She began studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia when Rowan was just two (she is now Professor of Medical Humanities at UEA). Her first book, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, won the Costa First Novel award and her subsequent memoir, The Language of Kindness, was a number one bestseller.
But now Christie questioned the effect her working so hard had had on Rowan.
‘When your child suffers from a mental illness, it holds a mirror up to your parenting,’ she explains. ‘I was a perimenopausal woman with all my own hormones, so it felt a little bit like Clash of the Titans.’
In the book, Rowan remembers Christie working extremely long hours when she was little, sometimes from 5am to 11pm.
She felt ‘short-changed’, she says, and wished her mother was more ‘motherly’, ‘more present’. ‘My favourite place became my room and my least favourite person my mum,’ she writes.
And suddenly you see how the misery and worry caused by an unwell teen can hang like a terrible pall over a house, and how very difficult is it for single parents to manage alone. During the year when Rowan was at her lowest, Christie would lie awake at night, listening for every noise that Rowan made, terrified her daughter might hurt herself.
‘I just felt overwhelmingly sad that she was so unwell, completely helpless and lonely. Even though I knew other parents were going through it, I felt isolated and incredibly anxious she wouldn’t get better.’
Unlike many children, who are left to wait months for treatment (and in some cases, more than a year), Rowan was bumped up the list and immediately given an appointment with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services(CAMHS).
‘I was worried about that,’ says Christie. ‘I thought Rowan must be really, really unwell to get an appointment, because they’re so underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced.’
Each week, Christie would take Rowan for therapy, and each week, Rowan remained withdrawn, angry. For six months,
she refused to speak to her mother; she stopped coming out of her bedroom, and barely attended school.
At some point, she began tattooing herself using a kit she bought online with a needle and (permanent) ink – doodles all over her legs and torso; the word ‘photosynthesise’ on one arm; a badly drawn teddy bear with wings on the other.
And all the time, she remained unreachable. ‘Parenting Rowan was like watching her drown, throwing her a life jacket, and then seeing her swim off and away from it,’ says Christie. ‘I had no idea what to do. There was zero communication.
‘I would ask her a million questions, would try good cop, bad cop, but it was either stony cold silence or ‘get out of my room’ kind of stuff. I didn’t have anything in my toolbox except to love her, loudly.
‘And so I just unconditionally carried on loving her, even though she couldn’t accept it. I was just hoping some of it would break through.’
Doctors considered everything from schizoaffective disorder to borderline personality disorder, and wondered if her breakdown might have been the result of ADHD or autism.
Rowan was keen for a diagnosis, Christie less so, not wanting her daughter to be defined by a particular period in her life.
‘We don’t have any answers as to what caused my breakdown,’ writes Rowan in the book.
‘But I think living is enough of a reason for mental collapse. Maybe I was mentally ill. Maybe I’m very sensitive. Maybe I’m really angry.
‘And maybe, just maybe – given the state of the world – that is entirely appropriate.’
She speaks eloquently of the constant state of fear that her generation find themselves in, that is amplified and ‘validated’ in online chatrooms in ways adults still barely understand.
A deep-seated anxiety that felt like ‘living behind glass that might break and shatter at any moment’.
Yet it was social media – ironically – that began to mend the disconnect between Rowan and her mother.
‘I thought, if social media is the language Rowan speaks, then I’m going to learn that language,’ says Christie.
She downloaded Snapchat and began sending silly pictures of herself with filters that turned her face into an apple, a dumpling or Albert Einstein. ‘I basically degraded myself as much as possible,’ she smiles.
Nine times out of ten, despite not speaking to her, Rowan would respond, perhaps with a laughing face emoji. ‘Each reply made my heart sing a little,’ says Christie.
Gradually Rowan began to recover – and ‘after the best part of 18 months’, the fog of depression and anger began to lift. Slowly Rowan began to live a normal life again, getting out of bed, showering, making coffee, imagining a future.
Today, it’s hard to square the psychotic, cigarette-smoking girl from No Filters with the one who sits in front of me.
Rowan is studying classics at university – she loves the epic poems, and the plays – and mother and daughter are closer than ever.
So what advice does Christie have for any parent who is reading this, unsure of how to navigate a mental health crisis?
‘Hang in there, communicate, and keep loving your child through it. Love, that’s the answer.’
No Filters: A Mother and Teenage Daughter Love Story by Christie Watson and Rowan Egberongbe is out now (Vintage Publishing, £14.99). If you need help with the issues raised in this story call The Samaritans on 116 123 or go to youngminds.org.uk
