YouSaid · the spoken record

James Longman

lines on the record
23
first
2025-02-09
most recent
2025-02-09
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1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yeah, much more. 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.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I would love to know, and if I could get in that scanner, I 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 the people who remained was a really important and that of my mum. The book is, it's, yes, it's about my dad. 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. 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 mum because he has to, he's basically like a human shield.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “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 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 too the people who remain alive.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “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 not 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 whatever word feels right to you is the right word, honestly.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “We finished, and then he ran out, and then he said to the interviewer, that was me. He was talking about me. And so if I've given people permission 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 it deals with these sorts of topics with no warning whatsoever, 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. 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.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “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. 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,”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And as we know, I am a scientist So that hollow feeling here, just utter sort of 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, you know, 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... Death to not have been for nothing.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I have been in some dangerous situations and when I was 24 actually I was stopped at a Syrian checkpoint and I was on my own and I had all of 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.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “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 were our wedding, which I didn't stop crying at.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “The thing my dad lacked when he needed it was community 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 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. That's the only reason I'm okay. It's not to say that I couldn't.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Mental health. I don't know about you, but I constantly see hashtag mental healthawareness day and eat some blueberries. That's great. And 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. And 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, both Pat, one of my dad's carers, worked in Shenley, big psychiatric unit, which was shut down and they started caring the community. And the book talks about how caring 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.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “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. And we should hear more about that. We should normalize conversations around people with significant mental illnesses. Rather than this big focus just on health.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “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. And 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 like lupus. And 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...”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “First phrases they were using were like, Well, you know, perhaps you were too busy to go and see your grandmother, you know, 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, walked round, and he showed me my brain. It was doing less guilty things. I thought it was amazing”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “This was an FMRI scanner I went under in 2016, and Dr. Zahner's doing some amazing work at King's College, looking at parts of the brain that generate guilt, because 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. And he wanted to see where the brain was generating guilt. And I went in to 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, amusing. And you've just quoted, it was actually his research assistant who tried that phrase out. Because there are other phrases, you make yourself feel guilty. So 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 her mother. And your brain will fire up the guilt. And you can say to yourself, other first...”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I'm just very proud to have been 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. And that has been really powerful.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Maybe he saw me playing in the playground or Being happy with my friends, you know, and maybe he saw that. And then I spent a long time thinking that having a kid and me being my mama, being forced to take part in the world was going to damage him and was not good for him because he had schizophrenia. But Liz, in that one meeting, that one moment was able to say he really wanted to be in your life. And it was, 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. But that was the thing I needed, I think. That's why I wrote the book.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “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 Yeah, I was, I think all of years of feeling sad, you know, just kind of lifted off, you know, they just lifted off me. She told me that, so I was at a 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 mum. He was always on visits. And she said, she remembers one time he asked her if he would. She would take him and drive near my school, just so that he could be near me.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “It's signed with Liz Morrison. And I look back in the notes, and that was his last carer. It was social worker. So again, I went back to the NHS. I said, can you find this person? This country wide search went out, and then they found her, and she lives twenty minutes away from me. Actually, she lives around here. She lives in Kensal Rice. 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 be 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?”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Which was really important. That's one of the things 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. And yet there was no color, a life before, and so that relationship with Lizian 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. And it's written in this kind of scrawl, and it says was phoned by coroner's office to be informed that John Longman was dead. Has an asterisk and the date in October 96.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “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 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 sort of sick schizophrenic person who ended his life. It was extraordinary, what a gift. And then she introduced me to the other friends from art school. She painted this amazing picture of Campbell in the 1960s, this kind of heady time of meditation and living in slummy flats and just his life before me, before his city.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I was in, I don't know what, 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've followed you all these years. I didn't know if I should get in touch with you again, but 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.”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “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, 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 four, 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. And she wrote this wonderful email, and 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,”

    2025-02-09 · Intelligence Squared · ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT