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althea samuels

Re:Live Forum: Tabitha Suzuma - 2007/05/31 20:18 Thank you for your reply. I have thought for a long time that the issue of mental health amongst young children and teenagers has not been addressed mainly because people like me are not sure how to go about it or how to broach the subject with their own children. I may ask my children to read your book and see how they react and hopefully give us a basis for discussion.
I liked the way your description of Raven's physical appearance contrasted with his internal emotional make up.
Did your choose the areas where conflict occurs for a particular reason?

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Tabitha Suzuma

Re:Live Forum: Tabitha Suzuma - 2007/05/31 20:19 althea samuels wrote:
Hello Tabitha
I have read from where I stand but I had to read it in stages due to the difficult nature of the subject. I found it interesting how the Raven managed to function despite his internal termoil. Also how skilled he is at hiding his needs and dosen't know how to get help even when offed.
Althea, from experience I have found that some people are very adept at masking their pain, even over compensating for it (at parties for example, when some people feel shy but don't stop talking in an attempt to hide their true feelings). I think that Raven is also on automatic pilot - at least at the beginning of the book. His suffering is so great that his mind operates a kind of safety valve, shutting out the thoughts he is unable to cope with.

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Tabitha Suzuma

Re:Live Forum: Tabitha Suzuma - 2007/05/31 20:24 Stephanie Johnson wrote:
Hi Tabitha
I've just finished this book and found it compulsive reading. I found myself 'feeling' for all the characters and found the descriptions of Flynn's experiences so intense and believable. Congratulations on writing such a powerful and moving story. I was wondering whether you have had much response from young people experiencing Flynn's illness and what their responses have been?
Hi Stephanie, thank you for your kind words. I have had a deluge of reader mail from teenagers AND adults (in fact one reader I correspond with regularly is in his 50s). The response has been quite overwhelming. I was never bold enough to talk of my own depression to people outside my family, but the book seems to have created a bridge between myself and the outside world. Now I feel much more comfortable talking about my own experiences of severe clinical depression and I have been quite staggered by the amount of people out there who have had similar or even far worse experiences. Reading the book seems to allow them to confide in me to a degree which is extremely touching as well as fascinating.

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Tabitha Suzuma

Re:Live Forum: Tabitha Suzuma - 2007/05/31 20:28 Dani Compton wrote:
Do you think you have to have experienced something to be able to write about it?
Not necessarily. Though I do think it helps the author in terms of time spent on research! But as Joanna Kenrick has demonstrated, if you do the research you can gain valuable insight into even the most difficult subjects. I do think you have to be quite skilled to do that though. When you are writing about a topic such as mental illness, it helps a lot if you've been through it yourself. At times when I was at my most depressed, I couldn't even get out of bed so I spoke into a dictaphone, describing the dark thoughts going through my mind. Later I transcribed these and incorporated them into some of Flynn's depressive episodes.

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Nikki Gamble

Re:Live Forum: Tabitha Suzuma - 2007/05/31 20:30 Earlier in the week we had a discussion in a different strand concerning whether when writing about mental illness in a book for young people it was necessary, or desirable, to 'show the way out of the snake-pit'. I'm not sure whether you will have read those posts. The experiences that I have had with mental health services have, sadly, not been very positive ones, and I have found that it has been through personal contacts that progress has been made, as indeed it is for Flynn. I do stress that this is a personal experience and I am certainly not criticising the individuals who work with dedication in this field. However, I would be interested to know how you respond to the suggestion that fiction dealing with mental health issues for children should perhaps provide a model for ways in which those problems might be dealt with or resolved.

Post edited by: nikkig, at: 2007/05/31 20:38

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Tabitha Suzuma	Re:Live Forum: Tabitha Suzuma - 2007/05/31 20:31 althea samuels wrote: I liked the way your description of Raven's physical appearance contrasted with his internal emotional make up. Did your choose the areas where conflict occurs for a particular reason? Conflict in what way? In the contrast between his physical appearance and internal turmoil?
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