'Why I’m on a mission to bring London together'

After her husband’s suicide, journalist Poorna Bell realised that for all its dazzle, our capital can create a perfect storm of isolation. Here, she writes about her drive to harness human kindness and build a more connected city
Poorna Bell18 June 2018

Human connection is the antidote to loneliness but London is a city where it is not only hard to make friends , its drive for success can be utterly singular and unrelenting around career, money and relationships. It means that when things go wrong, you feel as if you can’t talk about what’s going wrong.

I’m a die-hard Londoner, and for the past 20 years I’ve never stopped being dazzled by the city. It has excitement and possibility, red doubledeckers and beer gardens. London is the seat of Parliament but also a place where a café can just sell grilled cheese toasties or cereal — and that’s a perfectly normal thing.

But there is an aspect I have increasingly noticed: London is also one of the loneliest cities. You hear it in the voices of people who have tried and failed to make it here, and of those who are wondering if it’s time to leave. Last year, TimeOut’s City Index survey placed it as one of the loneliest cities in the world.

My experience with loneliness in London is one of the reasons that compelled me to write a book called Chase The Rainbow about what my husband Rob and I had been going through.

In 2015, Rob killed himself six months shy of his 40th birthday. It’s a story all too familiar these days because suicide still remains the biggest killer of men in the UK under 45, but it is still a death predominantly spoken about in whispers.

He was a New Zealander but I don’t know anyone who was more London than Rob, nor a person of such intense contradictions. He bought tickets to Mahler at the National Festival Hall, frequented the anarchists’ bookshop in Whitechapel, walked our dog Daisy on Streatham Common, and knew the exact tree where you could spot baby owls in St James’s Park.

We met through a blind date, and we were both journalists. Rob owned his own house at the time, he gardened and made friends with the elderly ladies on our street who he sometimes ran errands for.

Poorna and Rob

It was no wonder that I fell in love with him, and even when he told me very early on that he had depression, it didn’t register. He seemed to have it all in hand and was very confident about how he was managing it. “It’s not a big problem,” he would say.

I believed him, until Rob’s behaviour started to change after we got married. He was never a chatty person but he became increasingly withdrawn and bed-bound.

Eventually, after I asked him for the umpteenth time to tell me what was wrong, he revealed that he had not just depression but had been battling an addiction to heroin on his own for three years. Although it was hard to get a firm diagnosis, I believe it developed to self-medicate his mental illness, as it does for so many other addicts.

I loved Rob and I didn’t want him to deal with this on his own, so although I was incredibly angry at being lied to, I helped him with his recovery.

We agreed that we weren’t going to tell people because we were afraid of the judgment and stigma. A big part, I felt of Rob’s recovery, was to create a stable environment for him. So he spoke about his struggles in Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and I went to a support group in Lewisham for partners of addicts.

He had two stays in The Priory, and one of his first revelations was: “I don’t think I realised how lonely I’ve been.” It had nothing to do with our marriage but more to do with how Rob viewed his own problems and his inability to articulate them and open up.

Poorna

But for the most part, I couldn’t tell people what was going on. London is a bubble that breeds some of the best success and creativity but it can also stifle and alienate people who are not on the same track. A perfect storm is created: you can’t confess to your vulnerabilities because everyone else seems to have life sorted out, and no one else confesses for the same reasons.

So I would meet friends in the pub and at dinner parties, and nod as the same conversations about having kids, buying a house and getting married swirled around over and over again.

Although our relationship remained loving until the day he took his last breath, the issues around Rob’s recovery and relapses were complicated. Despite the doctors, medicine and support, he took his own life while visiting family in New Zealand.

I could barely talk about Rob’s depression and addiction to other people when he was alive, let alone on a public forum.

But when I realised that the taboo around suicide meant that no one really felt comfortable with me talking about his death, I thought, ‘This is part of the problem, and this is why so many people feel as if they are going at it alone’. So I wrote it to educate and start conversations but also to provide comfort. I have since received letters and texts that it has got couples and families talking to each other about being men, depression and people they have lost to suicide.

In the undertaking, there was a lot I learned about the complexities of men and this current event horizon we are hurtling towards. Rob undeniably had some serious health issues but none of that was helped by the fact that he was never able to talk about his problems.

What I realised is that men not being able to talk about their problems is not trivial. Loneliness killed my husband. He felt it despite being loved by his family, his friends and me. It’s toxic and unrealistic to expect a person to hold all their worries and failures inside — yet we expect it of men as a default — and it serves as one of the main explanations as to why the suicide rate is so high for men.

In a wider sense, writing the book changed everything I know, not just around addiction but also mental health.

It struck me how important this conversation is in the workplace. One of my sources who works high up in government health policy said we needed to understand everyone has mental health, and that it needs protecting and nurturing. In our city culture of long hours and intense pressure, workplaces have to start taking a preventative role, not just when someone becomes ill.

We’re lucky that London has plenty of mental health resources compared to other places — there are wellbeing-at-work training companies — but it’s about that mindset shift. Some companies don’t want to invest in that side of things despite the amount of money and people they lose to stress, and that’s because of the age-old problem that you can see a physical illness but you can’t always see a mental one.

From a personal view, the biggest thing I have learned with Rob is that no one has it all figured out. Every person in this city struggles with something hidden behind the scenes, and the loneliness that generates has to be something we recognise and tackle.

I know from personal experience that when Londoners take on a cause, we can achieve some incredible things. I’ve witnessed many small acts of kindness, and seen the bigger acts when thousands of us take to the streets to protest against injustice.

If we can harness this, the very best aspect of ourselves, maybe we can one day be known for our ability to reach out the hand of human connection, rather than a city of lonely souls who feel silenced by the challenges going on within their lives.

Chase The Rainbow by Poorna Bell, is published by Simon & Schuster, £8.99. Buy it here.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in