Introduction
How did a 30-year-old English woman with a loving husband of eight years and a fulfilling job and comfortable home suddenly make a suicide attempt which nearly took her life? Below, I will tell the real-life story of how this happened to my Mother, showing how she descended into severe mental illness in a very short space of time. I aim to show how top-down processing can both succeed and fail.
Background
When you are young, top-down processing cannot always help you overcome life’s difficulties, simply because you have not had enough life experience to draw upon. Therefore, perception is at risk. I aim to explain how my Mother came to suddenly perceive the world around her in a very distorted way, and how her sheltered past upbringing and experiences had by no means prepared her for what she was about to live through. Aspiring to what she envisioned to be an improved way of life, she and my Father made decisions which were too drastic a change for her mind to healthily process. Life’s previous fragile scaffolding crumbled to dust.
I can here relate, because I have her permission, my Mother’s descent into severe depression and anxiety in 1989, when she made an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and was “sectioned” in a psychiatric hospital in Northumberland, England, for two months. It would be two years before she made a full recovery and was free of anti-depressant medication. This very rapid decline in my Mother’s mental health came about, she realized many years later, because she had seen, through very troubled sight perception, her new living circumstances and environment’s problems as grossly exaggerated in her mind. She believed the only way out was to take her life.
Relevance to now
I can contrast 1989’s past experience with one that befell my Mother again only ten days ago, on September 1st. Having escaped Hurricane Henri completely, with only hard rain expected from Hurricane Ida, on August 31, at 10.45 pm, we received an emergency alert on our mobile phones of a tornado about to hit Lloyd Neck, Long Island, where we live for part of the year. Minutes later, our densely wooded neighborhood was hit by that tornado, bringing devastation to 136 houses and land.
History
In 1989, my Mother’s illness manifested itself after she and my Father relocated yet again, owing to his job, to the north-east of England from the Manchester area. They bought a large property made of stone in Northumberland with two acres of land and views of a castle and the North Sea. Once again, my Mother had given up a job she loved and a home in Cheshire which could be described as regular residential living, with a small garden in an attractive small town where they had lived very happily for three years.
In remote and wild Northumberland, unaccustomed to having to look after two acres of land, my Mother looked out of the house windows to extensive areas of what had been vegetable gardens, turning into swathes of fast growing weeds, requiring my Father to purchase a flame-gun to keep them at bay. In addition, there were large areas of grass to be cut, and tall, thick privet hedges to be trimmed. My Mother’s eyes perceived the garden greenery as threatening and encroaching. When my Father took my Mother out at the weekends to try to take her away from the home environment, she could not bear to see trees and leaves. The house also needed some renovation and redecorating. My Mother’s background had given her no preparation for the reality of such projects. Very soon, she could no longer eat or sleep. A social creature, she felt the loss of her work colleagues and a rewarding job very badly. She was extremely lonely, and her life felt out of control. My Father, coming from a family of extremely strong women, both physically and mentally, had no understanding of my Mother’s deterioration, telling her he had bought the house she said she wanted. In addition to the distorted sense of vision, now my Mother perceived she was under attack from what she was hearing from my Father. All of life’s supports had fallen away. In early May 1989, my Mother swallowed in the region of 75 paracetamol tablets and went to bed. In the middle of the night, she told my Father what she had done, and was taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, but the pills had already been absorbed into her body. The paracetamol was neutralized by intravenous drugs. The hospital into which she had been admitted had no beds available and she was placed in a female geriatric ward. Awake and vomiting all night, she saw several elderly women die during that night. Her relationship with my Father (they had been married 9 years) broke down, but they never separated or divorced, and were eventually counselled by a social worker for about six months. They have now been married for forty-one years and relocated sixteen times owing to my Father’s employment (including two different continents and three countries).
September 2021
When the tornado struck ten days ago, approximately 15 of our very substantial, tall oak trees fell to the ground, with foliage debris spread all over the two acres. Already shocked from many house deterioration problems owing to us having been absent from this house for eighteen months (Covid-19, my Mother’s new hip operation in June), my Mother felt anxiety and depression creeping back. She experienced difficulty getting her anxiety level down. Having been ill in 1989, and having experienced post-natal depression following my birth, my Mother can now recognize her susceptibility to fast mental deterioration and the important signs that can take her down. She rallied – by now she had lived through two periods of debilitating depression.
Conclusion
So why in 2011 did my parents decide to buy another big house with the same amount of land as some twenty-two years previous? The answer is probably that although the mind retains some life lessons, memory can play tricks if you have lived through many life changes and experiences. You have jumped so many hurdles already, you become drawn and acclimatized to taking on yet more challenges because you gain confidence again. Over the years, your clever brain has processed a vast quantity of information, but the future is always going to be a dodgy navigation because emotion is always involved. The dream of an ideal living location lives on, and when you believe yourself well again, mistakes can so easily be repeated. Top-down perception can alleviate some of the mental anguish.

Works Cited –
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th ed., pp. 59-62). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.
Top-Down processing. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved September 7, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027059