It's hard to know when things started to go wrong. In matters of the heart and mind this is probably always the case. How far back do we go? In the field of schizophrenia we know, for example, that symptoms usually start in late adolescence or early adulthood. Although childhood-onset schizophrenia does exist, it is rarer than the adult form and the disorder is usually thought of as mainly a disorder of adulthood. Many people who develop schizophrenia do well until their teens, but schizophrenia is increasingly seen as a neurodevelopmental disorder affected by childhood circumstances – we know that people with schizophrenia are more likely than others to have experienced child abuse, for example. Some research and theory push the trouble even further back – way back, to intrauterine experiences. When we start to think about anxiety and trauma, there may well be precipitating events, but there are also those who research our species’ evolution over very long periods of time, trying to understand how the brain of today replays what we learned as an evolving species of ape. Or earlier, and earlier.

Elsie's nerve problems were much more mundane, and much more easy to overlook, than anything as serious as schizophrenia. But nevertheless, she suffered. And, if we take a broad view of research, the reason Elsie suffered, and suffered so badly, with anxiety was probably all because she was a mammal. I am aware as I write this that this statement may well be discriminatory against fish. Crustaceans and even trees, which we now know do communicate with one another, may in their turn object to being left out of the puzzle. To reframe: Elsie suffered because she was alive. And in her case certainly, she was alive because she suffered. On a global or cosmic scale, if we try to compute the incomputable, she did not suffer that much – no pogroms, death camps or being on the wrong side of colonialism and apartheid. None of that. But hers is the life I want to understand. When I wrote my first memoir, Able-Bodied, which looked at my relationship with my disabled father, a number of people, with varying layers of disapproval, said to me that they missed a fuller engagement on my part with my relationship with my mother.