Severe Depression of James Clements

James Clements’s severe depression began after the death of his daughter Ellie and reshaped his family life, work, and sense of the past. The depression is described both through his former wife’s account of the breakdown that led to his hospitalisation and through his own later explanation: he had been overwhelmed by grief, anger, and the unanswered question of how Ellie died, and sought distance from reminders of that pain.

Background and Family Rupture

After her marriage to James ended, Helen Wilkins left the family home with their son Darren. She said that the house held too many memories and was unhealthy for Darren. From the sale, she gave James £40,000, although that money was not part of their divorce settlement; she said she felt sorry for him and had money of her own from her parents. The account places his subsequent depression within a family already separated by divorce and the loss of their daughter.

Contact between James and his former family became limited. Helen told Jo that staying in touch was not her choice: James had chosen distance because seeing her and Darren was, she believed, a painful reminder. She would not have allowed Darren to see him after the breakdown. Her account thus links the depression not only to James’s private suffering but also to the lasting separation between father and son.

Breakdown, Hospitalisation, and Withdrawal

In response to Jo’s question about the breakdown, Helen explained that one of James’s work colleagues had called her with the news. James had developed severe depression, was hospitalised for a time, and never returned to work. She placed the breakdown in the spring of 2013, though she qualified the date as her recollection. James moved away that autumn, extending his withdrawal beyond the workplace and the home he had shared with his family.

Helen believed he had gone somewhere in the Yorkshire Wolds, but she had not heard from him since he left, and, as far as she knew, neither had Darren. The account leaves his life during this period largely outside the reader’s view. What it establishes clearly is the sequence of breakdown, hospitalisation, departure from work, and relocation—and the silence that followed between James and his former family.

James’s Account of Grief

Years later, James described the emotional state that had driven him away. After finding Ellie dead across her bed, he said, his life had turned upside down. Sleep brought vivid, horrible dreams; while awake, he was persistently angry and on edge. Unlike his wife, he did not lose his appetite: instead, he felt a terrible need to gorge himself. He believed that unless he discovered why Ellie had died, he would go mad.

His search for an explanation brought him into contact with the drug trade that he held responsible for her death. James cited the number of cocaine deaths that year and the danger posed by changing drug purity: someone accustomed to taking cocaine might not realise that a familiar dose could now be fatal. Ellie, experimenting with cocaine for the first time, had no way to know the risk, he said. He had tracked down a dealer, who laughed in his face. James later gave up pursuing him, recognising that the attempt was both futile and dangerous.

Retreat and the Return of the Past

James described his new surroundings as a kind of medicine: a separate world in which the past did not exist and he could live in the present without worrying about the future. Above all, he wanted to bury what had happened. This was not a resolution of his grief so much as an arrangement for keeping its reminders at a distance. When Jo came to speak with him, her presence reopened the history he had tried to leave behind, and he told her that this was what had upset him.

His explanation gives the depression its central dramatic shape: an attempt to escape pain that remains active beneath the refuge. The account does not show that the investigation cures James or restores his family relationships. Instead, it makes visible the cost of his withdrawal and the persistence of the loss: the search for answers, the anger that accompanied it, and the past that resurfaced when Jo arrived.