Apparently, June is peak time for suicide. Adam Kaplin, The Johns Hopkins’ assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences knows that, contrary to popular belief, suicide rates spike in the light of spring, not the darkness of winter. “In April, May and June, the suicide rate goes up and is the highest,” he says.

You might think it Christmas, or another occasion when families traditionally get together in winter. Diwali, maybe, or Hanukkah. But in the Northern Hemisphere, when days are long and light, it is the summer solstice that turns folk manic, something Shakespeare seemed to know intuitively. Long before the days of IPSOS research and SSRIs, his cast of the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream were sent into a delirium by Puck, squeezing a love potion made from flowers into the eyes of somewhat foolish Athenians. By the end of the play, they have all temporarily lost their marbles.

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this week and idle theme,

No more yielding that a dream…

Puck declares. It was only a “dream” after all. Playwrights have used this analogy for centuries. You may not be old enough to remember Bobby Ewing returning to Dallas, but I am. The Dream Season ended with Bobby Ewing's return and the reveal that his death and all the events following it took place in his wife Pamela's dream.

I experience mood swings and at this time of year can feel my temper rising. Personally, I think it was the pressure of exams that first sent me crazy, but my father, a psychoanalyst, mooted the notion it was because that was when my little brother was born. Until that time, I had had my parents to myself. Certainly, in photos taken in the run up to his birth, I look very worried. My father died in 2016 and my mother last year, in 2023. My stepfather passed away in 2009. The only parent I have left is my stepmother. We have had our rows over the years, as she would leap to the defence of my father so swiftly. Now I appreciate that this was because she loved him deeply and commitedly.

And now, horror of horrors, I am 61!  How on earth did that happen? Most days I still feel 16. Perhaps that’s the period of my life that I am ‘stuck’ in, where I have most unresolved issues. Certainly, my teenage years hardly a walk in the proverbial park, caught as I was between two warring parents, each telling me they were right, and the opposite party was wrong.

“If you don’t get divorced,” I recall shouting, “I WILL LEAVE HOME!” I was 18 and expect they both thought, What’s the big deal there? Aren’t you going to university any minute, anyway? But most of us remember what being a teenager was like. As I explore in my series of Making Friends books on mental health, there are big similarities between adolescence, when our hormones are being switched on, and menopause, when they are being turned off. By the time we are approaching the end of life, the symptoms of diseases such as Alzheimer’s may mean we return to childhood. We become ‘gaga’, like babies, needing feeding and nappies.

“We all have to die sometime,” my stepmother said last week. “We have to make way for the next generation.” From what I can see, she is going to be with us for a few years yet. She is an intellectual force of nature and at 88 was granted an honorary doctorate.

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “You are an inspiration!”

She brushed off the compliment. “I’m nothing. You should see my friend, Pam, she is 100!”

Of course, there are some people achieving more than she is. The oldest person in the world is currently Maria Branyas, who is 117. It’s impossible to know when we are going to die, or what is going to claim us. Whether you love or hate your parents, I believe it is often worth building bridges before they pass away, for the sake of both parties. Few people want to look back on the final encounter they had with a loved one regretting all the words left unsaid.

Sarah

A Moodscope member