What is Sacred to you? James Longman responds 

Elizabeth   

James, you are very kindly speaking to us from Ukraine. Your mind may be in on many other things, and I’m going to be very mean and ask you a big juicy question. There’s no warm up, there’s no “What did you have for breakfast?” It’s straight in there with something that is trying to get to your deep values, the principles that you are least attempting to live by, and we all fail. And I frame that as, what are your sacred values? What is sacred to you? But you can take that in whatever direction you like and just see what bubbles up. Just riff from me for a minute or two, if that’s okay.

James Longman   

I would say, because I’m in Ukraine so work is at the forefront of my mind, kindness is really the thing that I try and likely fail to live by because it has always helped me in my work. I always feel very strongly that doing what I do often, I meet a person, probably at the worst time in their entire life. There’s no real other reason why I will come into your life, other than to document something horrible that’s happened to you, most of the time. Sometimes I get to do fun things, but when you work in international news, often it’s sad. And there’s a transactional nature to my work, where I have to say to someone, you need to give me a moment of your time: five minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day. And in return, all I have to give you is my kindness because there’s not much else in it for you, let’s be honest. I mean, a Ukrainian who’s lost their home to a Russian bomb will not probably see their life improved by interacting with me. We all have these highfalutin ideas in journalism that what we do makes a difference, and maybe the sum total of what we do does. Occasionally I’ve done stories where, if someone has appeared on television and as a result of my report, they might access more help, a charity might get in touch. There are ways in which they will benefit, but broadly speaking, I have to basically hope that they will just speak to me because I’m nice to them. And I don’t want to go away from that interaction feeling like I’ve taken advantage of them and so really, in some ways, it’s selfish. I want them to feel that I’ve been kind, because I don’t want to feel bad! But I also really deeply want them to know that I really care about what’s happened to them, and people see through it, the audience sees through it, the audience can get a sense of authenticity. So for all those reasons, I think that kindness has served me in my work, people remember it, and it is the thing that I think about most when I’m working. 

Elizabeth

It’s beautiful to hear you say that. And often, when I’m talking to people in professions that are up against the hard bits of life regularly, I think about the traditional professions that did this: priests primarily met people in their hardest moments, therapists, all of those people have structures of support, right and accountability, and they are trained to know how to process the fact that if someone has handed them their sadness, and they’ve been alongside people in their darkness. I have a kind of CJ from the West Wing soft spot for journalists and have always felt this desire to create some sort of mass chaplaining for journalists. How do you process the things that you are seeing and keep the ability to stay kind? You said in your book, “Sometimes journalists cope ugly”. It all comes out sideways. What has helped you maintain the ability to show up with kindness and not let the kind of things that you’re seeing harden your heart? 

James Longman   

I have a ability, and I think a lot of us do, when you’re in the moment, when you’re having to do a job, you put the trauma of it to one side. And actually, I was with friends the other day, and I was talking to a doctor about this. And he deals in pediatric emergency care, you can only imagine the kinds of things he’s dealing with. I mean, it’s much more serious than what I do: he’s actually saving lives. But he can put the trauma of it to one side because he’s got a job to do. So in the first instance, that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to make sure that it doesn’t affect me too much in the moment, because I’ve got a job to do. But more than that, and the way that I think that I have a lot in common with my dad, is that I wanted to make sure I was doing a job where I was feeling things. Because I think, and maybe I’ve been on an American network for too long, but there’s this phrase, “Where there’s feeling, there’s meaning”. But for me, that’s really true, because I just wanted a job where my emotions were being accessed. So whether that’s anger or sadness or being afraid, that’s part of this job. Like you might be in places where things are a bit dangerous. But where my feelings are constantly being activated, that is what drives me. So if I feel really moved by someone’s story, I feel very lucky, because I’m doing some things which I value and where I feel like I might, in that horribly naive way that journalists operate, make a difference. And I want the audience to feel something as well.  

Childhood Influences and Family Dynamics 

Elizabeth   

We’ll come back to that. But first, I want to give our listeners a sense of who you are and where you’ve come from. So tell me a bit about your childhood. What were the big influences, the big ideas that were in the air, maybe like primary school years when you were younger than 10? 

James Longman  

Goodness. So I was born and raised in West London. I am an only child. My parents split when I was three. And I was made aware quite early that my dad was not very well, he had schizophrenia. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t really understand, in a way a child doesn’t. So my dad really was kind of like a friend, he was in orbit around us. He only lived around the corner, and I’d see him occasionally. I suppose one of the biggest influences in my life was my grandmother. My mum is part Lebanese, and my grandmother was Lebanese. And they had moved around a lot, they had been refugees many times over. My grandparents had my mum in Egypt, and my grandparents had met in the war there, but when the war finished, they moved around a lot. They lived in Libya. They lived in Iraq, in Lebanon. They were fleeing war and revolution all the time and eventually came to settle in the UK. So my grandmother had this kind of wonderfully kind of international flair about her and she was deeply religious. And my grandmother basically came to live with us after my father had died, and it was a little bit like a Franco–Arab version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! I kind of lived with my grandparents and my mother in this kind of multilingual, multicultural environment where you had my grandfather, who was a New Zealander, former Army Major, married to this Lebanese woman, my grandmother, who was very glamorous. She always wore, you know, floral silk shift dresses. She always smelt like rose water. She wore red, deep red lipstick all the time. She had big white hair. And she was really a massive influence on my life until she died when I was 14. So I think my life when I was young, it felt quite disjointed, because I was an only child in this kind of weird family which didn’t look like other families, and I was always conscious of not really looking like other families. And then when I was when I was eight years old, I was sent away to boarding school, a very English boarding school. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I was sent away from an environment which was full of love in many ways, but was also quite kind of chaotic, and we’ll kind of come on to why. But when I went to school, everything kind of made sense. I was in this kind of English environment where there were rules and there were boundaries, and I loved it. I spent ten years of my life up until I was 18 there, but that Catholic background remains, because it was a Catholic boy in school, and that was the reason why I was sent there. So this kind of the ethos; the Catholic ethos, the saints, the constant praying, it was still in my life until I was 18. 

Elizabeth   

There’s this beautiful vignette in the book about your grandmother, who I just fell in love with through your words, can you tell me about her? The rosary beads over her bed?  

James Longman   

There were all kinds of things in the house, there were pictures of various different saints. She would constantly be praying to St Anthony, every time anything got lost. And over her bed, I always remember  these huge rosary beads, and each bead was probably about the size of my head. And if it fell, you were going to die. I mean, there was no question of it, if anyone was lying on that pillow, they were gone. Yeah, she was amazing. We moved around a lot, and when we’ve lived in France, and that was when she sadly died. I think my favorite story of hers was where she was on her death bed, and she was 96 when she died, and she’s lying there, and in the way the Lebanese do, she was giving my mother all her rice recipes and family secrets, and telling her which jewels she wanted to be buried in, and all this for stuff. And then she had had this long running feud with a cousin who she had lent a christening gown to. I was supposed to be christened in this christening gown, right? My grandmother had been making it for years and years. It was huge. She lent it to this woman, Andre. And Andre never gave it back, and my grandmother never forgave her for that. She held a grudge against her for 14 years, for the duration of my life. And she’s lying on her deathbed, and she says to my mother, “Tell Andre…” and my mother thought, ah, she’s going to let this go. “Tell her I will never forgive her.” And then she died, which I love! It tells you what you need to know about my grandma. She was a very loving, lovely woman, but she was very proud and superstitious as well. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah, and the other character that comes through so vividly and tenderly is your dad. So tell me a little bit more about who he was and his life. 

James Longman   

So my dad was an artist. He was a kind of Bohemian type in West London. This was Notting Hill in the 1980s when I was born. This is before the movie, before it became chic. I mean, you go there now, and it’s all kind of acai bowls and downward dog. 

Elizabeth   

When the carnival was launched and it was actually rooted? 

James Longman   

Yeah absolutely rooted in the in the culture of the of the area. But it was also kind of the sort of area of lots of Bohemian intellectuals and artists, and my dad was one of these people. He was an art student. He tried to become a lawyer, but then just decided that really wasn’t for him. He wanted to do something creative. And his mother and his brother were both artists, and he became an artist.  

But when he was 21, he had a major psychotic break, and his family realized that he had schizophrenia, and he was in and out of psychiatric care for many years. He actually met my mum in the early 70s in London, and they were engaged to be married, and then he had a psychotic break, and he left and went to live in Switzerland with the Maharishi, who founded Transcendental Meditation. And so my dad was in the mix in this kind of heady 1960s, 70s mix of the early days of Transcendental Meditation. You know, the Beatles were big on this, it was really an exciting time for young people, but he was carried away into this movement of deep and intense meditation, which the family all said was part of the reason why he ended up getting schizophrenia. They think that it triggered something in him. And there’s a chapter in the book about the links between meditation and schizophrenia for that reason. 

Anyway, he eventually came back to London ten years on, and then he knocked at my mum’s door and said, “Now I’m ready to marry you.” And they got married and had me, but soon after, these psychotic illnesses kind of returned. And when I was nine years old, he set fire to flat he was living in, and he then threw himself from the window, and he died. And his whole life, for me during my childhood and really, until quite recently, has been defined by that. When someone ends their life, that’s all really anyone remembers or thinks about, and they become this ‘sick person’ who killed themselves. And I’ve spent the last few years writing this book and rediscovering who he was away from the illness. He was a really talented, creative, funny, quirky individual who was really loved by a lot of people. I managed to find his art school colleagues, peers, other students who were with him, his cohort, his first girlfriend, the carers who looked after him at various points in his life, and I’ve been able to build a picture outside of the sadness of his suicide. 

The Impact of Mental Health in Family History 

Elizabeth   

And am I right in thinking you weren’t told that that’s how he died at the time? 

James Longman   

Yeah, that’s right. So I was told that there’d been a fire, and the first chapter of the book deals with how I’m told. I’m told by a housemaster at the school I was at and just told that there was a fire and that there wasn’t anything they could do. And I remember it just feeling it was bit weird. I didn’t really know something other than just a fire had happened, but no one really explained what. And I always remember the funeral, my aunt, my uncle’s, wife, read a poem about how he was finally free. And I remember sitting there in that church, I was nine, and I always remember having this memory sat there thinking, what does that mean? He’s finally free, he’s died. It’s not a good thing. And then it wasn’t really until much later, and I started to develop my own sadness. I got into some deeply depressive episodes, when I was in my 20s that I started to wonder, what actually happened here? My relationship with my mother kind of broke down, and I was told that he had killed himself sometime in my teenage years. My mother had told me during the fight, but I didn’t really know the details. And so when I started getting a bit sad, I started to try to investigate why that might be. And I was offered the opportunity. I was working for the BBC at the time, and I did a small piece on the issue. I went to the library archive to find out what had happened, and I discovered that he’d set fire to this building, and that he’d jumped out of a window. And that was when I was 26, so it took a long time to realize what had actually happened to him. Because I think one of the big themes of the book is really it’s just family: why we are the way we are, what makes us products of our family, and the secrets and the shame that pervade in families when a major trauma happens, and especially something like mental illness and suicide. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah, because there’s another piece of the puzzle that you’ve been putting together around your dad’s dad? 

James Longman   

That’s right. So it wasn’t until doing this that I then found out that his dad had also ended his life. And it remains a bit of a mystery. I mean, I was told, in a vague sense, it was because he’d been given a prostate cancer diagnosis. But even then, I don’t think that anyone really knew if there was anything else happening. I was told that he had shot himself in the family garden at a time of day when he knew his son would be there, my dad. And he wanted my dad to find his body. And my dad would have been in his early 20s when this happened, just at the time he was already experiencing psychotic illness. So quite why you would plan your own death in order for your son to find your body, when you know your son’s already going through something. He did it so that he didn’t want his wife, my grandmother, to find to find the body. And then through further conversations, but never directly with the person, I find out, my uncle, my dad’s brother, also had schizophrenia and was put into psychiatric care. I knew my uncle, he only died a couple of years ago. Only I didn’t see him in the last ten years of his life, but it was never really discussed. And so then I just thought, hang on, I’ve got a dad who ended his life and had schizophrenia, I’ve got an uncle who had schizophrenia, I’ve got a grandfather who killed himself. Wow, it’s not looking good! And so, when I was feeling sad, I just thought, well then is this written? Is it in my code? Is this sort of predetermined in some way that I was always going to get sad? How does that work? And that’s what set me on the path to writing the book. 

The Journey into Journalism and Conflict Reporting 

Elizabeth   

I want to come back to what you found and what it might mean for those of us trying to understand each other better. But let’s just fill in some gaps, because you went to study Arabic and ended up in Syria for studies initially. Is that right? 

James Longman   

Yeah. So when I got to sort of university, I thought, well, what can I do which is going to allow me to travel? That’s all I really wanted to do. I wanted to escape. That was basically my plan. And my grandmother was always in my heart, really. I just always thought about her, and being in the Middle East seemed like a natural thing to do. So I went to do a degree in Arabic. I lived in Syria to do that, which, if you know anything about the Middle East, for a Lebanese person, that would be exactly the wrong place to go and live! But I did it anyway, because I just I wanted to be close to Lebanon, it borders Syria. I went to live in Syria and fell in love with it. And then I did a Masters where, again, I was focused on Syria. And then the war started in 2011 it was a protest movement, if you remember all those years ago. Actually in the news at the moment, you’re seeing you know that that war bubble back up again. But this was in 2011 and I went really to do my thesis for my Masters, and I realized that I was in the right place at the right time to write for the newspapers, because they weren’t allowing journalists in. I had a visa, I was able to be there. And so I started writing for British newspapers under an assumed name. I wasn’t there legally as a journalist, and that’s where my journalism career kind of got started.  

Elizabeth   

Yes, and you’ve been in the most astonishing situations, right up close to some of the most dangerous and impactful events of our time. What draws you to keep doing this job, essentially, to keep going towards danger rather than away from it? 

James Longman   

I find it quite exciting to be in a place where some consequential things are happening. I feel like it’s a way of not being a passive passenger in a world. It’s a way of being a sort of proactive, I suppose, participant in world events. There’s something very exciting about being in the place where something is happening right this minute. I mean, every time anything happens anywhere in the world, my immediate thought is, how can I get there? What would be the quickest way? Are there planes still going? Who would go with me? Will ABC be interested in the story? How can I sell it to my network so that they’re interested? Yeah, it’s about being in a place where something that’s happening and making people understand that the world is bigger than the space that they occupy. What you realize when you do this job and you speak to people all over the world is that we all basically have exactly the same needs and desires. You can speak to a yoga Instructor in LA or a mother of seven children in a refugee camp in Iraq, and basically they want the same things. They want to be happy. They want their children to be okay. They want to be fed. They want to have a future. So trying to explain to people who live slightly more comfortable lives that everyone else really wants what they’ve got, I think I quite like that challenge as well.  

Ethics and Responsibilities in News Reporting 

Elizabeth  

One of the things I appreciate about the book is how honestly you’re wrestling with the ethics of what you do and the responsibility of it. And a lot of my work has been around cultural stories, I started at the BBC, and then I ran a think tank, and I’m fascinated by these kind of ambient narratives that shape our common life the way they shape us. They make some things seem legitimate, and some things seem illegitimate. They make some people seem like the good guys, and some people seem like bad guys. Some life choices are okay, some are not. And it’s mostly implicit. It is not explicit. It is just the sort of sum of our cultural stories. It’s this very interesting thing about how you choose what stories to cover. What is the responsibility of the editorial instinct within the news saying, Okay, there’s all these things happening in the world all the time, which ones are important enough for our viewers to know about? And what is the role of despair and hope? What are we actually implicitly claiming about what the world is like and what humans are like? Could you just unpack some of your thinking around that? Because I found it really interesting. 

James Longman   

Look, I would say that I didn’t get into this job to depress people. I don’t want to spread gloom. And so many people, especially people my age, who have dinner parties and people say, “I don’t watch the news, it’s really depressing.” And that kind of is troubling, because, I don’t know if I would go so far as saying it’s a duty, but I think it is important that we do know what’s happening in the rest of the world because whether you like it or not, it will end up affecting you. How we decide what a story is? There are so many different things that go into it. I mean, broadly speaking, it’s can we make this understandable for an American audience? I think what people have to understand is that the point of knowledge base and point of departure in the United States is just that much lower than it would be in Europe. Just because of geography, Americans tend to know a little bit less about the rest of the world than the average European might. I’m not judging anyone, that’s just the reality of it. Plus, the media landscape in the States is so much more varied, so you’ve really got to fight for space and attention. And telling them about this sort of tiny story in X country is not going to cut through, so you just need to be realistic about it. But what guides me often, and what American television actually does really well, and I would argue, better than it did when I was at the BBC, is provide people with a bit of hope. Even the most hopeless stories, you have to do that. There’s a reason why the most clicked on story at the BBC will not be about Syria or Ukraine. It’ll be about a panda or about an amazing snowman somewhere. And that’s not because we’re idiots. It’s because we want to be happy. Naturally, people want to be happy. So if I can figure out a way to make my serious story give them a bit of a panda. You know, it sounds trite, but that’s really what I have to try to do, then I’m happy. The thing I always remember as one of the things that formed me as a journalist, I covered the Bataclan attacks, people will remember in 2016, one of the victims’ husbands (this woman had died she’d been killed inside the theatre), and this was a father of two small children, and now a widower, he wrote a letter to the killers forgiving them. He wrote this beautiful letter saying, I cannot teach my children hate. I have to teach them forgiveness, and for that reason, I forgive you for what you did to my wife. I thought it was incredible that he’d written this. We went to his house. We asked him if you could just simply read the letter to our cameras. He did. It became the most watched thing the BBC had ever done at that point, which is insane, right? But it’s because he was giving people a bit of hope. Yeah, through the letter, through the information around it, on the website, you would find out the facts about what had happened and the very sad situation. But really at its centre, it was because he was giving people some hope, and I’ve got to try to do that with what I do as well. 

Cultural and Spiritual Influences on Identity 

Elizabeth   

Yes, it’s so interesting, isn’t it? I think attention is a moral act, like we can choose what we attend to and what we attend to changes us. And I think a lot of people’s resistance to watching news is the sense that the sort of overwhelming horror is changing them, and making them shut down, and be cynical, and the desire to protect ourselves from it. I think it’s quite a difficult balancing act, to attend to the true suffering of the world, but also attend to the true beauty of the world, and the potential for goodness and hope. I wonder if you continue to have any kind of spiritual frame for things, because this is often where people find the place that helps them balance those two things. How much does your grandmother’s Catholicism leave a mark on you? 

James Longman   

I say to people that I’m culturally Catholic in the same way as you can be culturally Jewish. Not being religiously Jewish in any way but part of a wider group, I feel that about being Catholic. I mean, my mum, I always remember like, if she’s asking after someone on television, she says, “Oh, who’s this? I’ve not seen them before.” And she finds out they’re Catholic, she said, “Oh, I knew they were Catholic. I knew I’d like them.” That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a completely insane thing to say! 

Elizabeth  

Scientists call it homophily, people like me syndrome, we all do it.  

James Longman   

It’s this kind of shared, sort of ephemeral thing that you just know that someone is nice because they’re Catholic and it’s just bonkers and it’s not always true. So that’s how I feel about it. And there were people in my life who were so important to me, right? My grandmother, some of the priests at my school, so I was at a Catholic boarding school run by Benedictine monks, the ethos of St Benedict is about community. And I think that really played a big part in my life. You know, thinking about what you can do to contribute to community, looking out for other people, thinking very deeply about being part of a group. I mean, as an only child, that was so important to me, because I grew up really on my own, and I got to a school where it was all about, well, you’re in a community now, and we have to look out for each other. I’ll always remember there was a boy who sadly died very young, I think it was 13, and the entire school of all 450 boys, we lined the path to the church through the whole school as his as his funeral went through, as his basket was carried. And I just thought the most powerful thing, because we’d all come and we’d all shown up for his family. Even if you’d ask those boys to recite various different prayers, they probably may not have known off by heart. I mean, most of us did, because you had to go three times a week. But how Catholic are we in ‘capital C’ terms? I’m not sure. But I absolutely feel it. If I’m in a foreign country and there’s a beautiful church, I will light a candle for my grandmother, because I know she would have liked it. I met the Pope, and I told him about my grandmother in very bad Italian. You have to speak to him in Italian and I was told a phrase in Italian, I can’t remember it now, but I just said, “My grandmother would have been very proud.” And he took my hand and held it, and then I felt my grandmother. She would have gone absolutely mental if she knew that I met the Pope, she absolutely would have gone crazy! She would have thought it was the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. And I remember, I was told about her death by our headmaster at the time at my school, and he was a priest called Father Christopher. And so if there are people who are important to you in your life and they are religious, as most of them have been for me, then I can’t help but think that there might be something in it, even if I’m not. I wouldn’t count myself to be a religious person.  

Navigating Homosexuality in Hostile Environments 

Elizabeth   

I want to ask you something that may be crossing a boundary, and I love a good boundary, so feel free to push back, and also we can edit. But I’ve been thinking, your book is basically a love letter to Alex, isn’t it? It’s this incredibly beautiful testimony, sorry, I’m going to cry now, about your husband’s love for you. And one of the things you write about is the complexity of being kind of publicly gay on social media and in the book, because of some of the places you report, right? Because that puts you in danger in some places. So I’d love you to say a little bit about that, and if you’re willing, how that has played out in terms of your thinking about faith and religion and whether it’s been a point of tension. 

James Longman   

Well in response to being gay in the public eye and doing my job, I often think about it in a few ways when it comes to doing my actual job. So I think about it if I’m in a place where it’s not okay to be gay. I went to Chechnya, for instance, which is probably the most dangerous place you can be gay in the world. I mean, I don’t know if there’s a ranking, but given that, they just summarily execute gay people! And I met the guy who’s basically responsible for rounding gay people up, and I was thinking in the back of my mind, this guy has no idea that I’m gay, because I wasn’t the idea he has of a gay person. If you go to some parts of the world, they have stereotypes of gay people, you have to be incredibly effeminate and basically dressed like a woman. And often, I remember when I lived in Syria, there was a group of guys who were obviously gay, who lived in our neighborhood, and they would grow their hair long and their nails very long, and they’d wear very tight clothes. And it was a form of protection. It was like, don’t worry, we are assuming this role. We are not a threat to your masculinity. You see that quite a lot in in parts of the world where it’s really difficult to be to be gay. But I did think to myself, well, if in this tiny way, I might break down some of the stereotype that he has of what a gay person has to look like, then I think that would be worth my time here. If the audience that is going to watch this, and there are huge swathes of the United States where people still feel very strongly that sexuality is wrong, if they’re watching it, maybe they might learn something. But I think most importantly, if there are young gay people watching and they’re worried about telling people they love that they’re gay, then maybe they’ll see someone like me on TV and worry maybe a tiny bit less. So those are the things that go through my mind when I’m working. And if I’m in a place where it’s not okay to be gay, I often say 

I don’t know how much you care about football or soccer, but I know nothing about soccer. Like, literally, close to zero. But as a British person, when you’re abroad, you’re assumed to know everything about it. Like, this is an oracle of football. And so everyone asks you about it, and you have to kind of fane, like, oh yeah, Chelsea, haha. Absolutely no clue! So you have to go through the motions. And so, by the same token, if I’m in a place where there’s someone who I don’t imagine will be very thrilled with me being gay, and he asked if I’m married, I then just have to go through the “No, but I’ll find the one someday” conversation. And yes, is that traumatic? Is it a is it a microaggression, to use modern parlance? Maybe. But I try not to judge that person. I know that I have a very happy life at home. I’m not going to get too upset if I go to a part of the world where they’re not okay with me being gay. So that is also my privilege to be able to be there and not have a problem with it, because people who live in those places, they really do have a problem with it. When it comes to my faith, that is something I really did struggle with. I think it’s one of the real reasons I came out so late. I came out because I emailed my mum when I was 24 I think, which these days is late given that I told the first person when I was 16. And I did think of it, if not in a conscious way, a subconscious way of being a sin, of thinking it’s something wrong. I remember telling my friend Stefa when I was 16 that I was gay, as though I were telling her that I had committed a crime. I was like, admitting something that was wrong, and hoping that she wouldn’t judge me, and that was really how I had internalized it. And as much as my school life was full of love and acceptance and compassion, it was, first of all, an all–boys school where homophobic tropes are just part of life. People were called gay all the time, and it was a Catholic all–boys school, so you were conscious that it is technically and remains a sin. And so I think it was a big reason why I came out late. There were boys in my year who were out, or at least they weren’t out, but everyone kind of knew they were gay, they would never be ‘out’ out, and their lives were hard. And I didn’t want to be like them. I was okay academically, I played sport, and I ended up becoming the head boy at school. And you just there was no way on earth, but I would say publicly that I was gay in an environment like that. I like to think that things have changed. Apparently they have, I go back to my school all the time, and I love it. It’s a brilliant community, and I hope, and I know that people do come out now, which is lovely, but it still identifies as a Catholic school. But I think it did set me back. And I think there are lots of religious communities where they’re not as accepting as Worth has become, and it’s still really hard. I think it must be a really big issue. But I’ve come across gay Catholics in my life, and they’ve been incredibly important for me to understand that if I have a faith, that it is my faith and that it’s not necessarily contingent on what the Catholic Church says or doesn’t say. The issue, of course, with Catholicism is it’s very dogmatic, that’s kind of the point, versus other types of Christianity. You are walking a tightrope. But again, I just come back to my grandmother. She was Catholic, and she was wonderful, and for me, that’s Catholicism. 

The Interplay of Genetics and Environment 

Elizabeth  

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. You started asking this big question in your 20s, and I can just feel the weight of it. You know, I have this heritage. I’m experiencing some depression, these moments of kind of suicidal ideation. What does it mean? What does it mean for my life? And the book is really pulling on that thread. Could you tell us, this very big question, but what did you find? What have you concluded about this? The title is The Inherited Mind, about how much some of these things roll down the generations, and what might be done for those who are asking the kind of questions that you are. 

James Longman  

I think anybody who knows about genetics will understand the genetic versus environmental factor equation. People talk about a 60% predisposition based on your environment versus 40% genetics. And it’s broadly understood as being a somehow combination of those two things, that will mean that you have some kind of mental illness. 60% environment, 40% genetics. But it’s often presented as this kind of simple equation. You have a chunk of genetics, whatever your upbringing was like, and then it’ll all go into a machine, and then out comes your predisposition. But what I discovered, and there’s some really interesting science happening right now and that’s why I wrote the book, is there’s so much more understood about the interplay between genetics and environment. That it’s not simply a kind of a question of addition or simple equation. It’s actually about how those two things intertwine, and how our environment activates genetics. Most people, when they think about our DNA, they think about the helix, the kind of balls on the chain, the pairs of chromosomes that get given by each of our parents. But that is only 2% of our DNA. The other 98% of our DNA is epigenetics. So if the 2% is the hardware, the 98% is the software. It’s how those genes are activated. It’s how they’re turned on or turned off. One scientist said, “Genes is loading the gun. Epigenetics is pulling the trigger”. So we cannot change our genes, but we can do something about the 98%. We can essentially turn our predispositions on or off. And what I learned in writing the book is that we not only have the power to change our epigenetic processes, we can give that power to our children. Which means that, yes, we can inherit trauma, but we can also inherit healing, which I think is tremendously powerful. These issues are seen as polygenetic so there’s not one gene for any of these things. There are groups of genes. They have found the groups of genes that may account for predispositions to depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which I think is fascinating. And most excitingly for me is that they have found how the body responds to the environment and how that impacts our genetic predispositions. And there’s one example, the part of the genome where they found genes responsible for schizophrenia is on the same part of the genome where genes code for our bodily immunity, our immune system. So we might start to think of schizophrenia, for example, as being an auto immune system issue, rather than simply a mental illness. Like, it could be thought of more like lupus or MS, rather than a psychotic illness. And that really helps, because it gives scientists the tools to refine the drugs that can really help people. Specifically in something like schizophrenia, where the drugs really haven’t changed for one hundred years, people are given various different degrees of lithium, which is a horrible drug for a lot of people. My dad didn’t like taking it. What I found in his medical notes, I got 120 pages of his medical notes released to me, which is incredible. He hated taking his meds, which is very common among people who have psychotic illness, largely because most of the medications haven’t really changed in that time. So the science that’s going on at the moment is really going to help people, because it can be better tailored to their own bodies and their own genetic predispositions. 

Understanding Mental Illness and Suicide 

Elizabeth   

One of the things that I was really struck by in the book, is how honest you are, and I value that so much when people can hold the complexity. And you said during the writing of this book, you had to stop for a while because you had a period of depression and had to step away from it. So there’s obviously not a linear case that kind of learning the science behind these illnesses means that you will never again feel sad. But what has what you’ve learned and this process and unpacking family history, how has it changed you? How has it shaped you? 

James Longman   

I thought for a long time that my depression wasn’t just depression, it was my dad’s depression. That I was getting sad like him, and I was getting lonely, and feeling this kind of heavy solitude, which I remember him having, he would withdraw. I remember thinking I have that. I don’t have this amorphous idea of depression, I have whta my dad had. And that has made it really difficult for me to come out from underneath this cloud in my family. What studying all this has shown me is how my own sadnesses are not linked in that way to him. They were his. What’s mine is mine, and I have the power to undo those things myself. That has been tremendously powerful for me. I think learning more about my dad has helped me untangle that, because for a long time it was the only thing I really had to go on. I didn’t know much else about him. So really, having his depression was a way for me to feel closer to him. And actually that was very unhealthy. And the book is not intended as a self–help book, but there is a chapter in the book which shows how there are things you can do in your life to generate more of these ‘longevity cells’, which a scientist in the book explains will help you stay away from illness. David Sinclair is a famous Harvard professor who talks about longevity genes and about how you can do things in your life to generate more of the chemicals that will keep you healthier for longer. There’s a lot of science around inflammation. For a long time, we thought inflammation was a good thing. Inflammation meant disease control. Actually reducing inflammation in the body is really important, and there’s a lot of ways that you can do that in your life, to reduce inflammation that has an impact on your mental illness and your mental health as well. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. Writing the book doesn’t suddenly mean I don’t get sad, but it has helped me move away from this idea of inevitability, because what I’ve realized is nothing is inevitable. You have the power to do something about it.  

The Power of Compassionate Support 

Elizabeth   

I’m aware that all these questions are very tender, and I’m just really grateful. But there’s a particular point where you’re talking about suicide, and there is a sense you have that there are some myths about suicide, or some stories that are told about suicide that you really want to push back on. What do you wish people understood about that horrifying event that touches so many people’s lives? 

James Longman   

I would say they must not think of it as a selfish choice made for the person’s own welfare. The person who ends their life is not doing it for them. My dad, I think, did it for us. He felt that he was a burden on us. So I really want people to move away from the idea that these are choices people make about themselves, because often it’s a decision that people make to unburden the people they love. That’s how they think about it. When I was really one of my lowest points, I remember a friend of mine telling me about her brother–in–law who ended his life, her sister had drawn the curtains back and seen her husband hanging from a tree in the garden, and they had had absolutely no warning, nothing. They did not have any idea that there was something going on. And she said “She looked at me, stricken and she said, ‘How can you have done that? What was he thinking?’” And I remember thinking I knew exactly what he was he was thinking. He was trying to unburden his family. It wasn’t about him. I’d also like people to think much more about people who have mental illness. We talk a lot these days around mental health, and that’s great. I think that’s brilliant. You know, mental health day, wonderful. But it’s given us permission to ignore people who have serious mental illnesses, and there are a lot of them. And then a lot of people will have people in their own families who have something much more than a stress induced depressive episode. They have clinical depression, or they have psychotic bipolar disorder, or they have schizo–affective disorder or schizophrenia. These are not things that a walk in the park or a bowl of blueberries are going to help. We’ve got to think really strongly about how we help people who have these issues and not romanticize, or you know… 

Elizabeth 

Sometimes trivialize?

James Longman 

Trivialize, absolutely! Trivialise these issues, because everybody has mental health, they absolutely do. We’ve all got mental health because we’ve all got brains, because we all got physical health, because we’ve all got bodies. We don’t all have mental illness but there are a lot of people in the world who do, and a lot of people in our society who do. And in investigating my dad’s illness, one thing that was very clear was that he got a lot more help in the mid–1990s than he would have done now.  

Elizabeth   

Channeling your [dilemma] ‘how do we help people see the good and the beautiful as well as the hard?’, I’d love to finish with a question that’s really about, how do we love each other well? If people have people in their lives that have serious mental illness, what would it mean to show up for them in such a way that – God that is going to make me weep – that healing can travel down the generations? What is it that Alex brings to you? What are the stories of people that you’ve seen? How do we help each other heal? 

James Longman  

Understanding. Just understanding and not trying to force what your idea of a solution is on another person. You know, my mum spent her whole life trying to fix my dad, and really it was never within her power to do that. What he needed was people to be alongside him and just to listen to him to make him feel that he was loved. So often, people who have significant mental illnesses are moved away from families because they’re seen as being a danger, especially to children, and that’s really detrimental. One of his care workers said to me, in her experience, it’s actually worse for the person, if they are ostracized from particularly children in the family, because it just kind of compounds their illness. 

The most beautiful story that I came across in writing this book was this guy, and I speak to other people who have these issues in their families, and Alex was his name. His mother, Monica, has schizophrenia. She’s had it for her whole life, and she’s in her 80s now, and Alex has grown up, and he tells the story of walking alongside Monica her whole life, allowing her to be ill and not forcing any solutions on her. And she hasn’t been medicated for 25 years. She has a paranoia about shiny surfaces in the house. A lot of people who may have paranoid schizophrenia believe there are listening devices. So she has paranoid schizophrenia about the establishment, about people listening to her. So she doesn’t like shiny surfaces, so they do what they can to remove the shiny surfaces in the house. She thinks moss is a listening device, so every six months, he and his siblings go up with these handmade harnesses onto the roof of her house and remove the moss. And the most beautiful example and the slightly crazy one, a few years ago, she believed that the Emperor of Japan had left her apartment in Copenhagen. She was obsessed with this idea. It was a delusion. She wouldn’t let it go. Eventually, Alex’s sister said to her, “I’ll take you to Copenhagen, and we’ll see if we can find the apartment.” They went there. They spent a rainy weekend walking around, didn’t find it, obviously. Came back. She was devastated. The other siblings came to the house. They just loved her. And she has these moments of insight, and she said, “Maybe you were right. Maybe there wasn’t an apartment.” And for every delusion since they’ve been able to say to her, “Do you remember when you thought there was an apartment? Maybe this is like that.” And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I said to Alex, “You are your mum’s medication. It’s incredible the support and the love that you can show her, and she’s not locked up in some psychiatric institution, she’s living her life in the world.” And I just thought that was the most beautiful thing. And of course, that requires privilege and resources. But wow, what a thing to be that love and support for a person who has something so scary going on in their minds. 

Elizabeth   

We are each other’s medication. James Longman, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred. 

James Longman 

Thank you.