The Skeleton Cupboard by Tanya Byron

kept her in my sights as I watched her climb up onto the barrier of the overpass; I didn’t blink or look away. My magical thinking told me that if I didn’t take my eyes off her, she wouldn’t jump.
    As I got nearer, I could hear the noise of car and truck horns. People had spotted this little girl and stopped to jump out and call up to her. I saw two men leap out of a van and begin running up the embankment, someone else on the hard shoulder was talking frantically into a mobile phone.
    As I approached her, I instinctively slowed down: Run at a person ready to leap, then leap they will. My feet were sore, my muscles ached, and my lungs felt near to explosion, so I stopped and stood still.
    Imogen, on the barrier, turned to look at me; all noise was gone. She was calm; she smiled at me. I was soaking wet from rain and sweat, and panting harder than I ever had. I wanted to bend forward, put my hands on my knees and recover after my marathon, but I couldn’t look away.
    Imogen broke our gaze. She and her dead sister’s stinky rag doll looked over the edge of the barrier and into the road below, gridlocked with vehicles. In the distance, a siren was wailing. I started to walk slowly toward her.
    â€œImogen, shall I pull you out of the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea?”
    I felt calm; I was back in my grandmother’s front room staring at her bloodstained carpet.
    She looked at me again, her mouth moving and her wrists circling. She was deciding what was about to happen. I willed her into my arms.
    And she came.
    I held Imogen, locking my arms around her and pulling her into my body as we both flopped onto the oily, wet tarmac. I felt light, as if I were floating. And then there was a thud on top of me as we both ended up under male bodies, sweating and panting from their sprint up the highway embankment, wrapping their arms around us.
    *   *   *
    Life continued. Young people came and went on the unit. Imogen and I carried on with therapy—I was the only person she would talk to. And talk she did.
    Over time she joined the unit school and after using the “sliding-in technique”—where a teacher would sit in a room while Imogen talked to me, getting closer and closer over days and weeks until our little charge felt comfortable enough to let him join our conversation—I was able to leave her with others, chatting confidently and engaging in lessons; she was a bright little button.
    The skipping and counting stopped almost completely, reappearing only occasionally to remind us that we had missed something she was still struggling with. Self-harm became a thing of the past. Imogen put on weight. Eventually she was able to wear her sneakers done up with their laces, and a dressing gown secured by its cord. It was time to plan her discharge from the unit.
    Coming into an inpatient psychiatric unit is hideous for anyone, but leaving it can be even worse. As a team, we would spend months talking to the kids about leaving, giving them weekend leave, introducing their outpatient team to them and beginning to integrate them back into mainstream school. We told them that this process needed to be lengthy because there was so much to organize, and we needed to give them the chance to disengage slowly, to say good-bye to us. The truth also was that we took so long because we were reluctant to let them go.
    We expected all young people to act out a bit before they left us—they were anxious and wanted to find a way to stay because the outside world felt too scary. Institutionalized children are difficult to support because their anxiety triggers a sense of protectiveness in us and we had to work hard not to collude with their need to remain with us. We wanted to keep them with us—to keep them safe.
    If you know you’ve turned a kid’s life around and she wants to live, how hard would you find it to send her back to the shitty world that made her want to