Meltdown: The story of a tragic psychological collapse

by Geoff Wilson

This is a tough story and will not be an easy read for many readers. And yet it should resonate with most as it is about friendship (which we all experience in some form or another in our lives), about kids at school and their often brutal, strange and uncompromising worlds (which we all have been part of), about the complex and often difficult relationship between children and their parents (again, all of us can relate to this whatever relationship we have had with our parents), about difficult changes in people’s relationships with each other (which we all experience during our lives, some more painful than others), and about jealousy and envy between friends (again, most of us can relate to this). Most importantly, this is a story about the tragic psychological collapse of a person who seemed quite normal as a teenager but who, for various reasons, broke down mentally as an adult and never recovered – a psychological meltdown many of us will have witnessed among people we know. Although the story is set in former West Germany between the 1970s and the present, this is not a particularly ‘German’ story. Indeed, it could be set almost anywhere in the world, i.e. the US, France, the UK, Australia, or indeed in any of the burgeoning transition economies that are increasingly sharing the social, economic and cultural problems, pressures, traps and challenges that shape individuals’ modern life pathways and that, at times, can severely affect individuals’ psychological wellbeing. After all, we all go to school, we all make friends at school and beyond, and we are all dependent on the vicissitudes of life that may toss us one way or another and almost always in unpredictable ways. And we are all psychologically vulnerable to greater or lesser extent, whether we like to admit it or not. We all have our pain, troubles and secrets, and none of us gets through life unscathed. May this story, therefore, be a warning to all those parents, daughters, brothers, friends, sisters, grandparents, sons and acquaintances of fragile personalities who do not realise that psychological meltdowns are frequently the result of a series of seemingly innocuous and unrelated events that can add up to immense psychological pressure and that may break a person’s fragile disposition. As recounted here, it is often also the, in hindsight, unwise personal choices in life, when one reaches one of these important bifurcations in one’s complex decision-making tree of life, that, ultimately, define the psychological fate of an individual, and which can cast her or him on a pathway of irretrievable psychological meltdown.

185 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 7, 2021