After the tragic suicide of her younger brother James, graphic novelist Zoe Thorogood is determined to use her platform to help others struggling with mental health issues and prevent similar tragedies.
Zoe Thorogood was walking back to her flat in Bradford last month when she got the call. For two days she had been trying to track down her younger brother, but with no luck.
Nobody knew where James was. His absence was reported to the police, which Thorogood calls a “hideously infuriating experience”, leading her to try to track him down through friends and online contacts. Her work, she says, “feels worthless right now. I’ve had people claim that my work may have ‘saved their lives’, yet, I couldn’t even ‘save’ my own brother. I think being a ‘mental health artist’, or whatever you want to call me, and going through this feels like a giant hand coming out of the clouds and pointing at me and laughing. I know this feeling is temporary, but right now, I hate art.
Male suicide is a growing problem in the UK. According to government statistics released this year, out of 5,354 suicides between April 2023 and June 2024, almost 4,000 were men or boys. Many charities and awareness campaigns have been trying to get men, traditionally reticent about opening up about their feelings, to talk more.
“In my teenage years we drifted entirely. I had just been diagnosed with depression and anxiety at 14 and was handling it poorly. I was skipping a lot of school and being a general menace. James was always so good and well behaved, very lawful and kind, quite serious. And I was the opposite. I’d kind of decided James and I would never be close, thanks to our opposite personalities. This was until around three years ago when he, pretty randomly, asked to phone me.
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