It was during a recent family trip to Dorset that Alison Miller first realised her daughter was severely ill. As the family were having lunch at a gastropub by the coast the then 13-year-old excused herself and hadn’t returned a while later. Miller, from southeast London, slipped into the women’s toilets to look for her and found the teenager cowering in a cubicle. “She was sitting on the floor, screaming and rocking because somebody had activated the hand dryer.”
The mother of two says that before the pandemic, her daughter was a confident high-achiever. Within months of lockdown, she had become beset by anxiety and extreme phobias. Now 15, her daughter suffers with symptoms of severe mental illness including dissociation, hearing voices and developmental regression. “My once capable, independent, intelligent young woman is a wreck. I can’t let her pop to the shops on her own, she’s so vulnerable now,” Miller tells The Independent.
