Author Mark Stevenson watched his daughter wrestle with anxiety from the tender age of three.
He says what his daughter went through, and his own experience of feeling helpless as a parent, was the motivation behind writing Jessie and the Monster - A Battle with Anxiety, A Story of Courage and Hope.
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Pitched at young people, aged 8 to 15, the book centres on a young girl who's previously safe and secure life is turned upside down by the invasion of a creature called Wisper.
Mark says the book has been 20 years in the making, and was born out of his daughter Frankie's own struggles.
Stevenson told Kathryn Ryan when he realised Frankie was wrestling with things that were of a disordered nature, he panicked. He felt helpless.
Navigating depression himself, Stevenson said you’d think he’d have a greater empathy but he found it was a whole new thing to learn – to trust when his daughter said she couldn’t go to school or try new things.
“It’s like an entity...it has that same characteristics of those in a horror movie, that it totally can come in and destroy the hope, destroy the happiness and the joy that we’re meant to have and it has the same capacity. The trouble is that we can’t see it, the trouble is that we find it hard to fully understand people’s own monsters that they face, whether it’s depression, despair, anxiety.”
Stevenson says his daughter’s anxiety stole things from her, it manipulated her life.
“I so wish, if I could turn back time...that the father that she needed I could have been better at being.”
Each person’s experience of anxiety is different, as is what they need, Stevenson says.
“The biggest thing is actually saying ‘tell me more’. But, he says, “It’s not that we have to understand it, but we have to accept it.”
Anxiety becomes almost like a friend in life in that it teaches you the essence of ‘know thy self’, he says.
Stevenson says as a young child, his daughter often couldn’t leave her parent’s sight.
“I remember when she was 5-years-old and we took her to school... the plans that we had we couldn’t make because everyday we never knew whether the anxiety would cause us to come back and have to have the day off nurturing her and being with her.”
On her first day at school, Stevenson remembers his daughter’s big scared eyes. The monster was playing havoc, he says. “And I had to leave her and it was devastating.”
Becoming so acutely involved in his daughter’s life, he says they become everything they didn’t want to be – helicopter parents that tried to fix everything.
Deep down there was a sense of guilt, that somehow they had caused this for their daughter.
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Jessie and the Monster - A Battle with Anxiety, A Story of Courage and Hope is about a brave and vivacious girl who is triggered by something she can’t control happening to her mother.
Then a prince comes and tells her about the nature of the monster, the truth. “The truth is that while it looks like the most horrific monster, it’s actually harmless.” From the badlands come these monsters – one of them called Wisper. Because she is strong, the girl is targeted, Stevenson says. “They often say with depression it’s the curse of the strong...it’s the same with anxiety.”
Rather than strategies, the prince speaks deep truths about the monster.
