“Let’s talk about these topics without it being taboo, let’s talk about death, grief and suicide”

Carmen Romero is a comedian, she has the monologue in her lineup Chochito; she is a presenter of podcast I hate people, alongside Bianca Kovacs; and it is Father Carmen in Bad people, by Victoria Martín. Now she has just made her debut as a writer with a book that is very unfunny although, at times, her laughter interrupts the desire to cry at the heartbreaking nature of the story.

It all started one night in June 2016. Her brother Miguel, aged 26, jumped out of the window of his house, in the presence of Carmen and her older sister, María. This is not happening (Editorial Planeta) is a book about suicide, grief, guilt, mental health and death told in the first person.

But in that atmosphere of immense pain, Carmen sprinkles the story with the jokes that came to her brain spontaneously. She didn’t cry, the tears didn’t come out, and she was able to joke inside herself with some of the scenes from the ‘movie’ she was living: “I laughed to myself… I spent the whole time and thought, at least I entertain myself.”

Then came panic attacks, episodes of depersonalization, anxiety attacks, fear, phobias, isolation and therapy. It took years of rebuilding, learning to manage the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and coming to terms with the departure of her beloved brother. Until “the beautiful memories begin to weigh more” and you realize that you can now live, with pain, but live.

If I’m honest, I’m embarrassed by this interview. It is your pain, it is your suffering and I am not the one to delve into it.

But you help me so that more people know it and that more people know the story so that we can change something.

Do you write it as therapy or do you write what you say to change something?

My goal is for this to be known, that if it can help someone, let them help, that we talk about these topics without it being taboo, that we talk about death, grief and suicide. And about the therapy, I didn’t think about that at all, but I have discovered that it has helped me.

It’s been eight years since your brother took his own life by jumping out of the window. Do the memories remain intact?

Man, I must have forgotten many things, but the ones I have, I have recorded.

And how have emotions evolved?

They have evolved, above all they have calmed down. They are the same, but as if they were smaller, more bearable. The pain remains the same, although it is not overwhelming, it is not impossible for me to comprehend. It’s like I’ve tamed it in some way and learned to live with it, but it’s still there. Post-traumatic stress is no longer the same, there is little of it anymore, but the pain of loss and absence is still there, although calmer.

When you start reading the book, one of the first emotions that arouses is anger, it’s ‘why wasn’t that avoided?’ Have you forgiven that?

I don’t know if I’ve forgiven him. If I start thinking about it, I get angry again. But for me the hopelessness and sadness weigh more, for me what he went through and that no one helped him weighs more… Of course there is a lot of anger, a lot of desire to hit and a lot of violence, but it breaks my heart more that he had to to go through that, to have those things happen to him and what he suffered.

But if the disease is unfair, the medical treatment given to him and the thought that it could have been avoided was also unfair.

The psychiatrist who treated him, the one who discharged him, when he found out, he called us to go talk to him. Obviously, we didn’t go because we also thought, ‘if we see him, we’ll hit him’, so we decided it was better not to go and leave things as they were.

There were many questions and many times insisting. And when they discharged him, the doctor was no longer there, he had left the discharge signed, but we wanted to meet with the rest of the doctors on the team: ‘Will you see him leave?’ They made us sign the discharge and they stuck to it in the trial.

If some doctors have said yes, I take my brother home because my brother was telling me that if I didn’t love him, that I wanted to leave him there. He had been in the hospital for three weeks and they told him that nothing was wrong, that nothing was happening and, obviously, they were not going to do anything more. It is a very very very complicated moment, which we have greatly regretted because in retrospect it is easy to think ‘we should have done this or that’. In the end, those responsible must be the family members, those who have not been listened to at any time and whose opinion has not mattered, and who hold us responsible when signing the discharge.

You have also written this book to put on the table the reality of mental health, which in your story has two variables: your brother’s mental illness that manifested itself with psychotic outbreaks and, on the other hand, post-traumatic stress derived from what you lived. The other day in The country, psychiatrist Mercede Navío warned that “we run the risk that when everything is mental health, nothing ends up being mental health.” Do you think we are at that point where mental health is sometimes trivialized?

I think so, yes, it can become frivolous, but frivolizing is a sign that at least it is being talked about. It may be collateral damage, but at least it’s being talked about. I am not a psychiatrist nor do I have any idea about medicine, but it seems to me that people lack knowledge. It is said, ‘I am depressed’, but depression is something else; or ‘I have anxiety’, well, you might be nervous. I think that this is a lack of knowledge on the part of people and we still need to talk more so that more is known, to know more and so that less is trivialized. But of course it is trivialized, just as it is done with feminism because it has been put forward and we have been stirring and changing things for a few years. So it seems like collateral damage that it is frivolized because that means it is in the spotlight.

I think there will be a better way of doing things and saying ‘let’s talk, let’s listen to the people who know, but let’s also listen to the people who are going through it.’ It’s like the male gynecologist who talks about a woman’s pregnancy and yes, you know the theory, but it is the pregnant woman who knows what she has experienced and what is happening.

If what happened had happened now, do you think you would have identified that your physical symptoms were a consequence of post-traumatic stress?

Yes of course. I was discovering what was happening to me because I was going through it, and I had to search, I had to investigate, ask and ask for help. Since I treated myself in therapy I don’t think I have had a panic attack again and if I have had anxiety attacks I have been able to stop them. 90% is identifying it and telling yourself ‘I know what it is, I’m not going to die and I can control it’.

At first, when your brother decided to jump out of the window, you refused to accept reality…

It was such a strong dissociation… I spent a few months without being able to cry, in shock, without being able to process anything, without feeling anything… It was like being in a cloud, I was very bad but I didn’t feel loneliness or sadness… It was all totally foreign. Being so dissociated from what happened, that the trauma will remain there, I imagine triggered all of that.

Was your grief more complicated than your mother’s or your sister’s?

I don’t think it’s more… He was my brother and for me it was horrible, but for my mother he was her son. What I do believe is that each person is different and that, perhaps, he caught me at a time when I was not doing well at work or with myself, and that is why he could hit me in a different way.

Does the illusion recover after a blow like that?

Let’s see, yes, there are flashes… There are things that excite you. I love my job, it makes me very happy. Making plans with my family makes me very happy, going on vacation with my mother makes me very happy. But it’s different, I was young and now I’m a different person. You live everything more relaxed and you don’t cling to things so much.

And cling to people?

Well, that has been another topic to deal with in therapy because unconsciously I told myself ‘take care of the connections you make because they disappear, they go away’. Luckily I have many friends and my family who love me a lot and I have felt very supported.

You’ve talked about your job as one of the things that makes you happy. You decided to dedicate yourself to humor while you recovered. When do you realize that this excites you?

From the moment I start making videos and jokes, I put them out there and they are received well and someone laughs. So I like that. For me it is like a game and I am very excited because I think that I am contributing something to someone, I feel useful. I am very excited because it is also a vocation, since I was little I liked to make people laugh and I liked to be silly and make jokes.