The bombing would start at nightfall. For hours we watched what looked like giant orange and yellow fireflies streaking through the air, then disappearing above us.

Seconds later a faint wind would kick dust in our eyes, and through it we’d see the massive white-hot explosion in the distance.

It was March 2019 and I was in the Syrian desert with my job as a TV reporter for the American news channel ABC .

This was Baghouz, a town on the border with Iraq where Islamic State terrorists were making their last stand against the West. We’d catch a couple of hours’ sleep in our van, then crawl back up to the rooftops as daylight broke and start all over again.

When it became too dangerous, we headed north towards the Iraq border. Only then did my mobile phone, silent for days, buzz back to life with messages. Colleagues and friends imploring me to stay safe.

James as a baby pictured with his parents at a family gathering

And then I saw the messages from my mother.

‘I don’t want to live any more. You’ve inherited the Longman curse. You’re sick like your father.’

To the outsider, these messages are shocking. But they are ones I’ve heard for most of my life.

The ‘sickness’ my mother was referring to was my father’s schizophrenia, which caused him to end his life when I was nine years old. The ‘curse’, refers to the pattern in our family: my uncle had schizophrenia, too, and my grandfather also ended his own life.

Since my father’s death, attacks like these became a feature of my relationship with my mother, spat at me in fits of rage or cried through great gulping tears.

I’m used to it by now. It’s part of an ongoing pattern that means I’m more at home in a news van, with bombs exploding nearby, than I am in a family in which every day is war. And yet her comments hurt, not just because they come from a beloved parent, but because I do have depression.

I first had deeply depressive thoughts when I was in my mid-20s, although I didn’t understand that at the time.

I had been working in journalism for a few years but was still unsure if it was what I really wanted to do. I felt lost. Things came to a head one day at work, when I found myself on a London pavement wondering whether I should walk out into traffic.

James’s grandfather Jimmy Longman had a tragic early death

James’s grandfather Jimmy Longman had a tragic early death

Ten years later, the deep sadness returned, and I found myself thinking about suicide again. All the milestones I thought would make me happy in those intervening years – professional success, including several years at the BBC, a meaningful relationship with my partner Alex – had lost their power.

And observing my mother’s battles with depression further reinforced the idea of genetic inevitability. I couldn’t help wondering: could she be right about the Longman curse? Does sadness run in families? Have I inherited mental illness? Am I destined to follow in my father’s solemn footsteps?

We all obsess over our physical health, and what we may or may not have inherited from our parents. Heart disease? Stroke? Cancer? These are familiar questions at the GP’s surgery. But I have only once been asked about my family’s mental health history during a doctor’s visit.

We all know, anecdotally at least, that we are partly shaped by our family history and experiences. But I wanted to understand what, when it comes to mental health, might be happening on a purely biological level.

Is there something in our DNA that affects our mental health? Do environmental factors affect these genetic traits? And perhaps most importantly: Can we find ways to thrive through all of this.

I have few memories that are more vivid. I was nine years old, and it was a cold autumn evening at my boarding school. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my housemaster, Mr Owers, appear, looking solemn-faced. ‘James, can you come here, please?’

My heart sank. I hated getting into trouble. I got up quickly and followed Mr Owers to his office.

He sat on his swivel chair and looked at me with his big grey eyes.

‘There’s been an accident,’ he said. Instant confusion. I realised he wasn’t talking about me.

‘I’m afraid it’s your dad, son. I’m so sorry. There was nothing they could do.’

I stared at him, unsure of what he meant. He proffered a tissue, but I didn’t need it. ‘What do you mean?’

There was a silence. And then: ‘He’s died, James.’

I don’t know if I voiced it or just felt it, but I remember experiencing utter disbelief. I’d seen my father only the weekend before. How was that possible? It was completely inconceivable to my young mind.

I didn’t know this at the time, but my dad had been diagnosed at various times with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and psychotic personality disorder.

By the time I was three, his illness was so bad that my parents separated, and my father moved into a different flat. My mother says she was scared to leave him on his own with me, and that he would often disappear for days at a time.

Later, I was sent to boarding school, by my mother’s admission, to keep me safe and give me a stable environment.

But, for me, my father was a hero. The scraps of memory were woven into an almost completely imaginary person – universally good and beyond reproach.

John Longman was an artist, and he had that slightly unkempt bohemian look, which I always thought was so cool. He had an effortless charm: denim jeans and Doc Martens, hands jammed firmly in his pockets, one leg crossed under the other as he leaned against a wall.

I remember his shock of silver hair, long walks around London on his shoulders, and the patch of yellow between his fingers from his endless roll-up cigarettes.

I remember his love of making things – he was so good with his hands. He had a particular gift for making paper aeroplanes, and in some of my last moments with him, I remember us folding them on the roof and watching the planes dip and bob their way down to the pavement below.

I don’t remember precisely when I was told he had ended his own life, but I think it was probably said in anger at some point in my teens, in the midst of one of the fights that had come to characterise my relationship with my mother. And it wasn’t until I was 26 that I learned the full story. In our local library archive I found a newspaper article entitled ‘Blaze Room Death Leap’, dated October 3, 1996. I discovered that he had not just set fire to his flat but thrown himself from the window.

The impact of my father’s death, and his absence from my life, has been profound. There is not a day I don’t think about him, or it.

It wasn’t until around a decade ago that I discovered my grandfather Jimmy Longman had also ended his life. He had been given a cancer diagnosis, and not long afterward shot himself in the garage of the family home. My father was the one to find him.

So, my father ended his life. His father ended his. And I have a difficult relationship with my mother. Not a great outlook, is it? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that I might find life tough at times. But just writing it off as a few bad genes and some batty relatives isn’t enough for me. I want some proper, scientific answers. I want to ensure my father didn’t die for no reason: to try to understand how I, and future generations, might escape his illness.

Geneticist Cathryn Lewis of King’s College London is at the cutting edge of the rapidly emerging, but still highly controversial, discipline of epigenetics. If genes are the hardware of our system, epigenetics is the software. While our genes are set for life, there are a number of epigenetic processes that can turn genes along the strands ‘on’ or ‘off’ during the course of our lifetimes.

‘Depression is about 40 per cent heritable,’ explains Professor Lewis. ‘Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are much more genetic – in those cases it’s about 70 per cent or 80 per cent.’

She says doctors have known for two decades that there is a genetic component to depression, but only in the past four or five years have they been able to identify which genetic variants are common in people with mental illnesses.

‘It’s clear that there is no single variant that has a very major effect,’ she says. ‘At medical school we learn about genetics like Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis, where there is a single gene and that’s the one that’s important. There is nothing like that in depression. You cannot say you have the gene for depression.’

Lewis’s work has discovered genetic variants for depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. But it is important not to view them as on some kind of spectrum that begins with depression and ends in schizophrenia.

One does not become the other. But they do share genetic variants, and they are found on similar parts of our genome.

Some of the genes that coded for schizophrenia in my dad, may also have coded for depression in me. And while I may have a similar genetic predisposition or risk of schizophrenia, epigenetic processes might have switched off the effect of those genes.

It works a little like a dimmer switch: my dad’s might have been turned right up, whereas mine might have been turned down.

His environment might have changed how the code was expressed at crucial times in his life, or in his early development. What turned his dimmer switch up? What kept mine down? Those are the big questions.

Could it be that I have avoided schizophrenia partly because, at a crucial time in my early life, I was kept away from the truth of my father’s illness?

Maybe it was my mother’s protective measures that kept my genetic dimmer switch down. So, how can I help that switch stay ‘dimmed’?

‘Often, people are very concerned about their genetic predisposition,’ Dr Jeffrey Borenstein tells me.

Borenstein, president and CEO of the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation (BBRF) in the US, is interested in prevention rather than cures.

When he was training in the 1980s, says Borenstein, ‘we were taught that old brains cannot grow new cells, and ‘old’ was after the age of two’. But the latest research is changing all that.

‘We now know that’s not true,’ he says. ‘Old brains do grow new cells, and at all ages. We know this for sure. Exercise is a very important part of that. When I’m speaking with patients, I may recommend talk therapy, medicine and exercise. So the brain is malleable in a positive way.’

To put this to the test, I took part in an experiment, going under a scanner that maps the brain and monitors connectivity under the supervision of consultant psychiatrist Dr Roland Zahn.

Dr Zahn told me: ‘In the brain is where biology and psychology meet, because the brain changes in response to your learning experience. And that’s why the changes we’ve found in people with depression I think are reversible.’

But how?

James (right) with his partner Alex at the book launch in London last month

James (right) partner Alex at the book launch last month

As I lay under the scanner, I was asked to think of scenarios that made me feel guilty.

It sounds artificial – and it is – but the brain can’t lie. Sure enough, my brain sensed guilt when I told it to.

I thought about not visiting my grandmother enough before she died. And the doctors monitoring in the other room could see my brain had an overactive guilt reflex, which is usual in people with depression.

I was then tasked with decreasing the level on the graph by visualising my guilt being reduced. They told me to say, over and over again the words: ‘I forgive myself.’

I felt stupid. I felt it would definitely not work. Honestly, I felt like it wasn’t science.

But then it dawned on me: I had been to many therapists over the years who had all suggested variations of the same mantra. ‘Be kind to yourself.’ ‘Don’t give yourself such a hard time.’ Friends have also offered this advice.

Now here, for the first time, I was being offered empirical proof that my brain was actually responding to these suggestions.

I went into the lab next door to see the graphs for myself. I saw one part of my brain telling the other to feel less guilt. Just as Dr Zahn had said, I could, in fact, teach my brain to re-learn healthy patterns.

For many years, I’ve been desperate to learn more about my dad in the hope I could build him out into a real person, rather than the mysterious hero of my imagination.

His medical notes were released to me by the NHS and I was able to track down his support worker and clinical nurse: two people who not only helped him, but demonstrate how important compassion and kindness are in the treatment of these conditions.

It feels like I’m prying into details I was never meant to read. But there are things in here that fill huge gaps in the timeline of my father’s life.

One of the names in the records is his care worker Liz Morrison, who I discovered, thanks to help from the NHS, lived less than a mile away from me. ‘He was very trendy,’ she says, laughing. ‘He had that hippie Notting Hill vibe. I remember him as charming, and funny.’

I ask her if he felt lonely. ‘I think so,’ she says. She describes the other side of his character: more withdrawn, more prone to isolation and introspection. And then she tells me something that makes me cry.

‘I remember I drove him past your school once,’ she says. ‘He wanted to be close to you. I think he was very sad over not being with you.’

My eyes fill with tears at the thought of it. It is not the big picture that hits me hardest when I think about my father. Not his illness or even his death. It is these small moments, these slim beams of light that shine and reveal his memory even now.

When I think about my father suffering, I think about him on his own. His last moments of psychosis and suicide must have been terrifying, and it hurts to think of him in that state.

Pat Leung, my dad’s clinical nurse, tells me that a lot of their conversations revolved around getting access to me. ‘Your mum saw your father every couple of weeks, but I don’t think she always included you in the visits,’ she says.

I ask her if he wanted me to be included, and immediately worry about the answer, panicking briefly that she will tell me what I fear most: that actually, he had not wanted to be part of my life.

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, smiling. ‘He wanted to see you very much. It was down to your mum. She was worried about when his mood wasn’t stable, how that would impact you.’

Through writing about him, and meeting more people who knew him, I have filled in many of the gaps in my father’s life.

I’ve seen what he experienced, even read the words he spoke when he was in psychosis. I’ve understood more of his ‘madness,’ and that has allowed me to separate it from my own struggles.

I’ve come to understand that perhaps genetically, my sadness is linked to him. But, equally, I have learned that it is within my power to mute those feelings.

So, if you are struggling right now, all I can say to you is this: the sadness you’re experiencing may feel like it runs in your blood. But the answers to feeling happy again are swirling in there, too.

You may carry a problem. You also carry the solution.

Adapted from The Inherited Mind by James Longman (Hyperion Avenue, £25). © James Longman 2025. To order a copy for £24.29 (offer valid to 22/02/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk