Tulisa - The Biography Read Free

psychiatric care, but at the time she only knew something very upsetting had happened. ‘My parents were arguing and I remember the police and ambulance lights flashing outside as my mum was taken away to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, North London,’ she told the Daily Mail , looking back. ‘I knew something was wrong because everyone around me was upset but I didn’t understand what was actually going on.’
    The trauma continued when Tulisa next saw her mother, and realised afresh that there was something seriously wrong with her. However, within weeks of that visit it seemed that everything was rosy again. ‘I visited her in hospital and she seemed distant, not like my mum at all,’ said Tulisa. ‘But she came back home after a few weeks and life seemed to get back to normal.’ It did not seem that way for long. Soon, Ann’s mental health issues began to cause problems for the family again. It was claimed that, for instance, Plato once found Ann trying to feed young Tulisa raw eggs. Tulisa was reportedly sitting at the table saying, ‘Please, Mummy, don’t. They’re raw.’ The danger of this moment is clear, but it would soon be upstaged by ever more terrifying turns of events. Tulisa, as an only child, began to feel ‘suffocated’ in the family home due to the issues and would go on to behave troublingly, even resorting to self-harm.
    The problems underlying this were both serious and deep-rooted. Ann had been suffering from a schizoaffective disorder since before Tulisa’s birth. Its symptoms are a cruel combination of those of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: hallucinations, delusions and wild mood swings from the pits of despair to manic elation. In Ann’s case, she would have what Tulisa has described as ‘episodes’. They would, she wrote, ‘bubble up during the year and she’d have to go into hospital for one to four months’. The episodes included her hearing voices, severe mood swings, periods of intense paranoia and potent emotions. Naturally, Ann’s condition was an enormous strain on Tulisa throughout her childhood; at times it made life almost unbearable for her. She tried to be as loving and supportive as she could, but as she wrote it was extremely ‘hard watching her suffer’. Even while discussing this most upsetting of issues, she is keen to emphasise that her mother is ‘a beautiful, kind person’ and her ‘idol’. Ann’s older sister – and former Jeep co-member – Louise sometimes stepped in to help, inviting Tulisa to go and stay with her when the going got tough. One such intervention was key, as we shall see.
    Significantly, given the road Tulisa would later take, Ann’s behaviour was a factor in turning her daughter into more of a street girl. She recalled how the ‘whole…worry’ of her mother’s mood swings meant she would often avoid being in the house altogether. ‘I never wanted to go home and be around that,’ she wrote. This was not just for her own sake but also for her mother’s. ‘It made me sad, so I would stay out and try not to worry her with my problems.’ Even when trained experts attempted to help, Tulisa felt that their interventions were unsuccessful. ‘The doctors didn’t seem to be able to stabilise my mother’s moods and I felt myself being dragged further and further down by the environment I was forced to live in,’ she said in 2010. ‘Music and my dream of becoming a success was all that kept me going through those very dark times.’
    Her father, too, suffered greatly, so it was not a huge surprise when Plato eventually lost patience with the situation and left the family home. However, it made for some difficult times between father and daughter. He had met a new woman, called Mel. Plato and Mel had first met in the late 1990s. Plato wooed her using an unconventional gambit: ‘If you agreed to date me, and we dated for a year, would you marry me?’ When he told Tulisa that he was leaving Ann, it was the hardest