Obviously my main focus has been and will be on Sheila after considering all other options. After studying her life over the short period of years that she'd been alive she'd lived those years in the shadow of her mother and from day one it wasn't the ideal beginning. Life wasn't as kind to her as it should have been and the relationship with her mother had a direct affect as she emerged into adulthood.
JB obviously had the same background but was more resilient and had been able to shut off as some can though it seemed that he hadn't been subjected to the same religious content as Sheila had been therefore his mind hadn't been " fighting between good and evil or God and the Devil " like Sheila's had been. It also appeared to me that JB had been favoured more than Sheila in June's eyes a reason perhaps why Sheila leaned towards her father. Nothing unusual in this as it goes on in lots of families but it's so sad that Sheila couldn't share her problems with her mother in a mother/daughter relationship. Instead we see JB helping his mother bake cakes----no sign of Sheila ?
The trauma of abortion/miscarriages and live births without follow-up counselling for any would also have had lasting damage on Sheila's mental health along with a lack of support. It's too much to have expected that Sheila would have " got over " these things because she wouldn't have done and being predisposed to mental illness because of her beginning in life it became obvious that something was radically wrong.
As far as supporting the current team of course I do and I will knowing that they know far more about this case as time goes on and with the extra information they've been afforded, though not all of it as yet.
JB had a relatively easy life compared to Sheila which would have made a vast difference to how he felt against how Sheila was feeling at that time.
Now that's a reasoned post, much of which I concur with. I don't agree with all of it but I get what you're saying.
We can only study what we know of Sheila's life. I suspect that's very little as chunks are missing, but I think there's enough for us to know that it wasn't a very happy life. I think it's FAR too sweeping a statement to claim that "Jeremy was more resilient". His emotions had to go somewhere. It would have been too personal, and he'd have been too young to have BEEN indifferent even if he'd feigned it. I think it was entirely possible that June favoured Jeremy over Sheila -it's also possible, that despite this, it was Nevill's approval that he craved- but I pay little heed to Jeremy's baking stories ONLY being about him and June together. It MAY have been that he watched Sheila and June baking and wished it he and June. It MAY have been, because there was a 3 year gap, that Sheila had baked with June previously, or even at such times when Jeremy wasn't there. These things simply are never set in stone. It depends on the view point/memory/agenda of the story teller.
I feel perfectly certain that all women who undergo abortion, natural or induced, and birth trauma, don't require counselling per se, but in Sheila's case, the odds,with all else she'd gone through, were very much stacked against her and I feel she'd have benefited enormously from having a safe space where she could have expressed herself fully. We can't say, categorically, because we don't know her genetic history, that she was predisposed to mental illness. What we CAN say, is that she'd been predisposed to too much emotional and psychological turmoil to "get over it" without intervention. Many years ago, such things were given the blanket term of "nervous breakdown" of which paranoia seemed to be a regular symptom. We can't actually say that Jeremy, other than superficially, had a "relatively easy life compared to Sheila". Sheila, it seemed, knew how to get her needs met. This possibly forced Jeremy into a place where his own needs were subjugated to hers and he was powerless to do anything about it.