Melanie, who worked for the British Red Cross, developed her second bout of depression after being overwhelmed with work following the 2005 Boxing Day tsunami. “Melanie was still living at home,” Gillian recalls. “I was aware that she was starting to show signs of being worried about things that maybe she normally wouldn’t be.”
Melanie went to see her GP, but the medication prescribed came too late. “She started to do things which were of self-harming nature,” Richard says. “I remember her even writing on the window, and seeing in the condensation on the window, her thoughts about wanting to die.”
Following an attempt to take her own life, Melanie was taken to hospital. Her nurse noted that she was at a “moderate to severe risk of suicide”, and she was placed on 15-minute observations. Nevertheless, the hospital subsequently granted her home leave, against the advice of her parents.
“She didn’t seem to us to be improving at all,” Gillian explains. “She didn’t see a doctor while she was there until the day she was given home leave – she was carrying on with her medication but she wasn’t having any sort of extra help.”
Richard almost immediately contacted the hospital. “I thought this idea of her leaving the ward was crazy,” he remembers. “I think unfortunately by the time I managed to get through and speak to somebody she’d already left.”
The next day Melanie visited a friend. She was due home by 6pm – but wasn’t back when Richard returned from work, so he again spoke to the hospital. Staff advised him to report Melanie as missing and a police officer visited the couple.
“While we were talking to him he got a phonecall,” Richard recalls. “When he came back he told us that a young lady’s body had been found hanging in Lyme Park.”
“After Melanie’s death we really didn’t know where we were; it was just something we couldn’t cope with,” Richard says. “I decided that we really ought to make a formal complaint. We were genuinely aggrieved at the fact that she’d been let out of hospital – she hadn’t even been seen by a doctor for most of her admission.”
The couple sought legal advice, and brought a case against the Trust under Article 2, the right to life, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. They succeeded – hospitals must now safeguard the right to life of mental health patients, whether or not they’re formally detained. It has also had the effect of ensuring that, in inquests concerning the deaths of informal patients like Melanie, the state should conduct a more wide-ranging inquiry into the circumstances of the death – something that has the potential to ensure that lessons are learned for the future.
“I feel now as if Melanie’s death hasn’t been for nothing,” Gillian adds. “It’s brought some good for very vulnerable people like Melanie – they’ll have more protection. Without the Human Rights Act we wouldn’t have had the means to carry on the fight.”
