https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14439721/sectioned-OCD-suicide-mental-health-unit-TABITHA-BARROWCLIFFE.htmlI was sectioned at 17 after my severe OCD led to several suicide attempts. This is the terrifying truth of my time at a mental health unit - and the shocking things that happened at night when the doctors went home: TABITHA BARROWCLIFFE
By RACHEL HALLIWELL
Published: 01:56, 27 February 2025 | Updated: 02:00, 27 February 2025
Hammering on the nurses’ station door, I called out for help. ‘Please,’ I shouted. ‘It’s urgent.’
Down the corridor, a 14-year-old patient, Emily (not her real name), was trying to strangle herself with pieces of torn-up fabric. There was a junior support worker with her, who was useless. I’d left him standing in her doorway, paralysed with shock. But I knew a ligature kit containing a special cutting tool to slice through the material was needed fast. That it fell to me to raise the alarm is utterly appalling. Because I was not a qualified member of the Joyce Parker Hospital’s team, but a 17-year-old patient at this secure children’s mental health facility. Two months earlier, I had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act following several attempts on my own life. And here I was, in the dead of night, seemingly responsible for saving a girl intent on the very same thing. So bad was the situation at the hospital, in Coventry, that last September it was announced it would close amid allegations of abuse. At the time, Health Secretary Wes Streeting called the claims ‘truly shocking’ and said the decision to close the children’s service was the ‘right one’. But there is no quick fix. I believe the appalling incidents I witnessed expose failings not just at this particular hospital, but across the NHS’s mental health services for young people. There is a well-documented mental health crisis among youngsters, especially girls. There was a 50 per cent rise in referrals to mental health services for children and young people between 2021 and 2023. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among those aged ten to 24. The resulting impact on the NHS is enormous and the response is often hopelessly inadequate. Ever-growing waiting lists mean children don’t receive the early interventions that would help them avoid hospital in the first place. And if you do end up hospitalised, the care can leave a lot to be desired. Last month, a report into the Joyce Parker Hospital by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) revealed that inspectors found three cases where children were physically abused by staff. They said they’d seen CCTV footage of staff abusing patients by dragging them. The incident with Emily is a powerful example of a wider problem of ineptitude and lack of training and care. I’d been on my way to bed at around 11pm when I noticed the support worker looking into Emily’s room, panic-stricken. When I asked if everything was OK, he told me she was ‘tying a ligature’.
He had an alarm at his waist for just such a crisis. I pointed to it and asked: ‘Have you pulled it yet?’
But he said it was too late for that. That made no sense to me. Instead, I ran to the nurses’ office for help. Thankfully a medic reached Emily’s room in time and disaster was averted. But the horrors of that night didn’t end there. My room was two doors down from Emily’s and when I heard her screaming and wailing an hour later, I returned to check on her. This time there were two support workers simply watching from her doorway. So I went in and tried to soothe her myself. At one point she grabbed a bottle of shampoo, which she tried to drink before I wrestled it off her. When a nurse looked in, having heard the commotion, she disappeared with a cursory, ‘Emily, stop doing that!’
Emily was left sobbing. By now, it was 2am and I was desperate to sleep. But how could I leave Emily? If she died I knew I would blame myself. In a panic, I returned to my room and dialled 999 on my phone, explaining the situation and that I didn’t feel safe. The police arrived within 30 minutes. The next morning, they returned to speak to me. I told them what had happened, hoping desperately it would improve conditions. Afterwards, though, nothing was said not even by the therapists I was working with intensively. Life on the ward carried on as though it had been a horrible dream. I saw Emily, who looked sad but physically well, and asked if she was OK. There was an unspoken rule among us not to pry, no matter what we’d seen each other go through. Finally, I raised it with my psychologist. ‘It’s being looked into,’ was all she would say.
None of this helped my own recovery I felt I could never relax. My parents came to see me most days. I’d tell them staff didn’t know what they were doing; a few times I pleaded with them to take me home. But I’d been sectioned, so they’d lost their parental powers and the decision was out of their hands. They had no choice but to trust I was in the right place, no matter how awful a time I was having. It must have been terrible for them too. People sometimes think that children who end up in mental health units must come from difficult, chaotic backgrounds, but mine was the opposite. I grew up in a happy, loving home with my parents and brother, who’s two years younger than me. But aged eight, following a traumatic experience, I developed obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). I developed exhausting rituals, such as washing my hands exactly 100 times before bed, otherwise Mum would die. I’d have to get dressed in a certain order or Dad would get sick. If anyone got ill I blamed myself. At first, I didn’t dare confide in my parents in case they tried to stop me from doing the things I thought protected them. But when I was nine Dad asked me about my sore hands and I broke down and admitted it all. My parents paid for private therapy rather than have me wait up to a year for NHS child mental health services (CAMHS) to see me. I can’t imagine how bad things might have got, if I’d had to wait. Therapy helped but then, when I was 13, Covid brought with it the narrative that you could kill your granny by not washing your hands. Meanwhile, the social isolation of the lockdowns led to a deepening depression. At first, suicide was just a passing thought an option offered up by my brain as it sought solutions to how sad and lonely I was feeling. Then ideas would pop into my head, suggesting ways I might do it. I managed to keep going to school, but in January 2023, I took my first overdose. My parents found me and rushed me to hospital. By now, I’d been diagnosed with ADHD and was on medication for that, as well as an antidepressant. It seemed to help the OCD, but my depression got steadily worse. Over the next nine months, I took four more overdoses, each time taking more tablets than the last. I’d take myself off to my bedroom, where, thanks to the constant vigilance of my parents, I was always found in time. Each time, I’d arrive home from the hospital feeling upset that I’d failed. The more upset my parents were, the more dying appeared, to me, to be the best option for everyone. I honestly thought, wrongly, that it would save them greater pain in the long run. In September, a locum psychiatrist who CAMHS had arranged for me to see took me off all my medication. She said she wanted to see what would happen. I begged her not to, saying the medications were effectively controlling my OCD, which I was terrified of having to deal with again on top of depression. She did it anyway. After that, I spiralled. A few weeks later, I took a massive overdose and was sectioned before being sent to Joyce Parker Hospital, a three-hour drive from my Brighton home. By then, I was so disconnected from real life that I felt weirdly indifferent as I was helped into a transport vehicle by security guards (having been sectioned, they had to make sure I didn’t run away). At the hospital, though, fear did cut through. I was searched, and all my belongings were taken, making me feel like a criminal. I had my own room, which was completely bare and resembled a cell. For the first 24 hours, all I had were the clothes I’d arrived in, and I lay sobbing on my bed. Mum, Dad or both did the six-hour round trip most days to see me always in the visitors’ room, meaning they never got to see what life was like on the ward. They had no choice but to put their trust in the people caring for me. Meanwhile I felt like I was being punished; that I must be crazier than I’d imagined. Of course, I see now that this was necessary because I’d been so clear I wanted to die. After a week under constant observation, I was allowed to start going to the hospital school and mixing with the other children. I was the eldest. Most were in their early teens. Monday to Friday, between 9am and 5pm, we had therapy sessions, meetings with doctors and medication assessments; there was a schoolroom and organised activities, such as baking or supervised trips out. I’m so grateful for the therapy and care I received in those sessions, which is what helped me to eventually return home. But the rest of the time at evenings, overnight and weekends it was like we’d been dumped in the Wild West of mental health care. Some of our ‘carers’ I felt saw their role as being glorified babysitters for difficult teenagers. One woman told her colleague within earshot of me: ‘I can’t wait to get home, this place is so weird.’
These support workers were privately recruited by Cygnet Health Care, the company that owned and ran the unit where the NHS was paying for me to be treated. I quickly worked out that to avoid being put into painful restraint ‘holds’, or dragged off into isolation, I needed to be no trouble to the support staff. That meant I couldn’t express fear, anger, pain, or any other of the difficult emotions I was feeling. But at least it stopped me from getting hurt. Not so some of the other kids, many of whom had trouble restraining their anger and frustration. I saw the bruises all over one girl’s body on her hands, legs and elbow and her swollen foot from being restrained incorrectly after she’d shouted at staff while banging her head against a wall during a psychotic episode. Instead of trying to calm her down, she told me a worker yelled back at her before two others put her in painful holds and took her to seclusion. Sometimes they put children into holds with good reason for example, when a child had become violent. But others they’d simply lose patience with, such as when one boy danced around a member of staff one evening, pretending to grab at his keys to try to make us all laugh. He was put into a hold and dragged off to an isolation room somewhere they took kids to calm down, but which I felt they also used as punishment. What happened on the night Emily tried to strangle herself was indicative of a culture that put every child between three and a dozen when I was on the ward at risk. Quite simply, the staff didn’t always have the know-how perhaps even the will to keep us safe. I’m very aware, as I tell this story, that I was one of the lucky ones. My doctors got me on the right medication, therapy helped me to manage difficult feelings and last February, after four long months, I was deemed well enough to leave. Now 18, I’m studying music at college. I’m also a musician, using the stage name Tabi and I am proud to raise funds for the suicide prevention charity Papyrus UK. I’m under adult mental health services now; I’m doing well, but I still need some support. There’s no doubt that the professional care I received at Joyce Parker Hospital helped me. But I look back in despair at how easily something could have gone terribly wrong after hours, once the doctors had left for the night. I hope that my calling the police played a part in CQC sending inspectors into the hospital last July. Their report raised concerns about emergency interventions involving ligatures. But I’m frustrated that instead of attempting to fix the problems, the unit was simply shut down. We need better care across the board, not fewer facilities. The hospital itself simply got a rebrand it’s now a unit for adult males, people who will be just as vulnerable as we were. A spokesman for Cygnet Health Care said: ‘We strongly refute any allegations of abuse. The police and local safeguarding authorities have closed their investigations into a small number of safeguarding incidents that we reported to them last summer, and they concluded no further action will be taken. After careful consideration last September, we made the decision to change the services offered at Cygnet Joyce Parker Hospital and to discontinue our Child and Adolescent Mental Health provision at the site. We collaborated with the CQC and other partners, including NHS commissioners, during the transition of our service to adult care. We will continue to work transparently to demonstrate our commitment to maintaining high standards of care.’
Nonetheless I’m speaking out about my time in hospital because I feel passionately that things need to change. There is a national crisis in care for vulnerable young people, especially girls. And my experiences from the psychiatrist wrongly taking me off my medication to the unsafe conditions in hospital are symptomatic of our complete failure to address it.
Tabitha’s fee for this story was donated to Papyrus UK. The charity offers confidential support to anyone under 35 with thoughts of suicide. Call their 24/7 helpline on 0800 068 4141 or visit papyrus-uk.org
