Massacre of Innocence

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December 30, 2014 | 3 Comments

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  1. I’ve been trying my best to follow this tragic case, largely due to Hayley Carter’s blog and the response it’s gotten. I’m still not convinced that we really know what happened to Charlotte Bevan, or why.

    1. For starters, do we really know she threw herself into the gorge? Or could she have slipped and fallen while taking a treacherous path through the snow in her slippers, while in a confused or distraught state for whatever reason?

    2. Are we quite sure she stopped her medications? All the accounts I’ve read have qualified this with “it has been claimed” or “it’s understood.” Is there a reputable source that has stated with certainty that she did stop them? That can be no mean feat when you’re a hospital inpatient – ask anyone who’s tried.

    3. Are we quite sure the medications in question were antidepressants? According to this article in the Bristol Post (echoed elsewhere), some of her healthcare providers had labeled her “schizophrenic” or “psychotic” prior to the birth of her child.

    http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/New-mum-Charlotte-Bevan-walked-hospital-fearing/story-25269028-detail/story.html

    That doesn’t mean she was “schizophrenic” – after all, she continued to work a responsible job – but it does mean she may have been pressured into taking antipsychotics. Unfortunately, even if considered merely “depressed” she might have been put on these drugs anyway. It’s a growing trend.

    4. Finally, are we quite sure what moved her to leave the hospital? I’d read in the Bristol Post and elsewhere that she’d been referred to social workers three times during her pregnancy, and feared having the baby taken away. Apparently she felt bullied or coerced by those encounters. She was a free spirit, an organizer for an environmental charity, perhaps a skeptic of psychiatric medication, perhaps of many other conventional health, dietary and child-raising dogmas.

    She was also living with a French African immigrant and expecting an interracial child. Granted, her folks seemed very accepting, but would all social workers react so well? Maybe it’s just the American in me, but I wonder if Charlotte found she #Couldn’tBreathe when they came around. In too many communities her mental health and fitness to parent would have been automatically under a microscope, no matter what she did.

    And she had a psych diagnosis. She may have feared social work intervention for “making changes to her medication”, as the Guardian puts it, or for refusing to jump through some other hoops, or simply for being who and what she was.

    None of this detracts one bit from David’s extremely valid points about medication withdrawal — just the opposite. To me it seems that a dramatic narrative is being sold: “She Died Because She Stopped Her Medication!” Before we accept that and say “Yes, but it was the withdrawal, not the depression,” we need to know if it’s even true.

  2. What is so secret about patients’ medical records?

    I followed this case as it seemed to me highly likely that Charlotte Bevan walked out of the hospital with her newborn in a state of hallucinations and delirium from stopping her anti-depressant.

    As they all trip over themselves trying to perceive Charlotte as mentally ill, the police as usual state “there were no suspicious circumstances”.

    Of course there were. Any death is suspicious. Be it from Heroin, alcohol misuse, battering from a second party, whatever……….walking out of a hospital is extremely unusual.

    I know because that is what I did.

    I walked out of a hospital in a state of delirium and danger because ‘I’ had stopped my Paroxetine and re-started it. Nobody took the time to talk to me, nobody checked on my medication, nobody could be bothered to read my medical notes and nobody could care less.

    I wish I could put my medical records up, in there entirety because the ‘doctors’ told the story – it reads like a film script. They described what they did with ‘medication’ or rather what they did not do regarding ‘medication’.

    I got into my car after a week in a mental hospital and the half an hour it took me to get home was rife with danger. I wanted to drive in to the loch, I wanted to gas myself with the car, and I wanted the deranged thoughts I had to stop……

    But, stronger than that, I wanted to go home to see my own baby and I wanted familiar surroundings…..and for some reason this took precedence over the mad thoughts that were taking me over……….

    Paroxetine is shamefully marketed, fraudulently and recklessly and criminally and it was my misfortune to be casually given this drug…..even a miracle of not dying gave those around me no cause for concern except to keep on the savage nature of their relentless persecution….

    Well, I didn’t die and Charlotte has a name Bevan, which is also my own, and I come from Welsh stock so the chances are me and Charlotte have a lot in common…and I will speak up for her as she is gone and cannot speak up for herself.

    And, what I find increasingly difficult to understand is why relatives, even, from the rich and famous prefer to think that a ‘suicide’ is a ‘suicide’ and do not seem to spend one minute thinking about the ‘medication’ which is staring them in the face.

    I wrote this ages ago, but I did not want to interfere so I sat on it……

    http://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/archive/2014/12/04/11647020.Baby_and_mother_found_dead_in_gorge/

    Police ‘not treating deaths as suspicious’…………..it’s just dreadful, awful, frustrating………..it certainly is..

  3. Just a thought, as it happened to a lesser extent to me. Gave up medication when pregnant, felt fine, then WD hit me, yep when baby was about 8 weeks old, not too bad.
    Was a given a valium, which sent me immediately psychotic …. luckily the power of motherhood, I kept it together, but the result? Refused another valium, forcibly medicated, sent to a mental institution for 3 weeks…… then they sent me home, no tablets realised I didn’t need any. Imagine the WDs and PTSD. Had no choice but to reinstate the zoloft? Next baby, a Zoloft half a heart baby. the spiral of drugs, and damn I didn’t need any.

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