Depressed mum drowned herself after being refused residential care for autistic daughter – Mirror Online
Tragic: Carol Barnett.
A mum struggling to cope with her severely autistic daughter drowned herself the day after social services told her they would not give her child residential care.
An inquest heard how Carol Barnett, 51, took her own life by walking into a river just hours after a meeting with social services.
Just minutes earlier she phoned her husband Daniel Barnett, 51, and told him that she could not cope.
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Parents of autistic children are tormented go mad. Many kill themselves. They live in helpless mental pain and emotional anxiety. Their efforts to help the problems of their children are doomed to fail. Their attempts to achieve a basic level of safety from attacks and abuse fail every time. Appeals for help from social services, medical services or educational services are cynically extended over long periods, generating hope, and then dashed. Trying to build, plan for, or develop an independent life and security for their children is impossible. They, as well as their children, are abused, suspected, blamed and punished for the situation they are in. Sleeping and waking, the anxiety grows and grows. Parents overcome it, day after day, knowing that they are the only ones their child has on their side. Eventually, the parents’ minds crack. The mechanisms by which you calm down after a fright stop working. They get more and more afraid, all the time. They live in permanent panic. It is physically painful, emotionally nightmarish and socially isolating.
I have an autistic son and I know exactly what that poor lady was going through. Thankfully, [when he was at his worst, when he was a child] I got help off my family, GP, hospital, social services, et al – now all these services are all but lost, you are on your own with a disabled child.
In my darkest moments I wanted my son dead and myself, so I know EXACTLY how that poor woman felt.
Yep, been there, gone through that, and we’re still suffering.
Before the cuts were even imagined, in the late 90s, I had to end up making a formal complaint, and saying that if my daughter died, I would hold social services completely responsible or not giving us ANY help when it became apparent that my child was suffering from high functioning Aspergers and serious mental health problems. I said I’d go to the press if they didn’t act.
Oh they did respond then, but by that time, it was too late both for her and me. It left a young woman broken and living in and out of hospital, and me a broken adult, already ill, living on a knife edge, never knowing if the next call from the police would be to tell me that she had died.
The care that she’s had, along with the support since then, must have cost social services, the police, the NHS an absolute fortune. Whereas if they’d intervened when first approached with the backing of the NSPCC, that young woman may have gone on to have some kind of life. But it’s ruined now. I’m lucky if I see her once a year and she has no quality of life.
It’s hard to explain the nightmare of giving continual care to youngsters who should be fully supported. We are not social workers or mental health nurses/doctors: we don’t know how to care for them! We are only human and so cannot go days on end with no sleep because our youngsters are ranting and raving, or they go missing yet again.
Goodness knows how people cope nowadays with the level of care that’s on offer. And this poor woman paid that price and had to die for it: another person neglected and dead because of the uneccessary cuts.
Caring conservatism at it’s best.