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Dad found hanged on Father’s Day
Wife couldn’t get through to crisis centre after husband’s desperate text message
A DEPRESSED dad was found hanged on Father’s Day after a cry for help was tragically missed by mental health staff, an inquest heard.
Roy Cairns, 38, of Bartholomew Road, Kentish Town, was found hanged in his room at the Highbury Grove Crisis Centre in Islington the day after he had been admitted over fears he could take his own life.
St Pancras Coroner’s Court heard on Thursday that on the day of his death in June Mr Cairns had sent a text message to his wife, Marie, at 1.35pm, which read: “I can’t take the pressure anymore. It’s all a mess. I love you.” Unable to get through to his phone and fearing the worst, Mrs Cairns told the court she tried to contact the centre’s crisis team “numerous times” during the next hour – only to be put through to an answer-phone every time. It was during the staff handover period.
The inquest heard that when staff finally called her back an hour and a half later and went to check on her husband, Mr Cairns was unconscious.
The court heard the former courier had been “devastated” after his brother took a drug overdose and had tried to hang himself before.
Although he had come through a nervous breakdown, he continued
to experience suicidal thoughts and had relapsed into heroin use.
Marie said he had been “sick for many years”.
She added: “He cried the whole way to the centre. I was under the impression he was going to a safe environment but he wasn’t.
“There was no real conversation between us or the staff. The staff said there was no bedding so he was given a curtain. It wasn’t a very welcoming atmosphere.”
Centre staff said the handover had overrun on the day of Mr Cairns’s death, and the answerphone messages had only been checked at 2.45pm.
Keith Wilson, a crisis support worker at the centre, said its policy had been changed as a result of Mr Cairns’s death and that calls were now answered at all times.
He said: “Our policy was not to answer the phone during handover. We would then check the messages as soon as handover finishes.
“We have changed our procedure since that time.”
Mr Wilson and a support worker at the centre, John Stirling, had assessed Mr Cairns on June 13 as a “moderate risk” to himself “with no actual plans to carry it [suicide] out” and had offered him a place at the crisis centre for the following day.
It was Mr Wilson and Mr Stirling, the only staff on duty when Mr Cairns died, who discovered his body.
Mr Stirling said: “He was very pale. I tried to resuscitate him by doing some pushes on his chest.”
Mr Cairns was confirmed dead at the Whittington Hospital later that day.
Coroner Dr Andrew Reid, recording an open verdict, said Mr Cairns’s death “might have been suicide or a cry for help”, adding: “By texting his wife there was an ambiguous expectation that she might call and seek to help him.”
Dr Reid said that Mr Cairns might still be alive if staff had received his wife’s message, but that he was satisfied the procedures at the centre had now been changed.
He added: “I cannot be sure that he did not intend to kill himself. It seems as though he did enough to seek attention and did not necessarily intend to take his own life.” |
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