‘Everyone thinks I am a pillar of the community – if only they knew’
Depressed father broke down while speaking with his counsellor
ALAN HAWE was a man who felt he had to be perfect but was beset by a hidden and worsening depression.
This morphed into a psychosis which led him to react beyond reason when he felt he was going to suffer a fall from grace, according to medical experts.
Several medical experts gave evidence at the inquests into the deaths of Alan Hawe, his wife Clodagh, and their children Liam, Niall and Ryan.
His GP said she was not aware Mr Hawe was suffering from depression and that she was unaware he had been seeing a counsellor.
His counsellor said he was aware Mr Hawe was stressed, but not to a level where he would harm himself or others.
But a professor from Trinity and the Central Mental Hospital, who did not know Mr Hawe and was working on a retrospective analysis of medical reports and the suicide notes, painted a picture of a deeply troubled man who could appear to others to be functioning normally.
Counsellor David McConnell said that Mr Hawe had never expressed suicidal thoughts or intent of harming himself or others.
He said he had seen him over 10 sessions from March to June 2016.
He outlined to Mr Hawe that if anything transpired during their sessions that would indicate he was going to harm himself or others then he would be duty bound to report that to authorities, but that this never arose.
“At our last session, Alan had arrived stressed and we talked through his difficulty in a supportive way.
“Alan then said ‘People think of me as being a pillar of the community. If only they knew’. He wept as he said this,” Mr McConnell explained.
“The stress for Alan appeared to be from the fear of shame of being seen as less than perfect.”
Mr Hawe’s GP Paula McKevitt said any of the illnesses he presented with were physical in nature and there was no indication of depression.
“There was no known history of depression. I asked him to avoid further conflict at work if possible, and to get some rest,” she added.
Professor Harry Kennedy, of Trinity College Dublin and the Central Mental Hospital, was asked by coroner Dr Mary Flanagan to give a post-mortem opinion on Mr Hawe’s mental state.
He said that from the GP notes it was clear that since 2008 Mr Hawe had been troubled by anxieties about his health without much basis in reality, and these seemed to be on his mind a lot of the time.
He also had ruminations, or thoughts that went round and round in his head, and scruples which were typical of an insidious worsening of major depressive illness, said Prof Kennedy.
In his opinion, Prof Kennedy said “it was much more likely than not” that at the material time, Mr Hawe was suffering from a long-standing depressive illness which he categorised as severe depressive episodes with psychotic episodes.