‘I’ll never forgive their barbarity’
Young woman sent by Tusla to notorious UK mental hospital as a girl tells of brutal attacks and how she was sedated against her will
A YOUNG woman who was sent by the State to a controversial psychiatric hospital in the UK has revealed how she was left defenceless and brutally attacked during her time there.
In an interview with the Irish Mail on Sunday, the woman, who is now in her 20s, was sent to St Andrew’s Healthcare facility in Northampton, on foot of High Court orders when she was a teenager.
Recalling her time at the psychiatric hospital, she said she was the only patient on her ward, that she knew of, who did not have a criminal conviction.
In one violent incident, she was attacked and taunted by another patient, who grabbed her by the throat and pinned her to the ground.
The young woman said she immediately contacted her legal team after she was attacked and pleaded with them to get her out of the facility.
She told the MoS: ‘I asked them how they thought I could ever recover with the taunting and assaults I was facing at her hands. They told me I was over there until I got out and there was nothing anyone could do.’
The young woman also said she was ‘traumatised’ by how the staff treated her at the facility.
In one instance, she said she was stripped to her underwear by staff who thought she was self-harming, and pinned face down to the ground.
She told the MoS: ‘It was traumatising and I was completely inconsolable. I was injected with sedation against my will.
‘They had only safety shorts so I was given them to put on, but I remained topless in seclusion for the night with a male healthcare assistant in the other room watching a camera. I wailed and cried all night,’ she said.
The young woman spoke out as Tusla confirmed 14 Irish children were placed at St Andrew’s Healthcare Adolescent Service since the
State child and family agency was established in 2014.
No Irish child is currently placed in St Andrew’s, and the last young person from Ireland was discharged from the facility in 2020.
In 2017, a damning programme from Channel 4’s Dispatches found that children and teenagers were being forcibly restrained and sedated in St Andrew’s.
The young Irish woman sent to the facility said the documentary shone a light on treatment similar to what she ‘endured’. She said she decided to come forward and tell her story as part of call for a ‘bespoke’ secure psychiatric unit in Ireland, for children and adolescents with mental health difficulties.
During her time at the UK facility, she said other children from Ireland were in St Andrew’s, all of whom were placed there on foot of High Court orders.
She said she had ‘no choice’ in being sent to St Andrew’s, and that her parents ‘had no choice either’.
The young woman recalled: ‘At the time they [the State] thought it was the best decision for me.
‘But sending children with mental health difficulties overseas to try to recover is not the answer and I will never get over the treatment I received,’ she added.
Detailing other shocking incidents of what occurred to her as a patient in St Andrew’s, the young woman said she was denied access to underwear or sanitary pads when her period started, as her ‘care plan’ would only allow her to wear one layer of clothing at night.
‘A male healthcare assistant sat at my door on my special for the night.
‘When I woke up in the morning my pjs were covered in period blood. So were my bed clothes.
‘I stood up and my pyjama bottoms were stained heavily with blood. It was so humiliating.
‘I had to go out onto the ward and
‘I was topless with a male care worker watching me’
have all the other patients see me like this. I never felt so dehumanised in my life. For the week of my period, it was the same thing every night. Going to bed knowing I was going to wake up spoiled with blood and have to be seen by the other patients and staff like that.
‘I felt disgusted. I didn’t feel like a person. I felt like the lowest of the low,’ she said.
‘Harrowing doesn’t even begin to describe my experience at St Andrew’s,’ she added.
In another incident, the young woman told how she was left freezing in a room with her teeth chattering, during the coldest week of that year.
‘My care plan only allowed me [to] have one layer of clothing, and I remember this week in December where the staff were wearing jumpers and scarves it was so cold and I only had a night dress.
‘I would wake up with my teeth clattering and I asked for a safety blanket but was told they didn’t have the staff to go to another ward to get a safety blanket.’
She said she will ‘never forgive’ the facility ‘for making me suffer in one of the coldest weeks of that year’.
The young woman added: ‘I was suicidal prior to going to St Andrew’s, but over there, I wasn’t even a person. I wasn’t treated like a young teenage girl.
‘I watched the staff put on woolly coats and scarfs in front of me and complain about the cold to the other staff outside my room, drinking hot drinks for the night while I lay in nothing but a nightdress, colder than I could have ever imagined.
‘How can you believe you’re even a person when this is your experience? I wasn’t treated like a person.
‘I was treated like a dog left out in the cold frost to die while his owners sit by the fire.’
The young woman told how she was sent to the UK facility after she had attempting suicide as a teenager.
‘A doctor came over from St Andrew’s to assess me. I was under the care of the HSE [Health Services Executive] at the time and my parents thought it was the right thing at the time.
‘On my ward, we were aged between 12 and 18 and the young people that came from Ireland, who were there when I was there, had come from Oberstown Children Detention Campus [in north Dublin]. I was the only one without a criminal record that I knew.’
She recalled how she was treated by ‘angry’ healthcare assistants, who stripped her ‘most treasured possessions’ from her room as punishment after she self-harmed one night.
‘When a room was stripped, it meant all clothes and items were taken out, but your photos remained untouched, along with books and cards.
‘The healthcare assistants were so angry with me for self-harming that they ripped all my photos off the wall. I begged them not to, I said that I was allowed to keep my photos, “please don’t take them.”
‘The following morning I went straight to the ward manager distraught over my most sentimental possessions with me in the UK.
‘He told me the night staff should not have ripped down my photos and stripped my room of my cards and apologised for it. We went to the property closet to try to locate my items to put them back in my room, but they were gone. They had been placed in a black bag without my name by the night staff and they had been dumped.’
In response to detailed queries from the MoS outlining the young woman’s treatment, a spokesman for St Andrew’s Healthcare said it had not received an ‘formal complaint regarding this individual’, adding it was ‘surprised to hear of some of these issues now’.
He added: ‘We would be very happy to speak to this person and investigate further should they wish to contact us.’
The statement said: ‘We treat all of our patients with compassion, dignity and respect, and care for them in the most suitable and least restrictive environment possible in order to keep them safe. Many of our younger patients come to us when they are at crisis point.
‘As a charity we want to see more support for young people in the community so they can easily access help as soon as they need it, without requiring inpatient hospital stays.’
Tusla confirmed the young woman was one of 14 Irish children sent to the UK facility ‘since the agency was established in 2014’.
The State child and family agency added: ‘There are currently no young children placed there with the last young person discharged in July 2020.
‘There are a small number of children who require specialised care as a result of their life experiences. On rare occasions the level of specialised intervention required is not available in Ireland.
‘In such cases, a child or young person may be placed in out-ofState care at a facility abroad which offers a broader range of treatment options, support and interventions than those provided in Irish facilities. In such cases, priority is always given to the care a child or young person needs, rather than to jurisdictional boundaries.’
A spokesperson for the State agency confirmed ‘all children in the care of Tusla who are placed in placements abroad remain in the care of Tusla’.
Outlining how this ‘care’ is monitored, the spokesperson said: ‘To ensure their safety and wellbeing we receive regular, detailed reports on the child.
‘The children have regular visits from their allocated social worker, an up-to-date written care plan, access to their families and/or carers where this is in their best interests and aftercare planning with an allocated aftercare worker.
‘Tusla’s ultimate goal is to see all children in placements such as that highlighted in your query, recover sufficiently to be safely discharged and return home to Ireland.’
‘The care assistants were so angry with me’