THE TRAUMA DROVE ME TO ALCOHOL

THE stress of her sister’s murder trial turned her to alcohol, Gemma Dowler candidly reveals.

She writes: ‘In the build-up to the trial, I’m drinking too much, burning myself out … I’m in a state of “chronic hyperarousal”, unable to concentrate, unable to sleep.’

She says she her mind ‘constantly ticks over images’ that should not be there. ‘Everything that the police tell us about the trial makes me angrier.’

She also tells how, after her mental health deteriorated, she had therapy at a Priory psychiatric hospital. She writes: ‘Mum used her considerable resources to try to track down help for me, especially after the panic attacks started.’

Describing how she felt after she was admitted, she writes: ‘Mum and Dad have kissed me goodbye many times before ... this goodbye is much worse.

‘When they leave me in my comfortable little room, my heart plummets. Has it really come to this? That I live in a mental hospital? That I’m no longer fit to live in society, or to work, or even to live with my parents?’