Mother who took cannabis for morning sickness turns psychotic and kills herself
A MOTHER who took cannabis to ease extreme morning sickness killed herself after the drug made her psychotic.
Polly Ross, 32, suffered from the same nausea and vomiting condition that has affected the Duchess of Cambridge.
The ‘ frighteningly clever’ translator started taking cannabis and magic mushrooms during her second pregnancy, an inquest heard yesterday.
After giving birth she was diagnosed with post-natal depression but was also suffering from psychosis triggered by the drugs. This led her to repeatedly try to take her own life.
At one stage she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act following a psychotic episode at home.
And she was at an in-patient unit at the time of her death in July 2015 – a year after the birth of her second daughter. She told mental health workers she was going to a shop to buy cigarettes but instead stepped in front of a train.
Her GP, Daniella Maleknasr, told the inquest in Hull that Mrs Ross suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, which affects about one in 100 women in the early stages of pregnancy.
‘She had told me when she was pregnant with her second child that she was taking cannabis and magic mushrooms to help combat HG during her pregnancy,’ she said.
In a letter to Mrs Ross’s psychiatrist, the GP noted ‘the patient’s psychosis had stemmed from illicit drug use, namely cannabis, taken during pregnancy’. Asked by coroner Paul Marks whether cannabis helped hyperemesis, she replied: ‘I can’t possibly comment.’
Dr Maleknasr said ‘alarm bells were ringing’ when Mrs Ross told her in February 2015 that she wanted to commit suicide. The following month she called at the family home in Driffield, East Yorkshire, to find the mother in a psychotic condition and sectioned her.
Mrs Ross was later allowed to leave the psychiatric hospital and go home to her family two days after an overdose of 60 paracetamol tablets.
She had been given medication to treat her condition but the inquest heard she attempted suicide three times over a three-month period.
Mrs Ross refused to allow into her home a crisis team assigned to provide a ‘higher and intense level of support’. Eventually she agreed to be admitted to an in-patient treatment unit in Hull, where she was staying when she died.
Mrs Ross’s mother, Joanne Hogg, told the hearing her daughter’s intelligence was staggering – she dreamt in French and Italian. ‘Polly loved her children unconditionally and knew heart-break- ingly that when she was mentally ill she could not look after them,’ she added.
Mrs Ross met her husband Samuel in Paris where she was running a translation business. A whirlwind marriage was followed by the birth of their daughters in June 2012 and June 2014.
The inquest continues.
‘She dreamt in French and Italian’