Ex-Miss Wales drank herself to death after post-natal depression
‘Times when you couldn’t help her’
A FORMER beauty queen and television actress died following a battle with post-natal depression and alcohol addiction, an inquest heard.
Melanie Hughes, 39, was at times drinking up to a bottle of vodka a day.
Her husband Rick, 50, discovered her collapsed at their £500,000 home last October. He tried to resuscitate her, before paramedics took her to hospital, but she could not be saved.
Mrs Hughes won the Miss Wales title in 1997 and went on to appear in Coronation Street and another ITV drama, Cold Feet.
The inquest heard that she started drinking heavily in 2013 after suffering a miscarriage.
She also lost her grandmother in the same year and was distressed about her mother falling ill.
Mrs Hughes told a health worker that 2013 had been a traumatic year and ‘alcohol ruined everything for me’.
She also suffered post-natal depression after the birth of the couple’s son, Kaden, who is now four, a year later.
Although Mrs Hughes spent time in rehab, she relapsed and at times was consuming up to a bottle of vodka a day. There were repeated patterns of heavy drinking followed by periods when she managed to stay sober.
A post-mortem examination revealed that she died of fatty liver disease caused by alcoholism, although at the time of her death she only had a small amount of alcohol in her system.
She weighed only eight stone when she died.
In a statement, Mr Hughes, a financial adviser, said he believed his wife, who later worked for a building firm, had been ‘let down’ by the NHS and other agencies that had been enlisted to help her. He said that at one point he had asked for her to be sectioned – detained under the Mental Health Act – in order to stop her drinking but was told: ‘It’s not as simple as that.’
Substance misuse worker Kelly Wilson, who is employed by the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, told the inquest in Ruthin, North Wales: ‘Melanie really was in a terrible state and there were times when you couldn’t help her.’
She had difficulty setting up a care plan for Mrs Hughes because she frequently missed or cancelled appointments.
Elizabeth Dudley- Jones, assistant coroner for North East Wales and Central, concluded that Mrs Hughes died ‘as a direct result of fatty liver disease which was caused as a result of her addiction to alcohol’.
Yesterday Mr Hughes said he was too upset to talk about what happened to his ‘stunning’ wife.
But he had previously paid tribute to Mrs Hughes, whom he described as a ‘a lovely soul... kind and gentle.’
Mr Hughes, who has a daughter, Taylor, 17, from a previous relationship, said: ‘Mel was so kindhearted and had time for absolutely everyone.
‘We are absolutely devastated at the loss of such a wonderful spirit and will never ever forget her.’
After winning the Miss Wales title in 1997 when she was still Melanie Jones, she competed at the Miss International beauty pageant in Japan the following year. Mr and Mrs Hughes knew each other growing up, in Holywell, Flintshire, north Wales, before getting together some years later.
The couple, who lived in nearby Ewloe, got engaged at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and married in 2011 in Mauritius, where Mrs Hughes’s mother, Jotee, had been born.
They took their children to Disney World, in Florida, shortly before Mrs Hughes’s death. Her husband said: ‘I am so glad we did as that has so many pictures with so many memories.’