I do not want to be just another statistic but nobody is listening
Family’s fear over tormented teen’s suicide attempts
A TORMENTED teenager and her family are begging medics to help save her life – claiming she was repeatedly sent home from hospital after a string of suicide attempts.
Jenna Duffy, 17, was left with horrific injures after her psychological illness sparked a string of episodes which saw her taken to A&E three times last week.
Her family claim she has been failed by mental health services who sent her home from Monklands Hospital, Lanarkshire, told her she was not at risk and “chastised” her for going to hospital during a pandemic.
Jenna, who has made dozens of attempts to take her life since the age of 15, said she doesn’t want her battle with emotional unstable personality disorder to make her “another statistic”.
She said: “I can be suicidal, but I don’t want to die. I feel like I’m not living. I’m just existing and nobody is listening.”
Jenna’s problems began when she suffered bullying at school and was brutally attacked. Her mental health deteriorated rapidly in recent years and, after previously receiving treatment in West Lothian where she lived with her mum, Jenna moved to Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, to stay with her dad Adrian, 48, and step-mum Evonne, 44, at the end of last year.
Last Monday, her dad was forced to call police after a psychotic episode saw Jenna, who takes antipsychotic medication, threaten to harm herself
with a kitchen knife.
A day later she was back in hospital again after being found on a train station bridge by a passing social worker with severe injuries caused by a piece of glass. She was back in hospital again on Thursday but once again sent home. Adrian and Evonne told how they are so scared for her safety that they have slept on her bedroom floor and are afraid to let her out of their sight. They also believe their efforts to get help for Jenna are being hampered by coronavirus delays and lockdowns. Evonne said: “When she went to A&E on Monday mental health services refused to assess Jenna, saying she wasn’t mentally unstable enough. “On Tuesday, she was told, ‘You can’t keep coming up like this, you do know we’ve got a global pandemic on the go?’ The staff at A&E are amazing, they cleaned her up and were really concerned for her. It’s the mental health team who have been totally complacent. They have completely failed her. Two weeks ago they downgraded Jenna’s risk.
“Jenna should never have been discharged from the hospital in the condition she was in. Me and her dad had a mattress on Jenna’s bedroom floor and slept there to make her feel safe.
“Other nights we sit outside her bedroom until she goes to sleep and when she goes for a shower we sit outside the bathroom. We are exhausted. Jenna needs monitoring and we’re getting zero help.”
Jenna has been undergoing mental health treatment since 2018 and was previously admitted to a crisis unit in Edinburgh, but the family say her treatment hasn’t gone far enough to control her episodes and she is now at crisis point.
Adrian said: “The medics were actually accusing Jenna of being on drugs. They wouldn’t listen to her from the get-go. Everybody can see Jenna needs more help than she’s getting, apart from the people who are supposed to do that.”
Jenna’s mum, Kirsty Johnstone, from Armadale, said her daughter was “crying out for help”. The 49-year-old said: “Jenna has made several attempts on her life and the medications are not working. I’ve emailed Nicola Sturgeon and contacted my local MSP.
“Jenna needs to be in hospital. It will be a lengthy process for her to try new medications, assess her mood and begin therapy to teach her how to deal with the mental illness she’s got.”
Jenna said she has chosen to speak out about her illness in the hope it will also help other young people get the support they need. She said: “I don’t want to be just another statistic.”
The family have now been told they can bypass A&E to get to more direct help for Jenna if she suffers an episode.
NHS Lanarkshire said it was managing a complaint and would respond directly to the family.
CAN WE ever trust what a notorious offender tells us about other crimes he may or may not have committed? Where the bodies are buried or where the proceeds of his offending have been hidden?
These questions are not just hypothetical – I am regularly in situations when I have to decide if what I am being told by an offender is true, or merely constructed for some other ulterior motive – perhaps to shape my view about guilt or innocence or, at one stage in my career, whether the person that I was speaking to should be given parole.
Nor in making my judgment can I rely on what people seem to believe from what they’ve seen on crime shows are “tells” – the non-verbal clues that supposedly give away the truth: the person looks up to the left, or down to the right (I can never remember) when they are lying, hugs themselves, or strokes their chin.
These signs might – in some circumstances – tell us something about an individual but to be able to judge accurately, I would need to know the person displaying them for a long time and in different situations when they are stressed, bored, excited or relaxed.
As a parent, I know when my children are telling the truth or lying but that’s only because I have seen and interacted with them for many years and so know what their eye contact, or lack of it, might indicate.
So can we believe Peter Tobin when he claims to have killed more women than he has been convicted of but in the same breath says he is not notorious Glasgow serial killer “Bible John”?
Did we really expect Ian Brady to have led the police to where he and Myra Hindley buried the body of Keith Bennett on Saddleworth Moor? Should we have believed Fred West when he suggested his wife Rose had no knowledge of any of the murders that had been committed at 25 Cromwell Street?
These examples show how the truth is very difficult to determine with people who have been accused or, indeed, convicted of serial murder and how we cannot rely on what is claimed by that killer, even if they appear to be forthcoming, or offering their assistance.
After all, they have lived a life that has been patterned by lies, muddying the waters or, like Tobin, actively refusing to speak at all. Indeed, when I attended his trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in 2009 for the murder of Dinah McNicol – he pleaded “not guilty” – he spent almost the entire time doodling, rarely engaging
We cannot rely on what is claimed by a killer
with what was happening in the court. It took the jury just 13 minutes to find him guilty. To establish the truth, we need evidence that can be verified and corroborated, such as DNA samples found at a crime scene that connect an individual to a victim, or CCTV footage which puts the suspect in the vicinity when the crime occurred.
This evidence has to be independent of what the suspect might or might not say, because we know only too well some people in these circumstances would argue that black was white, night was day, and, “Honest Guv, it really wasn’t me”.