I’m not worth saving, said suicide-risk son
A HEARTBROKEN mother has told how her son believed doctors did not care if he died after medics failed to treat him at a psychiatric unit.
Dale Thomson’s family say the 27-year-old killed himself after being turned away from the Carseview unit at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital three years ago.
Yesterday his mother Amanda McLaren revealed her battle with NHS Tayside over her son’s mental health – and how doctors let him go home despite his detailed suicide plans.
She said: ‘My son walked out of there and said, “They don’t think I’m worth saving.” And this is continuing – my son’s not the last. How many more are going to have to do this?’
Miss McLaren was among several families at the Scottish parliament yesterday when Labour backed a call for a public inquiry into the health board’s mental health service.
It came from the family of 50year-old David Ramsay who committed suicide in 2016, four days after twice being rejected for treatment at Carseview.
But instead an SNP amendment left families with the prospect of an inquiry commissioned by NHS Tayside itself, albeit with an independent chairman, which Labour health spokesman Anas Sarwar was prepared to accept.
Later, a tearful Miss McLaren said the medics at Carseview had been aware that her son planned to kill himself. She said: ‘He knew how he was going to do it, where he was going to do it... what he was going to use. And he told them all this. And they completely ignored that. They thought my son was OK.’
She claimed that Health Secretary Shona Robison had told her ‘Carseview has never clicked as a mental health unit’ more than two years ago – but had failed to take action. She added: ‘I don’t trust any of them.’
Mr Ramsay’s niece Gillian Murray, 28, said she and her uncle were once members of the SNP but she had torn up her membership card over the way the family had been treated.
Reluctantly she accepted the compromise inquiry ‘as long as it’s an independent chair and we are involved. But we will be watching, very, very closely.’ Malcolm and Karen Nichol, 50, whose son Scott, 22, killed himself after being discharged from Carseview only five days after a failed suicide attempt, have called for a ‘total overhaul’ of the unit as well as a review.
Mr Nichol, 53, joined calls for the Health Secretary to resign, saying: ‘The bottom line is we don’t trust Shona Robison and we don’t trust NHS Tayside.’
Of the health board’s own inquiry, he said: ‘I don’t believe for a minute it’s not going to be a whitewash.’
Mental Health Minister Maureen Watt told MSPs that avoiding a full public inquiry would allow work to get under way quickly and ‘ensure any necessary changes are expedited’.
She was confident the health board’s new leadership team would ‘create the environment for an effective and independent inquiry’.
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