‘I lost both my husband and daughter to suicide’
On World Mental Health Day, Karen Sykes tells her traumatic story to Victoria Lambert
‘She wanted to see the world, get married, have children. It makes no sense’
Karen Sykes is looking through her phone at pictures and videos of her youngest daughter Bethany. One shows Beth, as she preferred to be called, looking glamorous in dark glasses with a flirty smile. In another, she is dancing with her older sisters, Hayley, now 33, and Robyn, 30. Others show her cuddling with a friend’s baby, driving her prized black Mini, celebrating her degree.
Most poignant of all are the short videos 26-year-old Beth filmed of herself with her stepfather Ian Sykes, an electronic engineer: laughing, making silly noises, singing along to Fleetwood Mac in the car. These are all Karen has left, having lost them both to suicide in the past four years.
The hole the pair’s deaths have left in Karen’s life is nothing short of an abyss, too terrible truly to comprehend. Yet as today’s World Mental Health Day is focusing on suicide prevention, the 52-year-old – head of safeguarding at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust – is determined to try.
“If I didn’t see this coming,” she says, fiercely, as rain belts down outside the Leeds coffee shop where we sit, “with my experience of nursing and safeguarding, it makes you realise how difficult it is to prevent. But prevention – that is what we must do.”
This is especially true in light of new figures from the Office for National Statistics, which show that rates of suicide have risen among under-25s in recent years, particularly girls and women aged 10 to 24, a worrying trend that Dr Jon Goldin, vice-chairman of the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warned may be partially linked to the pressures of social media.
Karen turns back to those vivid pictures of Beth: “She wanted to see the world, get married, have children. It makes no sense.” But, then, the family, who live in Wakefield, have had to handle the ripple effects of a series of extraordinary tragedies since 2012. Karen and Ian and got together in 2003 after the end of their first marriages – she had three daughters, he had three sons: Daniel, now 28, Adam, 23, and Kieran, 21. “We were a happy family,” she says, simply.
But in March 2012, Ian’s 18-year-old niece Samantha Sykes, the daughter of his older brother, Eric, was killed by her friend’s ex-boyfriend. Ahmad Otak, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, is now serving 34 years for her murder and that of another girl at the same time.
“Ian went to every court hearing with Eric,” Karen recalls. “I think it was really difficult to see the way this had broken his big brother.”
The family set up a charity in Samantha’s name to try to make something positive out of the tragedy and Ian threw himself into fundraising, but became increasingly stressed and had a heart attack in 2014.
“Ian had a congenital heart problem with the valves in his heart, but he had kept fit and never smoked,” Karen explains. “The heart attack made him angry in a way I hadn’t seen before.”
She knew he was suffering mentally. “When we met, Ian told me that he had been to some dark places in his mind and had considered suicide once. But, at the time, his marriage had ended and he was concerned about seeing his children. These seemed reasons.
“At the same time, if we talked about him feeling low, he would be tough on himself. He’d say he needed to snap out of it. To man up. He was a perfectionist.”
Did that combination of factors result in Ian’s death? Karen cannot say. The night he died – Oct 3 2015 – they had been celebrating her daughter Robyn’s birthday. Karen had driven eldest daughter Hayley back home at 3am and returned to discover his body in the attic. There was no note, just one missed call on her phone.
“I was hysterical,” she says. “Beth was helping me. We called paramedics and they told us to give him CPR even though he was obviously dead; it was Beth that performed CPR on Ian.”
Her youngest daughter was amazing, she says, caring for her mother and dealing with Ian’s death at the same time. “They were so close,” she says. “She was like his shadow.”
The family dealt with things badly, Karen now believes. “We realise we did it all wrong. We held in our grief and anger. I went back to work after two weeks in case I was letting anyone down.” The following January, she was signed off sick. “I was acutely unwell,” she says. “But our GP was wonderful and was checking in on me and Beth, who was also struggling by this point. She was terrified [Ian] would be forgotten,” says Karen, “she missed him so much.”
There was a piece of good luck. Beth found a job as an occupational therapist at the oncology department of a Leeds hospital. She was referred for counselling and took a course of antidepressants.
In 2016, Karen met a new partner, Steven Hume, and the couple set up home together, while Beth moved into her own first home with her boyfriend, James. It seemed the family finally had a future to look forward to. But last Christmas, Beth became low again.
“She was open with me about her anxiety,” says Karen. “She didn’t go to the GP, as I suggested, but she was trying to cope. After she died, we found notebooks where she’d made lists of positives and negatives. Among the positives were comments like: ‘Didn’t cry, or a patient made me laugh’. But it was horrifying to read: ‘No flashbacks.’”
By February, Beth seemed to be back on an even keel and, on Easter Sunday, she went out for the evening with her mother, sister Robyn and close friend Sarah to celebrate.
“I turned in early,” says Karen, “but they carried on and met James before all going back to Beth’s to sleep. In the morning, I texted to tease them about being hungover and looked at Snapchat to see all the little videos they had been posting of the night. It looked positive, a good time. I said to Steve, ‘this must be one of the best Easters ever’.”
A few moments later, she received a phone call from Sarah. “It’s Beth,” she said, just as Robyn texted her: “I can’t do this again.” They had found Beth dead. Just as with Ian, there was no note, no explanation.
Toxicology later revealed that she had a little alcohol and traces of cocaine in her system – it later turned out that she took the drug occasionally and her mother wonders if it affected her balance of mind.
“I don’t want her judged by the cocaine, as it is [ just] one aspect and suicide is multifaceted,” says Karen, “but I would want others to know it could be a factor and to think before using alcohol and cocaine.
“Everyone wants an explanation after something like this, as though it can spread to them,” she adds. “As a society, we find it so hard to talk about suicide in reality.”
Karen now fundraises for the charity Papyrus, which aims to reduce the number of young people who take their own lives, by helping them and their families to recognise and respond to suicidal behaviour.
“There has to be easier access to mental healthcare services and support,” she says. “Right now, it is the charities doing so much and actually, I think, leading change.”
Having been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2017, she underwent a psychotherapy treatment called Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, which she funded privately. “I remember saying to the GP, I don’t need medication – I’m not depressed, I’m heartbroken.”
Life, of course, will never be the same. “Ian’s death was heartbreaking, but would Beth have considered taking her own life the same way if he hadn’t?” she wonders. “I was angry with him at first. Now I just hope they are both at peace.
“I know Beth would be loving me talking to raise awareness. She loved helping people. Yes, there were dark moments, but Beth was about brightness. I still feel so lucky to have had her, and if this helps just one person reach out, then it is worth it.”
Papyrus is the national charity dedicated to the prevention of young suicide. For more information, visit papyrus-uk.org or call 0800 068 4141