Found hanged in a park, anorexic beauty queen dropped by NHS for missing one therapy session
A TROUBLED beauty queen hanged herself in a park five months after she was discharged by the NHS for missing just one therapy session, a coroner heard yesterday.
Samantha Kearsey, 29, a former Miss Cheltenham contestant, suffered years of anorexia, depression and anxiety, and was described by her family as a ‘tormented soul’.
Miss Kearsey, known to her friends as Sammi, had been struggling to hold down her job as an account manager with a recruitment firm before her death in November.
Yesterday, her grieving parents demanded to know why she had not been detained, despite her years of mental health problems and previous suicide attempts.
Coroner Katy Skerrett, who described how a dog walker found Miss Kearsey’s body in a park in Cheltenham, asked her family: ‘I understand your main issue is that Sammi should have been detained at some point.’
Her father Jonathan Kearsey, 53, replied: ‘Yes, probably over two or three years. We had a long-term concern. A number of events raised our concerns but they were not processed.’
Miss Kearsey, who had been diagnosed with an eating disorder when she was 13, had been discharged by Solent NHS Trust five months before she was found hanged in Benhall Park, the preinquest hearing in Gloucester was told.
On June 6 she had been due to attend a cognitive behavioural therapy session – a talk with a counsellor to help her cope with her problems – in Portsmouth, where she had been living with her boyfriend Dan Coomber, but failed to turn up, meaning she was dropped by the service.
It also emerged that Mr Coomber called Miss Kearsey’s GP surgery with concerns about her mental state just five days before she died on November 12.
Her mother, Janet Kearsey, 55, told the hearing that her daughter lived in various places around Worcestershire and Hampshire but returned to her home town to take part in a Miss Cheltenham beauty contest in 2009.
She had contemplated suicide in 2015 but was considered to be of only ‘mild risk’. She had been living with her boyfriend in Portsmouth in the year before her death, but they had recently split up.
Shortly after Miss Kearsey’s death, her mother described her as ‘very popular, very beautiful and very bright’, but said she had been ‘running away from her mental health problems for years and struggled to stay in work because of it’. A date for the full inquest has not yet been set.
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‘Struggled to stay in work’