What the death of this aristocrat’s son reveals about Britain’s horrific drug menace – and a system that keeps parents in the dark
As the mother of Lord Monson’s tragic boy speaks for the first time . . .
ALMOST two years on from the death of her son Rupert, the grief is visibly etched on Karen Green’s face. Painfully thin, she survives on little more than meal-replacement drinks and coffee, and wouldn’t rest at all without the sleeping tablets that provide brief respite from her inner turmoil.
‘The first thing that hits me when I wake every morning is the shock that I don’t have my son,’ says Karen. ‘I lie in my bed stunned, paralysed with grief. I can’t move for an hour until what’s happened has sunk in all over again.’
Rupert died in intensive care on January 23 last year, aged 21. Five days earlier he had hanged himself in his grandmother’s garden, where he was living with his mother and younger sister Arabella, now 22.
At the time, Rupert had been in the grip of psychosis caused by skunk, a highly potent form of cannabis, which had made him hallucinate and hear demonic voices.
His parents, who are now reconciled after several years of estrangement, had tried repeatedly to get his life back on track — but it was too late.
Unsurprisingly, Karen, 55, a homeopath, is deeply traumatised by the loss of her firstborn. Beneath the surface lurks a deepening rage — not towards her son, a gifted artist and talented all-round sportsman, but towards the NHS trusts in charge of his mental well-being and those who peddle the potent drug.
While Rupert’s father, Lord Nicholas Monson, has campaigned for skunk to be deemed a Class A drug, Karen, a fiercely private person, has remained silent.
Only now, in the week of the inquest into Rupert’s death, is she speaking out, fuelled by a sense of injustice.
‘It’s too late for Rupert,’ she says quietly, ‘but I would do anything to prevent a tragedy like ours befalling another family.’
Yesterday, the three- day inquest in Woking concluded with the ruling that Rupert took his own life. Although coroner Anna Crawford singled out ‘failures’ in the treatment he received from Surrey and Borders NHS Trust in the days before his death, she did not say this caused Rupert’s suicide.
‘I cannot from the evidence before me conclude that it is probable they would have intervened in sufficient time,’ she said.
However, after the ruling Karen said: ‘ In my view, my son was very badly let down by a catalogue of failings and communication breakdowns, as admitted in court, which resulted in his death. Rupert was not being listened to by the professionals, was unsupported and in an utter state of despair.’
It is the second tragedy to hit Lord Monson — the 12th Baron Monson, of Burton, Lincolnshire — whose eldest son, Alexander, died in police custody in Kenya in 2012.
Nicholas, a writer and hotelier, and Karen had every reason to expect a dazzling future for Rupert.
They had met in London in 1995 when Karen worked in PR. But their brief relationship had already ended acrimoniously when Karen discovered she was pregnant with Rupert.
Karen threw herself into motherhood with the support of her mother, Pamela. ‘Rupert was always such a happy baby. You could see his intelligence shining through even at a young age,’ she says.
Karen went on to marry and have a daughter, Arabella, who was born a year and a half after Rupert. But her relationship with Arabella’s father ended when Rupert was just two.
‘Arabella and Rupert were very close,’ she says. ‘They loved exploring the woods, playing cricket and going on holidays to my parents’ place in Spain with my sister and her children. In many ways, he had an idyllic childhood.’
Rupert was academically gifted, an art scholar and all-round sportsman. At cricket, he was one of the fastest bowlers of his generation. He thrived at Lord Wandsworth College Prep School in Hampshire and had ambitions to be a doctor or vet.
His father came back into his life when Rupert was 14, having met him once before when he was seven.
‘It was as though they had never been apart,’ says Karen. ‘ Nicholas would take him to London Zoo to photograph the animals, which Rupert would later paint for his father. They would have holidays together at Nicholas’s homes in London and Stratford-upon-Avon.’
In 2013, Rupert went to study chemistry at Cardiff University. After a year he switched to biology at Essex University — a move that sparked his tragic decline.
Up until that time, Rupert had shown no interest in drugs.
Karen admits that she and Nicholas were naive about them, too, particularly skunk. Rupert was introduced to the drug shortly after moving into private student accommodation in Colchester outside the university campus.
KAREN only became aware something was wrong when Rupert returned home during the Easter holidays in 2016. ‘He had gone from being his usual polite, charming self to argumentative and occasionally aggressive,’ she says.
His behaviour became even more alarming over the summer holidays. ‘We knew something was very wrong when he told us he was unable to work and had failed his exams because his female flatmates were spying on him and hacking his computer.’
In August 2016 Karen took Rupert to the GP, where he admitted taking cannabis and feeling depressed. Karen says: ‘I assumed it was the kind of “soft” cannabis that my generation smoked. I was completely in the dark about skunk.’
It has been shown scientifically that skunk alters young brains irreversibly and can cause psychosis. It has a much higher concentration of the psychoactive substance THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and almost no CBD ( cannabidiol), which modifies the effects of THC.
While studies have shown a direct link between ordinary cannabis and mental health disorders, skunk users are at even greater risk of them, with side- effects including paranoia, hallucinations and even schizophrenia.
TEENAGERS, whose brains are still developing, are especially vulnerable, with 15 to 18- year- olds four times more likely to suffer harmful consequences than adults. Despite this, skunk is easily accessible at school gates and on university campuses, and now accounts for an alarming 94 per cent of the cannabis market.
‘I tried to speak to him about stopping,’ says Karen, ‘ and he did stop that summer when he was being treated.’
Rupert was referred to the early intervention and psychosis team in Aldershot, who arranged for him to be seen by their home treatment team, part of the Surrey and Borders Trust.
While he was taking his medication Rupert was calm and rational, if withdrawn. But Karen feared that if he returned to university, he would stop taking it. As he was 21, however, she had no power to stop him.
‘I understand why he wanted to go back,’ she says, ‘but I knew it wasn’t right for him.
‘I had a long telephone conversation with the university’s student support officer, expressing my fears. I was told she couldn’t discuss my son with me due to data protection. I made it very clear that Rupert was high risk.’
Meanwhile, the Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust assured her that a ‘triangle of care’ would be put in place for Rupert while he was at university. This meant the home treatment team would liaise with both a welfare officer at the university, who would be monitoring Rupert, and a care co- ordinator, a psychiatric nurse employed by Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT).
In fact, Rupert never saw any welfare officer assigned by the university to look after him — despite attempts to contact that person.
Karen was later told the information she’d been given about a welfare officer was incorrect, and that it was not the university’s policy to check up on students.
Once her son was at university, Karen struggled to get any response from him: ‘I managed to get him to answer his phone once, but he wasn’t very communicative. I was so
worried, my mother and I drove up to see him.
‘He answered the door after ten minutes and had been drinking heavily. He had spent all his student loan.’
From that point on, Karen describes Rupert’s ‘heartbreaking descent into the mental abyss’.
After three weeks, Rupert’s flatmates found him in a confused state, banging his head on his bedroom wall. They sent him in a taxi to Colchester A&E, where he was referred to the psychiatric team.
According to Karen, Rupert was sent back to his accommodation at midnight.
The next day, Rupert sent a text message to his father saying he had stood in the road in front of cars, meaning to kill himself, and would ‘make a better job of it next time’.
‘ Nicholas immediately called Essex police, who turned up at Rupert’s accommodation where he was in a very bad way,’ says Karen. Only after Karen pleaded on the phone with the police who had responded to Nicholas’s 999 call was Rupert was taken to Colchester Hospital, where he was diagnosed with drug- induced psychosis and sectioned.
After ten days in hospital, Rupert was discharged — which Karen believed meant he was cured. In fact, it was simply because the hospital had run out of beds. He returned home to Surrey on November 13, 2016, where a nurse with the home treatment team visited him each week.
Before Christmas 2016 Rupert asked to be readmitted to hospital. By this time he was hearing 30 voices and was delusional. But the nurse told him he didn’t fit the criteria to be admitted.
Despite this, Karen recalls Rupert’s last Christmas in 2016 as a happy one. ‘ We went to my sister’s house in Scotland. Rupert was surrounded by his cousins and people who loved him. He was stable on the medication and I thought he was doing OK.
‘When we came back home he was subdued, but he took himself off to play football and joined an art therapy group,’ Karen says. She had every reason to believe that all would be well.
But Rupert had a relapse in January 2017. Karen believes it was due to him stopping his medication, which the inquest this week confirmed.
Karen says: ‘He said something like: “You’re hiding the truth from me.” I told him I wasn’t hiding anything, then he said: “I am the son of God, and if you don’t believe me, there will be blood on your hands.”
Karen sent Rupert’s carer a text saying her son was ‘in a bad way’. She received no response.
On Sunday, January 15, 2017, Rupert told Karen he was very scared of voices in his head. Karen called the home treatment team, only to hear a recorded message directing her to Safe Haven Cafe, a local walk-in clinic in Aldershot.
The inquest heard how Rupert was assessed by a psychiatric nurse who was very concerned at his ‘florid’ psychotic symptoms and believed him to be high-risk.
BUT when she called the home treatment team, the nurse assessed Rupert on the basis of incomplete notes on the computer and without knowing his background.
The inquest revealed that she wrongly made the decision not to send the home treatment team to attend to Rupert. As a result, Karen had no option but to take her deeply distressed son home and await his scheduled appointment with a psychiatric consultant the following day.
Karen’s barrister argued that this would have influenced the ‘medium-risk’ assessment of the consultant who saw Rupert the next day and decided not to adjust his care plan to daily or twicedaily visits, as would normally have been recommended. Instead, she arranged to see him three weeks later.
On the evening of Wednesday, January 18, Rupert had supper with his family and helped his grandmother wash up before he went outside into the garden and didn’t return. It was dark, and when Karen couldn’t find him, a police helicopter was deployed.
Rupert’s motionless body was located through thermal imaging. His distraught mother could be seen struggling to help her son after finding him hanging by the rope of his childhood swing. He was not yet dead. Rupert was admitted to intensive care, with his parents at his bedside, before dying just ten days before his 22nd birthday.
It was a tragic death that his parents believe could have been averted had the NHS Trust acted with more urgency. Karen said she disagreed with the coroner’s ruling, and felt strongly that Rupert’s death could have been prevented.
Meanwhile, the dealers who provided Rupert with skunk have not been caught.
Controversially, Karen and Nicholas suggest a decriminalisation of milder forms of cannabis, so it could be monitored like cigarettes and alcohol. But they are calling for skunk, which is currently a Class B drug like ordinary cannabis, to be put in the Class A category alongside heroin and cocaine.
‘I’m so angry,’ says Karen. ‘ Not only have I lost my son, but I keep going over how many times he could have been saved.’
In a statement, university of Essex registrar Bryn Morris said: ‘We would like to reassure Rupert’s family that we have listened to their views following his tragic death to see how we can improve the way we work and support students who have mental health issues more effectively while respecting their expectations over confidentiality.
‘We promised Rupert’s family we would take additional actions to educate students about the danger of drugs and alcohol. We have also trained more than 300 staff in mental health “first aid” to raise awareness of how to identify individuals struggling at the earliest stage.’
A spokesman for EPUT said: ‘Our hearts go out to Mr Green’s family and we are keen to support them in any way we can.’
Justin Wilson, chief medical officer at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said: ‘I am deeply sorry for Rupert’s tragic death.
‘Our serious investigation into the care and treatment provided to Rupert has shown that the communication between our Safe Haven service and home treatment team was not clear and requires improvement.
‘We acknowledge the findings of the coroner that there was a missed opportunity for more intensive support from our home treatment team, and have worked closely with the services involved to make positive changes.’