In silence I don’t feel angry with Liam

To many who knew him, Liam Kavanagh was the “life and soul of the party”.

But his close family knew that behind his happy go-lucky facade was a man battling bouts of depression and anxiety.

And it tragically culminated with his suicide when the father-of-two hanged himself at Whitstable railway station last April. He was just 31.

His death devastated his close-knit family and, nine months later, mum Jackie says she still feels “numb” and can barely believe he has gone from their lives.

“I took three months off work but I still think I’m on autopilot,” she said. “When people ask me how I feel, I can’t tell them.

“Liam had a good way of hiding things and took to drink, which probably made things worse. He wasn’t perfect but he was devoted to his family and especially his two young children, which is why we have struggled to understand why he did it.”

At the time of his death, Chelsea fan Liam was living with Jackie, 53 at her home in Ivy House Road, Whitstable.

He was getting support from mental health services but Jackie believes it was inadequate and he should have been taken into a secure unit.

“He had tried suicide in the past and when I got his medical records, I was quite shocked to learn it had happened so many times,”she said.

“I don’t feel angry with Liam but I do believe more could have been done to help him.”

Jackie believes the high rate in suicides in men like Liam is a worrying trend that urgently needs attention.

“There is far too many and the numbers are growing,” she said.

Jackie, who is a shift leader at a centre for children with special needs, hopes there will be more of a focus on treating young men with mental health issues which put them at risk.

The family have also been devastated to learn that Liam had researched websites giving detailed information on how to commit suicide.

They are so appalled that his sister Natasha has started a petition calling on internet providers to be forced to take down the sites, which has so far gathered more than 33,000 signatures from around the world.

Jackie says: “I welcome the Kentish Gazette’s campaign because if it helps saves one life it will be worth it. I don’t want another family to go through what we have.”

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It’s 5.30am and Toby Winson’s trembling hands are now reaching for the bottle of vodka next to his bed. He’d left the 35cl bottle there the night before, knowing the sickness he’d wake up to and the uncontrollable shakes would make it impossible for him to move any further.

It’s a nauseating daily process, involving making himself sick before taking alternate sips of vodka and mixer, but it’s a necessary one, the only way to stave off a seizure and horrific hallucinations.

Once the drink’s consumed, he sits as still as possible, waiting for the vodka to burn away the symptoms of his alcohol dependency.

At last he’s functional - for three hours at least, when he’ll need another bottle.

It sounds like most people’s worst nightmare, but for former Simon Langton schoolboy Toby, it was a grim reality.

Looking back he admits he doesn’t know how he survived. He almost didn’t, after suffering serious liver disease following his descent into alcoholism aged just 21.

Seven years on from that disturbing morning routine, Toby, sitting in his parent’s home in North Foreland, Broadstairs, with his beloved dog Simba by his side, is two-and-a-half years sober - his ‘great escape’ as he calls it.

Gone is the puffy, yellow skin, and his once alcohol-ravaged body has recovered, almost.

The 29-year-old admits that at his very worst he was drinking a litre-and-a-half of vodka a day and, in one desperate moment, downed a bottle of hospital handwash because it was 98% alcohol.

“In the beginning I just preferred being drunk to sober,” he says.

“I started drinking with my friends aged 14, but then I started doing it in the evenings on my own, just because I enjoyed it, it gave me a release.

“It was something I thought I could control but I got lost in it and before I knew it, I was dependent.

“At some point, when I was 21 or 22, if I didn’t think I’d be able to get hold of a bottle of vodka that evening I would have a panic attack.”

Toby is perhaps one of the more unique cases.

There was no trigger, no traumatic event that led to his descent - if anything, he had everything going for him.

A bright grammar school boy, he grew up in Herne Bay surrounded by supportive family and friends.

He did well enough in his exams to secure a place studying business at the University of Hertfordshire and despite being drunk every day, managed to earn a 2:1 degree.

But with his daily drinking out of hand and knowing he had to stop, he decided to take the drastic step of going cold turkey.

Little did he know how dangerous this would be.

“For two days I was violently ill and constantly shaking from the withdrawal,” he says.

“I thought to myself, ‘I just need to get through this sickness and I can stop drinking from now on’.

“What I didn’t know was that I was about to temporarily lose my mind.”

He started to hallucinate, at first seeing tiny bits of coving fly off the wall, and then small heads popping up in the doorway and windows.

“Soon my legs were being tied together with cobwebs and the floor had become a bed of insects and spiders,” he said.

The terrifying episode became progressively worse until it ended with Toby running towards traffic on a main road in just his trousers, trying to get someone to save him from the eight-foot bald man he thought was chasing him.

Luckily, an off-duty police officer stopped and he was taken to a local station, where an ambulance was called.

Toby says he had been suffering from potentially fatal delirium tremens - a severe withdrawal to alcohol.

It meant despite desperately needing to stop drinking, it