So desperate, she bit holes in her arms
AYLA HAINES is desperate to die. She has tried to end her life through drowning, hanging and swallowing items such as a toothbrush, which remains inside her body ten months later.
The 26-year-old has a bald patch from repeatedly banging her head, despite often being under 24-hour watch by two care staff.
It is feared that her hair may never grow back and that she may even have caused brain damage. Now Ayla is biting holes in her arm and inserting items into the flesh to try to develop a fatal infection.
‘She just wants to die,’ says her distraught mother Jane. ‘And we are at the stage where we almost want it to end for her because she has no quality of life.’
Mrs Haines believes this destructive behaviour is the legacy of her only daughter being sent to an assessment and treatment unit aged 19, then locked in secure units for seven years. At one stage, Ayla was held in a lonely seclusion cell for ten months. Now she is being kept at a unit in Northamptonshire more than six hours from her home in West Wales.
Her mother says she has not been able to see her daughter for a year, with their phone calls, lasting ten minutes at most, being monitored.
Ayla self-harmed and developed eating disorders from a young age, but her mother believes the core problem is undiagnosed autism. ‘She is definitely on the spectrum,’ she says.
The teenager was student of the year at karate when she entered the care system but now, says her mother, she is an over-drugged wreck.
‘I wish they’d accept her autism, let her come nearer home and take her off the medications,’ says Jane.
‘This is hell, absolute hell.’