TW for suicide, self harm, infant death, police brutality
"The inquest heard that Sarah spent her last days either chanting, screaming, banging and spitting, or in a trance like state. This deterioration followed her being taken off anti-psychotic medication. Sarah had been taken off this due to concerns about her heart. However expert evidence was given which said, directly contrary to the claims of the lead psychiatrist at Holloway, alternative cardiac safe anti-psychotic medication was available.
"The psychiatrists responsible for her care treated her solely on the basis of a diagnosis of emotionally unstable personality disorder and dismissed her history of diagnosis of clear psychotic disorder, including paranoid schizophrenia. Consequently on behalf of the family it was suggested that Sarah’s psychotic illness remained untreated with her dealt with primarily as a discipline issue."
Deborah Coles, Director of INQUEST said:
“Sarah Reed was a woman in torment, imprisoned for the sake of two medical assessments to confirm what was resoundingly clear, that she needed specialist care not prison. Her death was a result of multi-agency failures to protect a woman in crisis. Instead of providing her with adequate support, the prison treated her mental ill health as a discipline, control and containment issue. Serious mental health problems are endemic in women’s prisons, with deaths last year at an all-time high. They continue because of the failure of the governments to act.
The legacy of Sarah's death and the inhumane and degrading treatment she was subjected to must result in an end to the use of prison for women. The state’s responsibility for these deaths goes beyond the prison walls and extends to the failure to implement the Corston review, tackle sentencing policy and invest in alternatives to custody and specialist mental health services for women.”
Note from PDV!: This is a harrowing case of many of the common themes of mistreatment--misdiagnosis, neglect, not taking a person's distress and threat to themselves seriously, and the most aggressive of punitive approaches--leading to what is a tragic death. I agree with Deborah Coles, she never should have been in prison. Unfortunately, the perspective through which all violence is viewed as equal and potentially criminal, despite the very real and incredible difference between the violence of lashing out and the deliberate victimisation of a more vulnerable person, is reinforced by academic psychology. When we divide psychology by criminality, by non-violent and violent, this obscures the environmental and systemic cause of violence and the different kinds of violence there are. It leads, ultimately, to the reinforcement of punitive action against vulnerable and distressed people, such as in the case of Sarah.
I wrote more about this in my post The death of Claire Greaves, BIGSPD 2019, money, and power
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