Young mother in motorway suicide treated for depression - UK

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3168612.ece

From The Times

January 11, 2008

Young mother in motorway suicide treated for depression

on

A mother who killed herself by walking on to a motorway had given birth to twins

two weeks earlier and was believed to be suffering from postnatal depression.

Police are interviewing healthcare professionals who had been treating

Finkill, 30, for the condition. A source said yesterday that she had visited a

psychiatrist the day before she died.

Mrs Finkill left her baby girls, Lacey and Isobel, with her husband, , early

in the morning on January 2. Several motorists reported later that they had hit

her after she walked on to the northbound carriageway of the M3 near

Farnborough, Hampshire, less than 500 metres from her home.

Her family released a statement yesterday saying that her death had left them

" numb with grief " . They added: " was a devoted wife and soulmate to her

husband, . How she came to die will be something that we may never come to

terms with. "

The couple had been married since 2002. Mr Finkill, a painter and decorator,

last saw his wife at 5am after he had got up to feed the twins. When he awoke

later and she was not in the house he contacted the police.

A lorry driver called the police about 7am, saying he thought that he had hit a

pedestrian. Several other calls were received from motorists saying that they

had hit her, and the road was closed for eight hours.

Sergeant Plews, of Hampshire police, said that staff from the Frimley Park

Hospital maternity section had been due to visit Mrs Finkill, a bank clerk, on

the morning that she died. Her daughters had been delivered at the hospital by

Caesarean section on December 19.

" This is an exceptionally traumatic and tragic incident which has torn apart a

very loving family, " Sergeant Plews said. " When someone dies 14 days after

giving birth we have to ask whether there was postnatal depression. Our

investigation would show that there were some signs, but there was no indication

that she was planning to take her own life. It seems the medical profession were

doing everything they could. "

Friends of Mrs Finkill have made donations to the Association for PostNatal

Illness in her memory. Nehmé, secretary of the association, said that the

condition could be treated with antidepressants, but it was often weeks before

an improvement was noticed. She said: " New mothers have no idea how long it will

go on for. Many, many women feel that they have gone completely insane and

there's no way back. It's not necessarily that they want to commit suicide, but

it's the only answer they can find. "

She said there was a distinction between postnatal depression - the most common

symptoms of which are anxiety, thought disturbance, sleep disturbance and low

morale - and " baby blues " , which she described as a " mild imbalance of hormones,

which nature takes care of within two or three weeks " .

Deborah -Graham, the head of Perinatal Illness UK, a postnatal support

charity, said that the cause of the condition was little understood. She

described it as the " silent epidemic " , adding that one in five mothers suffered

from it in some form.

" Nobody really knows what causes women to feel like this, but it is thought that

it is a mixture of hormonal factors, psychological factors and social factors, "

she said. " In most cases the deaths are very violent. The women have very

negative thoughts about themselves and feel like they are terrible mothers. "

Dr Wheatley, the author of Coping with Postnatal Depression, said she

thought that Mrs Finkill had been suffering from a more unusual mental illness.

" Because this has occurred in the first two weeks, I would say this sounds more

like puerperal psychosis, which is much rarer than postnatal depression,

affecting just one in a thousand. "