COLLEEN BELL PODCAST EXTRAS
CB: So the family are offered to provide a family statement and we nominated my mother to do that. She had been with Stephen, you know, those whole six weeks almost and obviously very close to Stephen before that, too, so she was able to give a really detailed account. And then, a day or two before the inquest, the coroner then decided no, I’m not admitting this statement to be heard at the inquest; instead, we’re going to use the statement of Stephen’s brother, Patrick, which he had given to the police the morning that he had discovered Stephen, and so you can imagine the Patrick statement is a statement that is very brief and confused and it just didn’t make sense why the coroner would want the police statement, you know, for Patrick to go up on the stand and for the police statement to be read out.
AM: Until then, what sense did you have of the coroner in terms of his mindset on this?
CB: Well, we had a pre-inquest hearing and it was probably a year before. Now, inquests — as I said earlier, inquests normally are supposed to, the guidelines are they’re supposed to be heard within, like, say, a year or so, and this took three years so we had a pre-inquest hearing the year before and the family doctor, the prescribing GP, he was asked to provide his statement to the coroner. What he provided was just bullet points, basically, a list of medications that he prescribed Stephen, and at that stage the coroner was quite — he was quite annoyed. He wanted something fuller and he demanded, then, that the GP then provide a more detailed statement. Then the GP’s statement finally came, it took a long time, but it finally came and it was a very lengthy statement. I can’t remember how many pages but we’re talking multiple pages, very formal, then. You could tell that it was done alongside, obviously, a barrister or a legal professional. And then, whenever the GP came on the day to the inquest, he then came onto the stand and he basically then said something that wasn’t in his original, very detailed statement.
AM: He lied.
CB: Well, as David Healy would say, he fibbed. (Laughs.) And this is where we are very annoyed because we want — we don’t want — we never wanted to really blame anybody, go after anybody. We didn’t want anybody to lose their jobs. We just want acknowledgment of what happened to Stephen in the hope that other people don’t have to suffer like Stephen did. So basically he said that Stephen presented that day and he was a completely different Stephen and that it would have been inhumane to leave him unmedicated. Now, first of all, that’s not in Stephen’s notes and records; there’s no mention of that. It’s also not in the statement that was previously provided to the court. Another thing that annoyed me, too, was that my Uncle Patrick, when he was called aside that morning, he was told by the coroner’s counsel, you’re only allowed to answer yes or no to any questions that I put to you, so Patrick was limited; his voice was restricted; he was only allowed to answer yes or no. But whenever any other witness was on the stand — for example, the GP, the doctors that treated him in the psychiatric unit, the psychiatrists — they were allowed to elaborate on their statements. They could talk at length. So this is then where — the prescribing doctor was able to then to completely kind of change his statement and say that Stephen was a different Stephen before medication. So that basically — to me, Stephen’s case was black and white. It still is black and white. You know, we have the medical notes and records there. And by just throwing that one phrase into the equation, that kind of unraveled everything; that kind of left a bit of doubt into Stephen’s mindset.
CB: So the 29th of July is Stephen’s anniversary. Last year we launched Prescribed Harm Awareness Day on that date. And we were taken back by kind of the reception that it got and the amount of people that shared it. Like, we know that the prescribed harm community is unfortunately so, so big and every day growing, so we wanted to acknowledge through Prescribed Harm Awareness Day that, you know, there are people out there suffering from prescribed harm, iatrogenic illness; there are families suffering from grief of those who have died from medication-induced suicide. So we want Prescribed Harm Awareness Day to initiate conversations around the medications we take and the problems they cause so that people have a better understanding and it is no longer a subject of shame or isolation. Knowledge and awareness can save lives.