A mother who saw her vivacious young daughter spiral into drugs and eventual death has said that authorities should do much more to help people kick their addictions and recover.
Helen Stobbart died aged 51, having struggled for years with substance abuse issues and mental health problems. The end came last May, when her opioid addiction resulted in her being taken to Rotherham Hospital, but it was too late. Sue Charlesworth, Helen's mother, said she was shocked to see the deterioration in her daughter in the months leading up to her death.
In a desperate final attempt to save her life, she even tried to have her sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But at an assessment in April it was judged that Helen did not meet the criteria — and she died just a month later, a coroners court in Yorkshire heard last Thursday (February 9) .
Helen grew up in Rawmarsh, near Rotherham, and was brought up by her mother from the age of five after her parents parted. Later, her life would go on to become dominated by dug addiction and solvent abuse.
Ms Charlesworth recalled Helen telling her that she had been given a whisky at her father's house when she was just nine years old, and later found out her daughter had been using her secondary school dinner money to buy cans of lager. Despite this, Helen secured a job as a shop assistant in Rotherham before leaving home to work on the Greek islands of Zante and Crete.
"She had such a lovely personality and would do anything for anyone," she told YorkshireLive. "That was part of what made her so vulnerable. She was really trusting and people would take advantage of that.
"Throughout her life she ended up in a lot of abusive relationships with men but was stuck with them. She'd be beaten up badly but would never say anything — it was always, 'oh I fell', or something like that."
As Helen's life spiralled out of control she would become known to a number of services across Rotherham responsible for mental health and addiction, including Change Grow Live and the NHS Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber crisis team. Ms Charlesworth added that she thought Helen started using cannabis in her teens before moving on to harder drugs in her 20s. By the end she was taking a mix of heroin, crack cocaine and methadone.
Helen died after taking a suspected overdose on May 21, 2022. Her medical cause of death was recorded as asphyxiation due to a cocktail of drugs in her system. Emergency teams tried to revive her with a mixture of drugs and physiotherapy. However, Helen was too frail and did not respond well to treatment, despite regaining consciousness and being able to speak on a number of occasions.
However, a decision was eventually taken, with her mother's permission, to issue a "do not resuscitate" order. Helen was moved into palliative care and died on Tuesday, May 24, 2022.
The inquest at Doncaster Coroners Court heard from the concerned health authorities and South Yorkshire Housing Association, which all had contact with Helen in the months leading up to her death. Of particular concern, said Ms Charlesworth, was the treatment of her mental illnesses.
She said she had a rocky relationship with Helen over the years but she became increasingly worried about her daughter's appearance in the months before she died. When she was admitted to hospital in May she had a BMI of just 17.6 and a number of serious injuries.
During an assessment to see if Helen should be sectioned, called for by Sue at the end of April, the consultant psychologist noted she appeared unkempt. However, in this assessment a decision was made between multiple agencies that treatment for Helen should remain within the community.
She had several diagnoses with regard to her mental health over the years, from borderline personality disorder to bipolar disorder. Coupled with her addictions, it meant her cooperation with the services was patchy. But Ms Charlesworth said that if her addiction and mental health struggles had been treated as one under what is known as "dual diagnosis", she may have met the threshold to be taken into medical detention that April.
However, as it stood, Helen did not meet the criteria to be admitted for her mental health alone and expressed no desire to be admitted herself. Mrs Louise Slater, the Area Coroner, said she was satisfied that the assessment from the multi agency team did all it could within the scope of their criteria they were working with.
She noted that the relevant agencies had gone "above and beyond" to try to engage Helen on multiple occasions. Mrs Slater said: "I accept it must be incredibly difficult to see someone who you love so dearly deteriorate so much and Helen's mum did everything right to try and help her." Helen's death at the age of 51 was ruled a drug-related death.
However, Ms Charlesworth still believed that the death could have been preventable. She said: "I believe that if she had been detained, she would be with us today. When I saw Helen, the way she had become was traumatic for me.
"It was upsetting and it was very clear to me that something needed to be done to help her immediately. Anyone could have seen that it was out of control. I had the feeling straight away — you just knew, looking at her, that she was going to die. And she did."
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