Lisa’s Story:

Lisa was a beautiful, gifted and bright young woman, a talented pianist, she was accepted at Cambridge to study Latin and Italian after achieving the highest mark in the country at “A” level. This was in 1990 but after two years she had dropped her language degree and transferred to a BA in Social Science.

Not long into this new course Lisa started to experience mental health problems that developed aggressively to the point where she was eventually suffering from extreme delusional and hallucinatory episodes.

After seven years fighting this mental illness Lisa was diagnosed with schizophrenia, much to the dismay of her parents and particularly her mother, Jane.

Jane felt that the diagnosis was severe and is still of the belief that such a revelation can actually encourage or even impose the illness on an affected person and drastically reduce the possibility of a speedy recovery if recovery is possible at all.

Poor Lisa spent much of her time in and out of hospital , which was unpleasant for her, the environment being rather cold if not clinical and some of the other patients were a little frightening in their behaviour and demeanour. The hospitalisation seemed totallyinappropriate, especially during relapse periods where a less austere environment would have been more conducive to quicker stabilisation. Much of the time, Lisa’s bright and sensitivenature was dulled due to the high levels of medication that she was receiving and increases in weight due to these drugs had negative effects on her self esteem. Lisa could not deal with any kind of personal imperfection, which, in moments of stark rationality, made the reality of her existence a living hell, in fact she once said to her mother that to search for perfection was to live in hell.

For almost ten years and between periods at home or in sheltered housing Lisa was in hospital battling with the demons in her head.

In 2002 Lisa was struck by a train as she took a short cut home over an open railway track. She was only thirty years old

What a waste of a beautiful life. It was a tragedy and her parents were absolutely devastated.