‘Abandoned’ Jane left to struggle on her own

3:44pm Wednesday 19th March 2008

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I'm meeting Jane but when I get to her house Tabby answers the door. Ickle left about an hour ago.

I'm the only person who has visited this traumatised and troubled woman today.

“So I sent fairies to people who were hidden away – as a way of connecting us all. It was a certain way of surviving.”

Jane

Jane, or Tabby, or Ickle, suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It is a coping method Jane's mind has adopted to deal with the trauma she has experienced in her life.

That trauma includes her care worker dying about four years ago, and other incidents that Jane wanted to keep private due to their extremely personal nature.

But it was when she was discharged in 2005 from the Lilacs ward at Tolworth Hospital that her personality manifestations began.

She tore her house to bits, wrote suicidal messages on the walls and started having seizures.

Phil Lockwood created a mental health forum after a friend and DID sufferer committed suicide. Through the forum he met Jane and they became friends. He now acts as her advocate and is fighting alongside her to get treatment.

He told me: "Jane is the host personality but Ickle has been out most of the time."

Ickle is a nine year-old-girl obsessed with making and drawing fairies. It's not just Jane's behaviour that changes when her personality does. She will sound different, act different, have a different posture and look in her eye. In every aspect apart from her body she is nine years old.

Phil recalled: "The first time I met her my 12-year-old daughter came and they looked like two children playing. Ickle was showing her how to make fairies."

Other personalities include Tabby and Mute, who will only converse on internet message services and through forums. Ickle comes out when life gets too hard for Tabby, and Mute will appear in times of severe stress.

Phil added: "Sometimes you don't know who it will be."

Jane wants treatment. She had been receiving some at a centre called the Retreat in York but her funding was stopped and she could not stay. She returned to her home in Tolworth but did not want to return to Lilacs, the scene of traumatic events in her past.

She said: "One day I just broke down - you can't imagine how shocking it was but they just ignored it.

"They're just not offering help for what's wrong with me."

And Jane believes South West London and St George's (SWLSG) Mental Health Trust, which has provided her treatment, has failed her.

She said: "They've taken everything away from me "They've not got the facilities to treat me. The Retreat does but they won't agree for me to go back there. They've wrecked my life."

Phil added: "She needs specific treatment in DID. There's no structured treatment and no speciality in SWLSG. They've got no experience in it and have no idea what they're doing.

"She's clinging on to life."

Jane's life is confined to the four walls of her flat. She has only left the building to attend meetings at the hospital to discuss her treatment.

She said: "I can't imagine life outside. I didn't have a Christmas tree. I didn't notice the difference between summer and winter. Some people thought I'd died.

"I thought what can I do to stop my mind from giving way?"

That's when she decided to make fairies, one for each day she hadn't received the help she felt she needed and deserved.

She now has hundreds, but some light has come from the dark that has engulfed her life.

She said: "I thought there must be so many people hurting out there hidden behind closed doors that nobody knows about.

"So I sent fairies to people who were hidden away - as a way of connecting us all. It was a certain way of surviving."

Jane is an articulate and clever woman whose condition and her situation seemed at odds with the person describing it. And she has a fantastic artistic talent.

Her fairies are sold over the world via the internet, she has a local fan base of people who congregate at her window to admire her work, and she has even had mothers ask her to decorate their child's bedroom with fairies.

She has begun writing for Fairy World magazine. But this glimmer of hope is hampered by her frequent seizures. She also developed anorexia, and is worried she might have auto-immune deficiency, making her prone to rashes and making it hard to walk.

She needs treatment but a simple mention of Lilacs provokes a severe reaction.

She said: "I could die there and no one would notice."

But this fear can be misinterprated as aggression or abusive behaviour, and Jane worries this is the reason she is being refused funding for treatment in York.

The trust could not explain why it would not fund Jane's treatment in York as it does not comment on individual cases.

A spokesman added: "We provide a range of services in Kingston for people who live with severe and enduring mental health issues.

"These can be accessed from the community mental health team, usually through referral by a GP.

"Where clinical teams identify that an individual needs specialist assessment and treat- ment not catered for locally, this would be referred to the primary care trust for consideration for funding."