A wasted life

This is a true story of bungled British officialdom that should have never been allowed to happen. We've included the account here to invite visitors to this website to share their accounts of similar unfortunate experiences.

 

WHY WAS MY KENNETH PUT AWAY FOR 40 YEARS?

 

by ROBERT MEAD

 

THE sister of a man who spent nearly 40 years in a mental hospital after stealing five empty bottles

has accused the authorities of "wasting his life".

 

Kenneth Moules was only 25 when he was sent to Turner Village in 1961 after stealing five empty beer bottles from the Conservative Club in Iceni Way and collecting the money back to buy cigarettes.

But after originally being sent to Turner Village "without time limitation", Mr Moules never left NHS care, dying at a home in Witham in 2001 after being moved there a year before.

His older sister. Olive Laudrum, is incensed at the treatment her brother received and has spent the past few years demanding answers, without ever getting them.

She has accused the health authorities of "gross neglect" saying he would have been better off in prison.

She has also been denied his medical records and questioned his bank statements, which showed he spent all the money he received each week on cigarettes.

"I think that my brother has been grossly neglected by all and sundry. They took him in and wasted his life."

For years Mrs Laudrum, who lives in Pinewood Close, Great Clacton, Essex, UK, but whose family were brought up and were living in Colchester at the time, didn't question her brother's situation believing that he was mentally ill. But in 1996, when her mother died, she became next of kin to her brother, sixteen years her junior, and wrote to find out his situation, and was shocked to find out the truth.

She received a letter from Lyn Holman, of Essex County Council social services, which said Mr Moules was "sent to the institution originally without time limitation, but became an informal patient in 1962.

"Of course today we would find this decision unacceptable but unfortunately thirty years ago it was seen as protection of the individual and the public. "Unfortunately, people with learning disabilities were not recognized as adults with the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else."

 

"They took my brother and wasted his life"

 

Reading the letter she said: "I was disgusted, I couldn't believe it. "Until I asked about my brother I truly believed that my brother was one brick short of a load and was best left where he was. This was the letter that changed it." I was alerted then to the fact that my brother was being kept somewhere for the wrong reasons." "They turned him from a young man into this shell, like something out of Belsen.

She spent the next few years trying to have him discharged but was told he was institutionalized and suffered from depression.

"They said he suffered bouts of depression which they were treat­ing him for, to which I remember my mother saying 'So would you be if you were stuck in there with that lot'.

She also asked to have him moved to a home in Clacton so she could visit him more easily, but after originally being told it was possible he was instead moved to a home in Witham, where he died in 2001.

After his death Mrs Laudrum asked why, despite being in NHS care, he was allowed to spend £28 out of a weekly allowance of £29.25 on tobacco.

She was told he was discouraged from heavy smoking but only so much could be done.

His post mortem said he had died congestive cardiac failure

and ischaemic heart disease and bronchopneumonia.

And despite repeated attempts and pleas, Mrs Laudrum still feels she has not been given the truth about her brother.

"Nobody will answer my ques­tion, why did you keep my brother in there for 40 years?"

"There should be some explanation for the life that was taken away from my brother by the NHS."

Since Mr Moules died, a re­structuring of the NHS means New Possibilities NHS Trust no longer exists. A spokesman for Colchester Primary Care Trust, which only took on responsibility for learning disabilities in 2002, said: "We do sympathize with Mrs Laudrum. Now people who have a learning disability are looked after and cared for today in a much more progressive way.

"In that sense he was a victim of his time."

He said a number of people had visited Mrs Laudrum to try to help and explain.

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