Voices Unheard: How NHS Trust Failures Cost Young Mental Health Patients Their Lives
Former patients and grieving families say repeated warnings about dangerous conditions at a northern England NHS trust went ignored — and people died as a result.
'We Knew Someone Would Die' — And Nobody Listened
Laura Kenny carries memories she cannot shake. For years, she was a patient at a mental health unit in Middlesbrough, and she watched the situation around her deteriorate until the unthinkable happened.
"We'd been warning everyone," she recalls. "We wrote letters to everyone we could think of, saying one of us is going to die."
Her friend Christie Harnett was also receiving treatment at the same unit. Christie later took her own life — becoming one of three young women who died by suicide within months of each other while under the care of the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV).
Warning: This article contains distressing content relating to suicide and self-harm.
A Trust Under Scrutiny
TEWV is responsible for mental health services across a wide area of northern England, including North Yorkshire, County Durham, and Teesside. Over recent weeks, journalists spoke with more than a dozen former patients — both young people and adults — who described serious failures in the quality of care they received.
In addition to Christie's death, the trust's care has been linked to other tragedies. Nathan Evison, aged 19, died by suicide in 2019. Laurent McNamara passed away the following year. Both had been receiving care through TEWV outside of a hospital setting at the time of their deaths.
Across all these accounts, a troubling pattern emerges: staff who lacked compassion, a near-total absence of meaningful therapy or treatment, and a culture where serious warning signs were routinely dismissed.
What Patients Experienced Inside the Unit
Laura spent much of her teenage years as an inpatient at West Lane, a specialist mental health facility for young people based in Middlesbrough. Her struggles began at age 13 with a severe eating disorder that left her dangerously underweight, eventually progressing into episodes of self-harm and suicide attempts.
She describes how staff responded to incidents of self-harm in ways that were either aggressive or entirely passive.
"Their reaction would be to either leave you for hours headbanging or self-harming, or to just restrain you very quickly to the floor and inject you," Laura explains. "The idea was to sort of just shut you up."
Christie Harnett's stepfather, Michael, echoes this deeply troubling picture. He recalls what Christie told him about how staff handled her self-harm episodes.
"They would literally just pin her down, sedate her, put her in bed, and then that was it," he says.
Independent Report Confirms Failures
An independent inquiry commissioned by NHS England and published in 2023 examined the deaths of Christie Harnett, 17-year-old Nadia Sharif, and 18-year-old Emily Moore. Its findings were damning.
The report confirmed that patients had been subjected to excessive and inappropriate physical restraint. Staff had allegedly been instructed not to intervene during episodes of self-harm. Systemic failures, rather than being addressed, had been allowed to persist with the knowledge of management.
The unit itself was described in the report as "chaotic and unsafe" — language that aligned closely with what patients and families had long been saying.
Following the report's release, TEWV issued a formal apology and stated that significant changes had been made. However, many bereaved families and former patients remain unconvinced that the lessons from these tragedies have truly been absorbed — particularly given that three years have passed with little visible accountability.
Calls for a Public Inquiry — And Frustrating Delays
Hundreds of former patients and grieving families united in demanding a full statutory public inquiry into TEWV. That inquiry was officially announced in December of last year, giving hope to those who had waited so long for answers.
Unlike the earlier independent review, a statutory public inquiry carries legal authority — including the power to compel witnesses to testify, demand the disclosure of documents, and focus specifically on preventing future harm.
But progress has stalled. Families were promised meaningful updates by the end of February. A meeting held on 31 March with the Department of Health and Social Care left them no closer to knowing who would chair the inquiry, when proceedings would begin, or where they would take place.
"While our clients appreciate these things take time, they are worried about the continued care being offered by a trust under scrutiny and how, in three months, there appears to be no firm developments," said Alistair Smith of Ison Harrison Solicitors.
The Department of Health and Social Care responded by stating it is working "at pace" to confirm the inquiry's leadership, adding: "We are committed to ensuring the voices of patients and the families affected by failures at TEWV are at the heart of this inquiry."
What Families Are Really Asking For
Beyond formal proceedings and legal frameworks, the people most affected by TEWV's failures have a simpler, more human goal: they want to understand what went so catastrophically wrong, and they want some form of justice for those they have lost.
For Laura Kenny — now in her twenties and studying law at university — the fight is both personal and purposeful. She is determined that Christie's death, and the deaths of others like her, should not be forgotten or minimised.
TEWV declined to take part in an on-camera interview and stated it would not comment on individual cases. In a written statement, chief executive Alison Smith, who has held the role since last September, said the trust would "co-operate fully with the public inquiry with honesty, openness, humility, grace and kindness."
For those who lost loved ones, and for those who survived but carry lasting scars, words of cooperation are a start — but they are not enough. What they need now is action, transparency, and a genuine commitment to ensuring that no other family has to endure what they have been through.
