But the team chose not to admit Nathan, she says, despite his mental health having spiralled out of control. Within a few hours he was dead.
“It was like he went from 0-60 in six weeks,” she says. “I don’t think he had any help. And he did the right thing, he went and asked. We’ve seen that support for him just wasn’t there.”
Her partner Andrew feels that if the community team had communicated with his parents, things might have turned out differently.
“They only had to ring us up and tell us what was going on that day,” he says. “His friends would have gone, we would have gone, he could have come here. But it never happened, for that one phone call.”
In Harrogate, another family is also coping with the fall-out from a clinical decision at the trust that seems to have gone catastrophically wrong.
Laurent McNamara lived with bipolar disorder – characterised by extreme shifts in mood, and impulsive, sometimes reckless, behaviour.
Last June, during a manic episode, he was detained at Foss Park Hospital in York under the Mental Health Act. But then, unexpectedly and without warning, he was discharged.
The first his father Bill knew was when Laurent phoned to ask if he could be picked up from the hospital car park.