The Judith Trust: From Personal to Political‐A Case History
| Published date | 01 June 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200000015 |
| Date | 01 June 2000 |
| Pages | 19-22 |
| Author | Annette Lawson |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
The Judith Trust:
From Personal to Political –
A Case History
Annette Lawson
Chair
The Judith Trust
Case Study
he Judith Trust is a new family
foundation set up to help improve the lives of those
with both learning and mental health problems. It
seeks to plug the gaps in services that seem too often
unable to reconcile the fact a person who has limited
intellectual ability will also have emotional needs and,
frequently, serious mental illness. We – our family –
has the personal experience. Borrowing the wholly
appropriate feminist adage, we seek to translate that
personal knowledge into political action
The personal
‘I have been murdered, you know. It’s the truth.’
‘No. No. Listen to me, listen and don’t interrupt.’
‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You don’t understand
about my body, Annette.’
‘I know something. I think you know too, don’t you?
I can’t tell you. It’s dangerous, you see.’
‘Dr X wants to get engaged to me. It’s the truth. It is.
I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that would I? Now
Shut up. I don’t want to talk about it. Leave me alone.’
These are some of the things my sister, Judith, says.
Now 62, she is a little bent, a little overweight and
walks stiffly. She has dark hair with some steel-grey
and a still rosy complexion. Every few hours she pops
pills – a range of things to stop the voices and
delusions; to stop the shakes from the pills to stop the
thoughts; to stop her tummy hurting from the pills to
stop her head bothering her. She has been diagnosed
as having ‘schizophrenia in a woman of low intelligence’.
As a little girl, Judith was referred to as ‘slow’. She
was disarmingly pretty and sweet-natured. Her best
Tfriend was the gardener whose Somerset drawl she
understood and whom she followed as he worked,
clutching her favourite toy, a black puppy. She was
never, unlike me, interested much in dolls, but she
loved soft toys representing animals. Perhaps they
made fewer demands on her.
It was the headmaster and his wife at my brother’s
prep school who recognised her learning problems.
They brought them to the attention of my parents
when Judith was five and had begun to attend a
kindergarten they had set up. She simply could not
understand numbers at all. And reading took her until
about eight years of age.
But there was much worse to come when we
returned to live in London.
We (Judith and I – our brother continued at
boarding school) were sent to the same day school my
mother and aunts had attended. Judith was bullied
and I was miserable. I begged to be sent to boarding
school which I imagined as my Somerset paradise. My
parents had Judith assessed and, as a result, found her
a little dame school near where we lived in Holland
Park. It was during this time – when she was nine –
that Judith was sexually assaulted on her way home for
lunch. It was a bright summer’s day. Shortly afterwards
she began to have ‘fits’.
As Judith’s teenage years approached, my parents
felt she would do better away from Holland Park and
Nannie, and they found a weekly boarding school in
Surrey. In her diary of the first term there, her
rounded, childish handwriting begins to stray across
the page and become illegible but I can distinguish,
‘What am I going to do? I can’t manage’. Judith’s
epilepsy continued under the control of phenobarbitone
until she stopped having fits some time during her
thirties. By this time she had had many breakdowns
The Mental Health Review Volume 5 Issue 2 June 2000 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2000 19
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