MENTAL HEALTH professionals missed opportunities to help Daily Mail agony aunt Sally Brampton in the months before she drowned herself, an inquest has found.

British Elle’s launching editor died in the sea near her home in St Leonard’s on May 10 this year having expressed suicidal thoughts over the past few months but "human error" meant professionals missed the chance to help her.

The 60-year-old who also wrote for The Sunday Times and Psychologies magazine had a well-documented battle with bipolar depression for about fifteen years.

In March her private psychiatrist Dr Adrian Lord wrote to her GP Dr Nicholas MacCarthy to say she was “in crisis” and could he refer her to local mental health services.

The GP duly contacted the crisis team at the Sussex NHS Partnership Trust, which agreed to call her but did not - due to “human error”, the inquest heard.

Ms Brampton went back to her GP in April, where another doctor contacted the trust’s community mental health team.

But, based on the information they had at the time, the team did not consider her a high risk and no contact had been made before she died.

Recording a verdict of suicide at yesterday’s inquest, assistant coroner for East Sussex James Healy-Pratt said: “I certainly find there was a missed opportunity to assist Sally in March 2016 following the first referral.

“I also find a second missed opportunity April 2016 to assist Sally.

“However, we don’t know if those missed opportunities would have changed Sally’s outcome - and that is an important factor.”

The court heard Ms Brampton had been sectioned in August 2014 amid her long battle with bipolar disorder.

She had been released and was living and working from home when in March 2016 she contacted her private psychiatrist Dr Adrian Lord.

He wrote to her GP: “She told me that she was in crisis and was going through her regular 18-month cycling of depression with strong suicidal thoughts, accompanied by hopelessness and helplessness.”

However, his full letter was not passed on to the mental health trust when the case was referred on.

Paul Deigan, a senior nurse at the trust, said his team might have acted differently if the letter had been forwarded.

Christine Henham, general manager for Hastings and Rother at the Sussex Partnership Trust, said the trust had not contacted her as agreed because a note to do so had been put in the diary rather than the referrals whiteboard and was not followed up.

She added lessons had been learned and changes were underway or in place to the referrals system.

The night before her death, Ms Brampton had spoken about wanting to kill herself to two friends who stayed late into the night to comfort her, the inquest heard.

She left four suicide notes, including for her daughter Molly, in the morning of May 10 before drowning herself on the coast near her house in St Leonards.

Her body was found off Galley Hill by a woman walking home from work as her friends alerted police after finding the suicide notes in the kitchen of her home in Stanhope Place.

Mr Healy-Pratt added: “It’s sad that it took her own death to promote more public awareness about the importance of mental health, its lack of proper funding, and appropriate treatments for depression.”

He quoted Ms Brampton herself: “’We don’t kill ourselves; we are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive’.”

TRAGEDY OF AGONY AUNT WHO STRUGGLED HERSELF

MILLIONS of fans around the world took her wise advice in agony columns in the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, but the one person Sally Brampton could not help was herself.

For many years she lived a glamorous life as the launching editor of British Elle, a job that brought parties and glitz but also the pressure of being constantly on show.

As her bipolar depression worsened in recent years she had moved out of London to more peaceful digs in Stanhope Place, St Leonards, where she wrote her pieces from home, made many friends and battled the “damn dog”, as she had described her depression in a memoir.

“It would range from periods where she would seem pretty normal to everybody to other periods where we just would not see her – she would be in bed,” her good friend Emma Ridout told yesterday’s inquest at East Sussex Coroner’s Court in Hastings, which heard how Ms Brampton drowned herself on May 10 in the sea near her home.

“She might not reply to a text message and initially that used to be very worrying to me because we were afraid that she would die because she did talk about dying quite a lot.”

Known to her many admirers for her toughness and independence, Ms Brampton, 60, had tried to kill herself in August 2014, the inquest heard, and so Ms Ridout now contacted her every day to make sure she was OK.

In the months leading up to her death Ms Brampton’s depression had worsened, Ms Ridout said, but she was trying to help herself by helping others, sharing her home with friends and family members who needed her.

“She was trying to find a purpose,” Ms Ridout said, “A lot of the messages that I received would be, ‘what is the point of life.’ “She did not really find any enjoyment in anything.”

Yesterday’s inquest heard how Ms Brampton had sought psychiatric help again in March 2016, first from her private doctor and then through the local NHS mental health services, which did not contact her before she died.

Ms Ridout said the mother of one had a bad experience of the NHS as an in-patient in 2014 after she had come out of an appointment with her GP Dr Nicholas MacCarthy in 2016 “upset and distressed”.

“She said, ‘there is no hope, I am never going to get well,’ she recalled. […] “She did not have confidence in the NHS to help her.”

In April Ms Brampton had also had her Psychologies magazine column stopped, the inquest heard, and told her friend that she found writing the goodbye column upsetting.

Ms Ridout last saw her the Sunday before her death, when they had a picnic with friends on the beach.

She recalled: “When we were out on a social occasion we would always joke about it.

“She would just lie down and have a sleep.

“She did that and we were talking about Brexit and she got very angry and cross with me and threw my jumper at me and told me I had spoken far too much about stuff.

“It was quite a shock as normally she was not like that to me.

“I said I am going to leave and so I left and that was the last time I saw her.”