Who Decides Women Are Mad?

Trigger warning: domestic violence

Kiena Dawes and her baby daughter

Recently I have been writing about women incarcerated in British mental asylums in the 1950s. The essence of the story centres around my grandmother, who also found herself there and, as well as exploring the stories of other women, I wanted to find out why and how she ended up as an inmate.

I know a little of her home life at that time and it wasn’t pretty. She lived with an abusive man and she couldn’t cope, which is presumably why she attempted to take her own life – the event that landed her in a psychiatric hospital.

She was then deemed mad – by both the patriarchal institution that ‘treated’ her with electric shock therapy and the rest of the family – and she lived forever with that label. Whereas the man she was returned home to lived until his 80s with no such label, his reputation intact, his mind untroubled.

But this was in the 1950s, things are so different now.

Except they aren’t.

In the UK yesterday, a man was found not guilty of the unlawful killing of his fiancé, Kiena Dawes. Miss Dawes died by laying in the path of an oncoming train in July 2022. She left a nine-month-old baby daughter behind with her friend, still strapped into her car seat.

Police were called to investigate the circumstances of her death and found a note written by Miss Dawes saying that she was murdered. Not only that, but she told them exactly who had killed her.

How many detectives wish that all victims could leave a note like this? It would certainly make their jobs easier.

“I was murdered. Ryan Wellings killed me. He ruined every bit of strength I had left. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t ask for it.” Miss Dawes wrote.

It was to be the last thing that she penned, the last attempt to make her voice heard in this world, but she failed because on Monday a jury decided to disregard Miss Dawes’ note and found Ryan Wellings – the man who had carried out a two-year violent campaign against this young mother – not guilty of unlawfully killing her. Not murder as Miss Dawes had stated, the police obviously knew it would be hard to prove that essential malice aforethought, and yet they sort of did because the jury found him guilty of the lesser charges of assault and coercive and controlling behaviour. The jury had been shown pictures of Miss Dawes with blood running down her face, they had heard that he had thrown her against a radiator with such force that it had broken clean off the wall. That was the malice aforethought, wasn’t it? To the rest of us maybe, but not in the eyes of the law, or at least a jury.

Wellings is now free to go and assault and coerce and control other women. He has a previous conviction for battering the mother of his other two children after all. Now other women who may, like Miss Dawes, find his abuse so impossible to cope with might decide to take their own lives. We may never know.

I read one newspaper report that listed his abuse against Miss Dawes which started just weeks after they had met. He told her that no-one would believe her because of her mental illness, I fear that he was right and that is what we saw play out in court this week. The jury heard that Miss Dawes suffered from emotionally unstable personality disorder (which appears to be a new name for borderline personality disorder) one of the symptoms being low self-esteem. The court also heard that she had attempted suicide on other occasions in previous relationships. I do not know if she suffered in those either, but the fact that she stayed with a man who started assaulting her just weeks after they met indicates to me that her self-esteem was not buoyant.

This young mother was 23 when she died, twenty or twenty one when she met Wellings, barely out of her teens. I had to stop and ask myself, at such a young age, with such little experience of relationships and the world, how had she been saddled with such a big diagnosis?

I’m reading a book written in 1972 for research at the moment, it’s called Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler and on publication it sold over two-and-a-half million copies. The back of the book reads: Why are so many women in therapy, on psychiatric medication or in mental hospitals? Who decides these women are mad? Why do therapists have the power to deem a woman mentally ill when she asserts herself sexually, economically, or intellectually? Why are women pathologised but not treated when they exhibit a normal human response to abuse and stress — including the lifelong stress of second class citizenship?

And that is just the back of the book. A reminder that this was written more than 50 years ago, and yet we are still asking ourselves the same questions.

What difference is there between Miss Dawes and my grandmother born almost a century before her? Miss Dawes lost her life, my grandmother lost her brain. My grandmother’s story reverberates through the generations, as will Miss Dawes’. The trauma does not end on those railway tracks.

Just eleven days before her death, Miss Dawes was hospitalised by Wellings. She wrote to a friend: “I was in hospital longer than he was in the cells. The world is f**ked and I hate it.”

Defending Wellings, John Jones KC described Miss Dawes as ‘a troubled young lady.’ She who was on the receiving end of his client’s fist. She was the troubled one? But the jury agreed with him, acquitting Wellings and putting her death down to ‘multiple factors’.

In the same last note, Miss Dawes wrote: “I hope my life saves another by police services acting faster.”

How I would love her last wish to be granted, but I fear it won’t.

Wellings says he is not a monster, though admits to being ‘heavy handed’ at times. On hearing the not guilty verdict, Wellings blew a kiss to his current girlfriend in the public gallery, this perfectly sane man – untroubled in the slightest – before being led away.