Liz Brown
            
Liz Brown suffered from chronic anorexia. Though she was in touch with a local anorexia unit, they had a ‘no compulsory treatment’ policy. Liz lived in a house divided up into supported flats for those suffering from long term mental illness.
Liz attended art therapy while in hospital and evening classes when in the community. At the end of the summer term 2005 she was told that her art course had to be closed down due to lack of funding. Liz was devastated. She had started to show her work at local charity and craft fairs. Besides painting and drawing classes Liz had attended occupational therapy departments. She decorated cakes, odd considering her illness, and sewed tapestries. She was also a keen photographer documenting her life and drawing from the photographs she took. Liz also accumulated an extensive image bank of newspaper and magazine cuttings and kept a journal in which she recorded daily events in her life and her thoughts.
Sadly an upstairs resident moved her boyfriend in, against the house rules. The upstairs couple were verbally abusive and kept Liz awake by watching the television with the volume turned up until the early hours of the morning leaving Liz too tired to face the day and continue with her artwork. Demoralised, Liz responded in the only way she knew, by not eating. Isolated and living in an unsympathetic community, Liz’s option’s had been continually diminished. 
On the 18th of August 2005, social workers, accompanied by a psychiatrist rang my doorbell at 11am. They said that they were seriously concerned about Liz and could they have access to the inside door of her flat. They found Liz’s body lying on the floor of her bed room where she had collapsed and died.  The social services had arrived just a few hours too late. They were intending to section Liz. Liz had been a patient at the local Littlebrook Psychiatric unit but they were reluctant to treat anorexic patients Two days after Liz died, a Littlebrook patient Andre Grassl, aka the Piano Man, whose concurrent illness had been documented in every national newspaper, decided to break his vow of silence. The piano man had not spoken since his hospitalisation in March of that year.