A life of depression and insecurity
But she got over her upset and by the time she was in second year, everything was going smoothly. So smoothly in fact that she secured a place in Trinity College in Dublin to study medicine.
It was a return to the city where she was born on Christmas Eve 1960 and where she lived for a year with her family before they moved to Tipperary.
For her first year she stayed in student accommodation but when she moved out in second year, she became depressed and got so low that the university doctor recommended she move home and repeat the year when she recovered.
She took an overdose and ended up in hospital, but recovered well and returned to her studies. She wasn’t long back to her books, however, when her mother killed herself.
It was 1982 and Lynn was 22 years old. Iris Hutchinson had battled depression for a long time and had taken several overdoses but the way she died, aged just 49 and after suffering for three days from swallowing paraquat, a weedkiller, shocked her daughter.
Nevertheless, Lynn picked herself up again and continued her studies, graduating in 1986 and working in paediatrics before deciding to specialise in psychiatry.
Indeed, Professor Tom Fahy, a psychiatrist who assessed her last month, said he believed her mother’s illness had given her the interest in studying psychiatry. Lynn worked in and around Dublin until 2000 when her husband, Gerard, got a lecturing job at the Institute of Technology, Carlow and the family moved to Kilkenny where Lynn began working as a locum.
She had known Gerard since childhood and the pair began dating when she was 18. Their’s was a close, mutually supportive relationship, and Gerard’s only concern about his wife was her need for reassurance that she was physically attractive.
She thought her breasts were too large and she refused to have a scale in the house. She had a brush with an eating disorder when she was 17 her insecurity about her body image persisted.
Her daughter’s weight loss in the summer and autumn of 2006 intensified her anxieties. She became depressed, lost weight, could not concentrate or sleep and declined work after September as she didn’t feel up to it.
According to psychiatrist Prof Tom Fahy, she even thought of drowning herself after reading in a newspaper about a man from the area who killed himself by driving his car into a river. She thought fleetingly about putting Ciara in the car and doing the same.
But no one knew this and the shock when she did take Ciara’s life was overwhelming. Superintendent Aidan Roche summed up the confusion in people’s minds. “She was a kind, gentle, hardworking, efficient person who was very well thought of in her practice,” he said, “but she was a very private person.”
