Consultant aware of Gibbs’ condition

LYNN GIBBS was aware of her own vulnerability to stress and took steps in her professional life to avoid it.

Dr Cleo Van Velsen, a London-based consultant psychiatrist who examined Gibbs before the trial, said she was content to work as a locum rather than take a staff job, avoided managerial responsibility and, by her own admission, did not see difficult patients.

Similar evidence was given by Dr Tom Fahy, another London-based psychiatrist who was also asked to carry out an independent assessment, and said Gibbs had developed an ability to “compartmentalise” problems, putting each one in a drawer and leaving it aside.

This was a coping mechanism she had developed for dealing with troubles in her earlier life and it had worked remarkably well. However, it was that experience of setting aside problems that may have left her incapable of tackling them head on.

Dr Van Velsen said Gibbs’s own family had not spoken much about their mother’s death by suicide and had not worked through feelings they had. When Gibbs’s relationship with Ciara began to suffer over Ciara’s weight loss, Gibbs did not seem to know what to do. “To hear her daughter say ‘I hate you’ was very, very shocking to Lynn,” she said.

Dr Fahy agreed. “This may have been the first time in her married and family life that she had something very serious to worry about. It seems before this that her relationships and family life was very stable, predictable, comforting.”

Dr Van Velsen also said Gibbs seemed to have difficulty separating her own past troubles from her daughter’s present difficulties. “It was very hard for her to tell where she stopped and her daughter began. She saw her own suffering in her daughter and vice versa.

“She felt her daughter was doomed, that she had doomed her daughter,” she said. “Her feeling of guilt around her daughter approached delusion.”