A son commits suicide when he could no longer hear his angels

A Family Fights to Break the Silence
By hearingvoicesnetworkanz

Here is an edited excerpt of the article.
Written By Chris Barton
The inquest into Shane Fisher’s death begins with a song.

“This will be a difficult day for you,” says Dr Murray Jamieson to Shane’s parents. “And I want to express my sympathy.”

At their request, says the Auckland coroner, the court will hear “a recording by the late Shane Fisher, an accomplished guitarist”.

There’s an awkward moment. The music plays in fits and starts. The registrar gets up, sits down and then gets up again. Mercifully, the track settles and Shane’s melodious acoustic guitar and voice eerily fill the courtroom.

The tribute is a poignant reminder of a life cut short. The stuttering start has resonance too - Shane’s story has waited 29 months to be heard.

For years Shane lived in a world of spirits, visions and astral travel, a world where he saw himself as a leader of angels. But on May 18, 2006, with new medication, Shane reveals he does not feel controlled by spirits, does not see visions or hear the angels commanding him, and is not having thoughts put into his head.




The medication is clearly working, but there is a tragic side effect. The loss of his auditory hallucinations, his psychotic world, is also a loss of his identity. Shane is missing his angels and is talking about self-harm as a way of rejoining them.

Two days after the final review he was to have at Te Whetu Tawera, the Auckland District Health Board (ADHB) acute mental health unit which was caring for him, Shane was found dead at home.

The question at the centre of the inquest into his death is whether someone as unwell as Shane received the proper level of care. It’s a question that goes to the heart of the recovery-based ideology that guides our mental health services.

It’s a question that asks whether there are gaps in that service - whether it has the expertise and resources to deliver its goals.

Whether Shane was given the time and support he needed to get better, or whether a service under strain pushed him back into the community before he was ready. At the end of the two-day inquest, the coroner finds Shane’s death, on May 20, 2006, was self-inflicted and intentional and that no other person was directly responsible. Shane was 26.

Suicide. It’s what everyone knew when it happened, but only now, such is the legal taboo on uttering the word, can it publicly be uttered.

Normally, that would be the end of it - name, address, occupation, self-inflicted death - another statistic to add to the 500 or so who die this way each year. Our Coroners Act prohibits the publication of details of individual suicides. And no one can publish that the death was by suicide until the coroner says so.

But Shane’s case is different, largely because the family wants the inquest evidence made public. It’s an unusual circumstance disrupting the logic behind the Coroners Act: that the family and friends of anyone who commits suicide suffer enough grief without having it played out in the news media. Normally, suicide is nobody else’s business.

The Fishers disagree. They want the information to come out to highlight the plight Shane, and others like him, face under what they view as a mental health service in chaos.

Thanks to their courage, and Dr Jamieson’s lifting of the publication prohibition - in the hope some “good could come out of the death of a much-loved son” - the wall of silence of what happens in a suicide inquest is broken through…

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