Abi Burton: 'I nearly died' - the Olympian wrongly sectioned and fighting back from an induced coma

"Rugby had defined Burton's life, but she was soon given a "new perspective".

Burton, who made her England debut aged 18, says she first noticed a change in her behaviour when she started to feel "really down" and had no energy."


"She remembers being put on anti-depressants because "the first thing people go to is mental health"."


"Then - on 15 June 2022 - she suffered her first fitting seizure, while sitting at the dinner table with her mum.

After being assessed in hospital she was discharged as it was her first seizure and "could also be the last".

But her behaviour would change significantly.

"I went from being a timid, unresponsive person, to really quite manic behaviour," she says. "I was really aggressive towards my parents, siblings and even the dog.""


"After more seizures, Burton was sectioned, and says doctors thought she had stress-induced psychosis."


"Burton spent 26 days in Fieldhead - a psychiatric hospital in Wakefield - and her behaviour continued to deteriorate.

"I was being treated for psychosis, basically," she says. "They didn't rule out an autoimmune illness, but they didn't test me for it either."

Burton's behaviour and seizures did not improve until her father was approached by a member of the autoimmune diseases research staff who had reviewed her notes.

"He came up to my dad and said: 'I think your daughter has something physical, I don't think it's mental."

After tests, Burton was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis, which occurs when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks the brain."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/64876477

 

It's beyond clear that they cannot tell the difference between "physical" illness and "mental" illness. And yet this separation still has absolute unaccountable power over us.

They can't tell when it's mental illness, and they can't tell when it's not. The process is as arbitrary as it can be. So really nothing they do is formal and validated. And it just keeps plodding along, unchanged.

What I don't understand is why no one in that system objects to it. The ease of compliance with an obviously broken and unethical system is the real cause here. Zero whistleblowers. None. Not a single one ever. A system that cannot ever see anything wrong with itself will commit all the wrongs and feel great about it.

It feels exactly like living in a broken state, where everyone is so deflated and demoralized that they can't even imagine a better system, and so don't even try. I don't get the indifference, it's so incompatible with what the entire system is supposed to be about.

 

Unfortunately, this situation, and those like it seem relatively common.

One would think that seizures would trigger a MRI brain scan investigation, and other neurological testing, not sectioning for mental illness. The default action in many situations is to blame the patient, and their psychology, not delve into biomedical causes.

Burton is indeed lucky that someone finally twigged to the possibility of an autoimmune disease.

ETA: Good to get the word out about this. Maybe it will help caution others who may find themselves in this nightmarish situation.

 

and, with @rvallee 's point too, it raises another key question:

if sectioned or landed on such a ward do such patients generally find it hard/harder [than they would if they were e.g. booking an appt 'off the street'] to get access to such tests or investigations?

The article says:

What would normally be the possibility of someone being able to either happen to have their notes looked at by another professional or later on either they or e.g. a family member asks for other things to be looked into (EDIT: and that actually happens)? And would they be allowed to leave if e.g. the treatment wasn't working but/and so they were still behaving differently?

Would this person have had a chance to pick this up if they'd ended up in e.g. a private psychiatric hospital off-site? Or would/should she not have been sent to such an off-site place until they were sure?

Where/what are the safeguards for this if there aren't any necessarily to require this early on? Just from the point of view of treatment access, with the main 'peculiar' thing about psychiatric here being the freedoms issue but maybe also whether it affects likelihood of other colleagues looking into things being dependent on culture/circumstance/individuals?

 

Again with the irony. BPS loudly maintain that there can be no separation between body and mind, and by that very act have caused a situation where all too frequently a biological process affecting the mind (or in this case the brain) is misdiagnosed as psychological, with no effective treatment under that paradigm.

I didn't read to see if she had the classic benign ovarian tumour of anti-NMDA encephalitis.

 

Yes, the BPS crowd claims it's important to treat bio, psycho, social aspects of a patient. But, in this instance only psychological aspects were ineffectually treated, leading to the neglect of a very serious physical health issue.

In my experience, this is the go-to plan of action for many medical personnel I've consulted. This despite the problem being biomedical. Their first choice is to treat the issue as psychological. Finally with further urging or proof, they come round to seeing it's a physical and not a psychological issue.
However, this is never an easy nor straightforward journey.

 

Do they just make it up as they go along? Since when did psychosis cause seizures?