Jill and Martin Kingston, 4 Feb 2025, Today, Radio 4
Emma Barnett [interviewer]:
Martin and Jill Kingston faced a reality no parents should face. Their son took his own life in their home after they had enjoyed a perfectly lovely weekend lunch together, they were the ones to find him with a gun near his body after he suffered a traumatic head wound.
Thomas Kingston, the husband of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent’s daughter and the king’s second cousin, Lady Gabriella. Kingston was just 45 his death prompted a warning from a coroner.
Today, his parents speak for the first time since losing their son, and they’re doing so because they want something to change. Their son, who worked in finance, had been struggling with stress in his job, and was prescribed by his GP some sleeping pills and an antidepressant, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor known as an SSRI.
Tom, as his family referred to him, then returned to the surgery, saying they weren’t making him feel better, and his doctor moved him from Sertraline to Citalopram, a similar drug. He then stopped taking that one as well.
At an inquest, senior coroner Katie Skerritt said Mr. Kingston had taken his own life and was suffering adverse effects of medication he had recently been prescribed in a prevention of future deaths report, she said action must be taken over the risk to patients prescribed SSRI medications.
And his widow, Lady Gabriella, said in a statement, the lack of any evidence of inclination, it seems highly likely to me that he had an adverse reaction to the pills that led him to take his life. If this could happen to Tom, this could happen to anyone.
Jill and Martin Kingston started our conversation by describing the day their son took his own life. And I should say, our discussion contains details some of you may find difficult.
Jill Kingston:
He was normal. He was fun. We had we’re laughing about various things. There was nothing that raised any suspicions in our mind, and you’d had a lunch together, I believe, yes, that’s right.
Emma Barnett:
What happened after lunch? Did you have a walk? Or were you relaxing?
Jill Kingston:
No, we were relaxing, reading books, sitting around the fire. It was a cold February day, and we fell asleep. You fell asleep. I fell asleep,
Martin, I don’t know if you fell asleep but, but you suddenly decided to go for a walk and then Tom got up and went to unload his car, because he was bringing home some stuff that they’d got in London, and it was going to be stored with us.
Emma Barnett:
You live in the countryside?
Jill Kingston:
We do.
Jill Kingston:
When did you know something was wrong, Martin?
Martin Kingston:
When Joe couldn’t find Tom and realized that one of the rooms that was in the outbuilding was locked, and that was, yeah
Emma Barnett:
Were you not able to get into it and you had to go in? Or how did you actually find out what had happened?
Martin Kingston:
I had to break the door down.
Emma Barnett:
Gosh. I mean, I can’t imagine what that would have been like.
Martin Kingston:
No, and I think I would have difficulty explaining to you what it was like without crying.
Emma Barnett:
You hadn’t known where he’d gone. I bet he had seemed okay?
Jill Kingston:
Yeah, well, he there was a room nearby where he would have put all his stuff, so we knew he’d gone up there. So that’s where I went to look for him. And when I went up, it was all quiet, and he obviously wasn’t up there. And so I went back to the house and checked his room, and all his bags were all ready for going back to London. And so then I went back up, and then I noticed the locked door.
Emma Barnett:
It must have been such an incredible shock as it would be for any parents or family, but the fact that you’d had a lovely day together
Martin Kingston:
Yes,
Emma Barnett:
And it’s that contrast, perhaps, that has led you to want to talk about, really, what’s gone on here and how things like this are handled
Martin Kingston:
Yes, and the level of both, I think, misinformation and no information. The misinformation is something you’ve covered already on the Today program with your interview with Joanna Moncrieff, talking to her about what is described sometimes as the serotonin myth or the chemical imbalance myth. And I did it last night just to see what the position was. If you print off a patient information leaflet on one of the widely prescribed SSRIs, it will tell you at the beginning that what this medication is doing is helping a chemical imbalance in your brain related to serotonin. So the patient gets an up to date leaflet telling them something that the scientific community is, as far as I’m able to judge, largely accepting is not true
Emma Barnett:
Or there’s at least debate about where this might be, not in what you had heard, but the point being is it’s not the same as what’s in the leaflet for the patient
Martin Kingston:
Absolutely,
Emma Barnett:
As you can see
Martin Kingston:
And that disconnect seems to continue into what happens with general practitioners, and so when they’re talking to their patients and are willingly prescribing to 8.7 million people every year medications of this or a similar kind, they’re not apparently aware that actually the science doesn’t support this chemical imbalance view
Emma Barnett:
Your son was put on a sleeping pill at first to help with this anxiety, as you described from work, and then was moved from one to another, as I understand it. This is what you now understand to be the case.
Martin Kingston:
He was prescribed one on the fifth had a bad reaction to it stopped. It was prescribed another on the 12th took some of it, we don’t know how much, yeah,
Emma Barnett:
And then he stopped taking it.
Jill and Martin Kingston:
Yes, yes.
Emma Barnett:
So that is a lot of change and a quick short of time in in somebody’s experience or reaction to a drug, isn’t it, and in their own brain?
Martin Kingston:
Yeah, absolutely. And the important thing about SSRIs, which no doubt you’ve already perceived, is that they can pass out of your system in the sense of not being traceable in in a, for example, a blood analysis, but the impact on the way your brain functions can continue, and in some people, continues for a long, long time.
Emma Barnett:
Well, that’s why they can be very hard to come off
Jill and Martin Kingston:
Exactly, exactly.
Emma Barnett:
Did he have someone you know, holding his hand throughout this? Obviously, he was married very, very happily so, and was in a loving relationship. He was close to you. Sounds like he had friends?
Jill Kingston:
Well, obviously his wife knew that he was taking something, and as far as she was aware, he didn’t behave differently in that period, apart from after the first SSRI, when he had quite a strong reaction.
Emma Barnett:
You don’t often get told how long something might take for you to adjust to and what’s normal and what’s not, and it’s quite hard, to say the least to know what’s okay. And obviously he had a bad reaction to the first one. He went back to his doctor, got a different one, and then he came off that as well. Do you feel there should be closer medical management of that process?
Martin Kingston:
One really needs to understand, I think, where the pressure points are for GPS and medical professionals, if you’re a general practitioner, you’ve got 10 or 12 minutes, someone comes in and says that, under pressure, I’m not sleeping, I need something to help me. Can you give me something to help me? The doctor may well say, well, what about CBT, cognitive therapy? And the patient will, I think, probably typically say, No, I just need something to help me get through this period, the pressure on the doctor to do something to help the patient. The desire to help, I think, is what results in effectively saying, well, let me give you something that seems to help quite a lot of people. And let’s be clear, probably 50% of the people who have prescribed this medication are helped to some degree, whether, whether that’s something which then becomes a problem later on is another thing.
Emma Barnett:
What do you want to see change? In the sense of you mentioned earlier about there being a point person, you know, somebody really, definitely knowing you’re on this
Jill Kingston:
Yes. Well, there are two things we would really like to see changed. One is that every person who was prescribed
SSRIs actually signed something that said that they had been told about the difficulties of going on and about the difficulties of coming off.
They were aware it could, it’s an extreme case, but it could lead to suicide, they need to be told that and have written something that showed that they’d heard and then alongside that, we’d really like to see that a person, a spouse, a partner, a parent, a close friend, somebody was going to walk with them through it. Maybe they should be at that Signing Time.
Martin Kingston:
That’s an immediately achievable result, we think, in terms of raising awareness of the dangers of the medication.
Emma Barnett:
Do you believe your son should have been prescribed antidepressants?
Martin Kingston:
That’s a sensitive issue, because he was very well cared for by someone who was concerned about his health. But the consultant we employed for the inquest took the view that there were probably better ways in which he could have been helped without prescribing the medication drugs
Jill Kingston:
Particularly because he was definitely not depressed. It was just a short term anxiety issue.
Emma Barnett:
Did you know anything about?
Jill Kingston:
Never even heard of an SSRI really?
Emma Barnett:
Why do you feel so driven to talk about this?
Jill Kingston:
I think there are various reasons. One is we think there are an awful lot of people today who, like us, do not really understand about SSRIs and do not understand what they’re being given by the GP. They trust the GP. The fact is that many GPS don’t know that much about SSRIs, because nobody really knows what they do on the brain, and everybody’s different in terms of what they do
Emma Barnett:
They do, obviously help some people.
Jill Kingston:
Yes, exactly.
Emma Barnett:
And for the right people can be, you know, it’s horribly ironic in this case, to say, but a lifesaver.
Jill Kingston:
We have many friends who are on them, and we totally understand why they’re on them at the same time, it concerns me, because they’re nobody knows the effect of them in the long term
Martin Kingston:
We wouldn’t be able to be comfortable reading about somebody else going through what we’ve been through, if we had not made clear what we think could happen to save someone’s life and save someone’s grief.
Jill Kingston:
I think we both feel that it was a horrendous experience, but we’d love something good to come out of it.
Martin Kingston:
It has to be, and perhaps you’ll forgive me for saying but for us, part of the way we’ve got through the last the 12 months has been rooted in our faith, and it is still a faith journey.
Emma Barnett:
There’s no forgiveness needed to say that
Martin Kingston:
I think our Christian our Christian faith, is central to the way we live and how we function, and the desire, therefore, to ensure that other lives are saved and other people are kept from the pain and grief that we’ve experienced is a very strong one in us.
I also just keep thinking about the fact that you’ve, you know you had that lunch and you had such a nice time, because let so many people replay the last time they saw somebody, if they could have said something, if they could have known, if they could have done something?
Emma Barnett:
We decided to never, never go down that route. What if it had happened? And for me personally,
I knew straight away, you know, within minutes, that Tom was fine, he was with Jesus, that I would see him again. And that has been, for me, a big part of my journey.
Martin Kingston:
You have to make a conscious decision not to do the what if or the if onlys, if only I had, If only I hadn’t gone for a walk, if only I had. There are so many if onlys in there, but they don’t change anything.
And it is important, isn’t it, as someone has famously said, to distinguish routine, the things that you can do that will make a difference and the things over which you have no control or ability to change them,
Jill Kingston:
We now want to give back, really, because we’ve received a lot
Martin Kingston:
With great pain and grief is painful. It’s possible and tempting sometimes to want to run away from it, to turn away from it. So, for example, don’t go to the place where Tom was. Don’t to stay away from those things. And one of the things we’ve been doing and have learnt to do is to what, in colloquial terms, might be described as leaning into the pain, which was a very famous Christian speaker, Charles Spurgeon, who said you should learn to kiss the wave that throws you onto the rock. The rock is Jesus. The wave is the trial and tribulation of daily and sometimes not so daily life.
Emma Barnett:
Martin, how should we remember your son?
Martin Kingston:
As a joyful, giving, full of life and caring person? He could be quite noisy, but one of the things we found we after Tom died, and part of the kind of leaning into the pain process was to put up in our hallway at home, the over 400 letters, cards, sort of blue tack them to the wall, because, in part, because so Many of them told us things that we never knew, and I think I would like him to be remembered as sorry, as someone with a big smile on his face, while helping people to do difficult things, that’s a lovely thing.
Emma Barnett:
Do you want to add anything?
Jill Kingston:
No.
Emma Barnett:
Thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you.
Martin and Jill Kingston:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Emma Barnett:
Jill and Martin Kingston there remembering their boy, remembering Tom
Emma Barnett:
Current NHS advice says that research suggests that antidepressants can be helpful for people with moderate or severe depression. And if you are taking antidepressants, talk to your doctor before you stop taking them. And it is important that you do not stop taking them suddenly. I should also add, if you want to support a list of support organizations. Support is available @bbc.co.uk/action line. Or you can call for free to hear recorded information at 08100, 066066
And we will be speaking to an expert just after eight o’clock about what the science is around this particular subject to but a big thanks to Jill and Martin Kingston.
Prof Allan Young and Layla Moran, R4, Today, BBC, antidepressants
Emma Barnett:
Nearly a year ago, Thomas Kingston took his own life after a perfectly lovely, normal lunch with his parents. He was just 45 and he’d recently been prescribed antidepressants that he’d struggled to get on with and then stopped taking. Married to the king’s second cousin, Lady Gabriella Kingston, he was found by his parents at their home with a gun next to him. The coroner at his inquest said that when he took his own life, he was suffering from the adverse effects of the medicine. And his wife said, if it could happen to Tom, as the family referred to him, it could happen to anyone.
Today, Tom’s parents at Jill and Martin Kingston have spoken for the first time exclusively to this program about losing their son, and they told me about what they would like to see change when people visit their GPS to talk about this kind of medication
Martin Kingston:
The pressure on the doctor to do something to help the patient, and the desire to help, I think, is what results in effectively saying, Well, let me give you something that seems to help quite a lot of people, and let’s be clear, probably 50% of the people who have prescribed this medication are helped to some degree. Whether, whether that’s something which then becomes a problem later on, is another thing.
Jill Kingston:
Well, there are two things we would really like to see changed. One is that every person who was prescribed SSRIs actually signed something that said that they had been told about the difficulties of going on and about the difficulties of coming off. They were aware it could, it’s an extreme case, but it could lead to suicide. They need to be told that and have written something that showed that they’d heard and then alongside that, we’d really like to see that a person, a spouse, a partner, a parent, a close friend, somebody was going to walk with them through it. Maybe they should be at that Signing Time
Emma Barnett:
The suggestions from Jill and Martin Kingston and you missed our interview. It was on just after half past seven. We’ll put it out in full as a special podcast. And a lot of you who have heard it have been getting in touch, very moved by what you have heard. But 8.7 million people in England alone are on antidepressants, and are people being given enough information about them and also how to come off them? How should we view their role in healthcare and the approach we take to tackling mental ill health? Professor Allan Young, professor of psychological medicine at King’s College, joins us now. Is on the line, and so is Layla Moran, MP Liberal Democrat and Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee.
Good morning to both of you.
Layla Moran, MP:
Morning.
Professor Allan Young:
Good morning
Emma Barnett:
Professor Young. If I could start with you, I just wanted to ask what you make of some of the concerns raised by Martin and Jill and how these drugs are prescribed in the first place.
Professor Allan Young:
Well, of course, the concerns are very valid. And of course, the account we heard from the Kingston family is very heart rending. Suicide is always a tragedy. And of course, there’s 7000 suicides in the UK a year. So I think this is a very important subject, and we should be thinking about these matters very carefully, including thinking about a very careful appraisal of the benefits and harms of all the treatments we use for depression and anxiety
Emma Barnett:
And I mean in terms of their specific ideas, having somebody there, getting them to sign, somebody being aware of the journey they’re now going on. Do you think those are I mean, GPs may say they’re not practical. We sort of heard that from some GPS we’ve spoken for but do you think they’re advisable?
Professor Allan Young:
Well, I think it’s good practice to always include what you might call a significant other, which might be a spouse, a parent, an adult child, or whatever, in in consultations. And of course, that’s not always practical as you say, but that’s good practice. And I think GPS know that. And many cases do it, do it when they can. The other thing to be said, of course, is that you get extra information if you talk to significant others, which is very often very important, and you bring them into the loop of helping with the treatment.
Emma Barnett:
So would you, you would support having somebody there?
Professor Allan Young:
Well, we always teach and our practice, remember, I’m a psychiatrist, not a GP
Emma Barnett:
So slightly different way of doing things.
Professor Allan Young:
Yeah, t’s a slightly different scenario. And as Mr. Kingston said, GPS will have much more limited time, whereas the psychiatrists hopefully have more time and can do things like this to a greater depth. But my experience with GPS is they very often do try to include the spouse. But of course, there’s scenarios where that may not be appropriate. So for example, if you have a woman who’s got an abusive partner and no other family members nearby, you may not and if she doesn’t want the abusive partner to be included, then then you clearly wouldn’t do it. So it’s difficult to make large and fast rules, although we can, of course, point out ideal practice.
Emma Barnett:
Layla, I will come to you in just a moment on the policy side, but if I can just ask another just ask another question of you, Professor young, you know, of course, we’ve got to be mindful of how helpful antidepressants have been to a great number of people, but how, what is your view of when someone should go on them, and what, what can be taken as the reason for them going on to it, if that makes sense,
Professor Allan Young:
Sure. Well, I mean, you know, there’s many ways of treating both depression and anxiety, and I note that Mr. Kingston had an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are, of course, associated with an increased risk of suicide as well, and it’s not uncommon for us to hear the story that the suicide apparently came out of the blue, because there does seem to be an impulsive nature to the act in many cases. But for treatments, all treatments should be assessed essentially on the rate of benefits and harms. The assessments that have been done for antidepressants, treating depression and anxiety overall show a very favourable ratio. But of course, there will be individual cases where the person doesn’t particularly tolerate the medication very well. And I note that was a feature of what we heard from the Kingston family. And in those cases, perhaps extra attention and time should be given. And of course, there are other modalities. There are other types of antidepressants. There are psychological treatments. We now have neuro stimulation treatments. We even got emerging digital treatments. So antidepressants have their place in the therapeutic armamentarium, but they’re really not the only thing, but very often they are the convenient and practical treatment for both GPS and the patients, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that
Emma Barnett:
Convenient because they work?
Professor Allan Young:
Well, convenient because they work, and for most people, they’re relatively safe and because they’re easy to deliver. If you look at a course of, say, psychotherapy that can be not. I mean, we did a survey across Europe of treatment of depression, and we found that only 19% of people across Europe had access to psychological treatment.
Emma Barnett:
So it’s convenient in the truest sense of the word, as well as there being good levels of efficacy, but, but it also shows potentially, other routes aren’t always available or explored, which is, which is a very important point.
Emma Barnett:
Layla Moran, to bring you into this chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, what? What do you make of the calls from the Kingston family and others in this position?
Layla Moran, MP:
Well, my heart absolutely goes out to them. And I get this in my surgery as well, where you’ve had a family go through extraordinary pain. And you know, if there is something that can be done. My understanding is the coroner has referred their report to the MHRA nice and the Royal College of GPS. And you know, if a change in emphasis on how to prescribe these would help to prevent some of those unnecessary deaths, then, of course, I support that. But to pick up on what Dr Young was just saying, I mean, we’ve got to, you know, cut GPS a little bit of slack here as well, because what we have in the mental health space is a, as is often the case in the NHS, but especially the case in mental health, a lack of services that are available for GPs to be able to refer into. And so what we find is GPs are the front line of this. People will go to their GP as their first port of call, of course. But then when GPS notice that there’s a complex case when there’s someone that they feel they need to refer on to, very often, those services are so overstretched as to not be there. And the Darzi reports pointed out that as of April last year, there were a million people on the waiting list to access mental health services that’s beyond GPS, including 345,000 referrals, where people were waiting more than a year for first contact. Now, if you think what that means in terms of that patient, their families, the crisis it’s causing in their life, perhaps they are struggling to hold on to work. Perhaps their relationships are breaking down. A year is an extraordinary amount of time, and by the way, that figure also includes children. So what the health and social care select committee have done is we’ve launched an inquiry into community mental health services for adults. In fact, today is the last day for people to submit written evidence. And we want to hear from patients, from families who have experienced that lack of support or good support. We want to know what good looks like, too. And we start taking evidence on this next week, because we do think this is a massive issue that currently remains unaddressed.
Emma Barnett:
And we will talk again then on that thank you for raising that. But just to say 8.7 million people in England alone on antidepressants later. Do you worry that we’ve outsourced our mental health to the pharmaceutical industry?
Layla Moran, MP:
I don’t think it’s for me as a non-clinician to say whether or not that’s an appropriate way to treat these illnesses or not, but I think what we have heard from the doctor we’ve just had on is that it should be part, ideally, of a wide range of things that are offered to patients, which at the moment concerns us, which, at the moment, those aren’t available. So you know, 8.7 million is probably just the number of people who need help, who have able, been able to go to their GP and have, you know, there’s still stigma and a little bit of shame around this. To keep talking about this is always welcome, because it’s a good thing to talk about and encourage people to go, but when people then need to be referred on, they’re facing these inordinate weights, and it’s just unacceptable, and families find themselves in a position of not knowing what to do, and that’s completely unacceptable.
Emma Barnett:
Layla Moran, head of the health and social care select committee and Liberal Democrat. MP, thank you. Professor. Alan Young, thank you to you