The widow of a man who took his own life after being accused by a psychiatrist of “faking” mental illness has reached a financial settlement with the Western Health Trust.

Kathleen Furlong returned from work to find her husband Larry’s body at their home at Whaley Terrace in Enniskillen, less than 24 hours after he was discharged from the Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital.

The father of two had hanged himself.

Mrs. Furlong sued hospital managers at the Western Health Trust for medical negligence. The case was due to be heard in January but the Trust settled out of court. It paid her an undisclosed sum of money while still refusing to accept any responsibility for her husband’s death.

However, Mrs. Furlong points out: “They would not have paid me the money had they been in the right, had they not been responsible for my husband’s death. That’s how I feel.

“He went into the clinic to be looked after and they told him he was faking it, yet he was suffering from depression,” she recalls.

Her husband first became depressed in 1992.

“He was sick for around six months and we didn’t know what was going on but he was diagnosed with depression,” she explains.

He was prescribed medication by his GP and after two or three months “he was fine”.

Around 2004 or 2005 he again became depressed and was again prescribed medication.

“The medication sorted it out and he was fine,” says Mrs. Furlong.

“I would say he was mildly depressed,” she adds.

Her husband was working as a painter and decorator and was doing well.

“I still get phone calls for him,” she says.

However, around November 2009 a few incidents happened.

“His mum died and he fell off a ladder at work and I think it all got too much for him,” she says.

Mr. Furlong had regularly travelled up and down to Wexford to visit his mother while she was sick.

In addition the dog that had been the family pet for 15 years also died in 2009.

Mrs. Furlong says her husband became “chronically depressed”.

He went to his GP and was again put on medication but this time “it really wasn’t working”.

“They asked him would he like to go down to the clinic and he was more than happy to do that, as you would be if there was something wrong with your heart and you were going to see a heart specialist,” she recalls.

Mr. Furlong was admitted to the Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital on Friday, April 9, 2010, and discharged 11 days later on a Tuesday, April 20.

Mrs. Furlong remembers going to the clinic to visit her husband and meeting Dr. Stephen Dax, the consultant psychiatrist responsible for her husband’s care.

“Basically he said there was nothing wrong with him and he would be going home in a week,” she recalls.

“I knew he wasn’t OK because he had never been so ill. This was a totally different man. He lost three stone in as many months,” she explains.

She says Dr. Dax went as far as telling her her husband was “faking” it.

“And I believed him. I really believed he knew Larry better than I did. He was a professor in that field. To me he would have known what he was talking about,” says Mrs. Furlong.

“I had a list of questions made out to ask him,” but the first thing he told her was that her husband was faking mental illness and she never asked the questions.

“All the staff treated him like he was faking it,” she adds.

“He (Dr. Dax) also told Larry that he was faking it. That was one of the things that devastated him. He was being told that and he knew he was so ill,” says Mrs. Furlong.

She says she and her family felt “totally let down”.

She hopes lessons have been learnt.

“I certainly hope so. I really hope so, for the sake of some other poor individual who may be in the same predicament as Larry was. And depression is such a common thing now. There must be many individuals like that,” says Mrs. Furlong.

The Trust has never apologised.

“Not to me in any form,” Mrs. Furlong confirms.

She says the Trust paid her the money but did not admit any responsibility for her husband’s death.

“But that’s what they do. They don’t admit their mistakes,” says Mrs. Furlong.