suicide of Bristol University students Natasha Abrahart 20 and Miranda Williams 19

Philosophy student Miranda Williams, 19, had struggled with anxiety and depression and is understood to have taken her own life just three weeks into her first term Fall of October 10, 2016 at age 19

The 19-year-old philosophy student from Chichester had struggled with anxiety and depression, and took her own life with a drug overdose.

She was only in her first term at the university, and was praised by her mother as 'an amazing young woman' with a 'wonderful circle of friends'.

Abrahart, who was studying physics, was found dead in her student flat at 2.30pm on Monday 30 April 2018, half an hour after she had been due to take part in a “laboratory conference” that would have involved her giving an assessed presentation to almost 50 fellow students and staff in a 329-seat lecture theatre.

Margaret and Robert Abrahart have accused Bristol University and mental health services of letting down their student daughter who had severe social anxiety and was found hanged on the day she was due to give a daunting presentation.

Robert said: “She didn’t get run over by a bus and die in an instant. She was put through torment for six months before she died. What she had was a phobia, a fear. She would do almost anything to get out of a room she felt fearful in. It’s like a person with arachnophobia being put in a room of spiders. Her phobia was being negatively evaluated or judged in social or performance situations.

“Look at Natasha as she was that day. What were her options? Go and do the conference, when her biggest fear is to be judged badly by others? She would have frozen. But if she didn’t turn up she thought she’d be off the course, kicked out of the university, sent home in shame. They had six months to help but didn’t do anything.”

The couple said Natasha, from Nottingham, was shy from an early age and reluctant to speak out in front of others, but she was clever and independent, with a wide circle of friends. She did well in her A-levels and won a place on the prestigious four-year master of science physics course at Bristol.

“She was fully ready to go to university,” said Margaret, a retired psychological wellbeing practitioner. “We considered her a really strong person, well able to look after herself.”

The first year went well but by January 2018 her parents realised she was worried about being thrown off the MSci course. “She would have considered this a huge failure,” Margaret said.

On 20 March 2018 one of Natasha’s flatmates phoned the family home and told Robert, who was an associate professor at the University of Nottingham, that she had just tried to hang herself. “It was almost impossible to believe,” Robert said. “I couldn’t get my head around it. The whole world had been turned upside down.”

When Natasha spoke to her mother she said that what she had done was “silly” and there would be no repeat. Her parents offered to collect her but she insisted she wanted to stay until the end of term, a few days away. They made sure she had people around her and was seeking medical help.

Over the Easter break, she returned home and her parents were careful not to push her to talk if she did not want to, but to provide her with a safe and supportive environment. “She was subdued,” Robert said. “And she wasn’t working as hard as she normally did.”

Margaret said: “Had we not known about the attempted hanging, we wouldn’t have suspected that something was wrong. She cooked, baked, went out with her friends.”

On the last day of the holidays Robert asked her directly if it was safe for her to return to Bristol and questioned her over who she was speaking to at the university. Natasha told him she had talked to a member of staff called Barbara Perks in the physics department.

The Abraharts were shocked at how the university handled her case. They found she had been struggling since the start of the academic year. The laboratory conference was part of a crucial module that included one-to-one interviews with teachers. She ran out of the first one. “From that point she was failing,” Robert said. Natasha managed to do only two of the five interviews.

Adrian Barnes, a senior tutor in the physics department, met Natasha at the start of December and concluded she had “genuine social anxiety”. During the inquest into her death he insisted she was not being failed and the university was trying to find a way to help her.