Published: 17 January, 2014
By ALICE HUTTON

A WEST Hampstead schoolgirl found dead on rail tracks at St Pancras Station had become “addicted” to posting self-harming photographs online believing she couldn’t make any friends in the “real world”, an inquest has heard.

Tallulah Wilson, 15, walked out of her dance class in King’s Cross on October 14, 2012, and died after being struck by a train.

In the months leading up to her death the teenager had gone into a spiral of clinical depression after her ­grand­mother died in late 2011. She felt she was being “bullied” at St Marylebone School in Marylebone, a jury at St Pancras Coroner’s Court heard on Monday. 

Her mother, Sarah Wilson, described the year between Tallulah’s health breaking down and her death, which was filled with several suicide attempts by the schoolgirl, as “the worst horror movie you have ever seen in your house”.

Tallulah, known by the nicknames Toots or T, had been using social website Tumblr as well as Twitter, on which she had 18,000 followers, some of whom encouraged her to keep self-harming and competed to “out-do each other”, Ms Wilson said.

The mother of the talented dancer, who had been headhunted by the Royal Ballet School, told how she frantically struggled to keep her daughter away from the internet after she was diagnosed in February 2012 as suffering from “suicidal ideation” – an unusual preoccupation with ending one’s life.

The court heard how Tallulah’s mother felt she had become an emotional “punch bag” for some girls at school who used to “ridicule her”.

“We had a lot of issues,” she said. “She was trying to fit in with these girls in school. There was… lots of taking of drugs and sex and smoking and alcohol. It was quite shocking actually what was going on.”

In April 2012, St Marylebone asked Tallulah not to return after she cut her wrists at school.

The jury was told that the school hadn’t called the ambulance and had sent Tallulah home before ringing her mother, after which she didn’t arrive home for six hours.

“They said: ‘Don’t bring her back’,” said her mother. “They were so horrendous.”

Tallulah later began classes at the private St Margaret’s School in Hampstead.

Her GP referred Tallulah to the Tavistock and Portman NHS mental health trust, where she began having regular therapy sessions from May 2012 but problems escalated, prompted by “obsessive” friendships Tallulah would develop with girls online and others living nearby so she could use their internet, because she was banned from using it at home.

She took an overdose in her bedroom after dinner on October 1, feeling that she had hurt one of her online friends by starting a friendship with a new girl.

The first her mother learned of it, she told the court, was when an online friend of Tallulah’s texted her to say her daughter was trying to commit suicide upstairs.

After that, Ms Wilson said she was on “24-hour suicide watch” but felt she was being “consistently turned away” when she sought professional help.

“I was constantly told that I didn’t qualify,” she said. “I was at the end of my tether and I think that Tallulah knew it. It was a constant battle trying to get someone to take it seriously.”

When she discovered that Tallulah was still accessing her Tumblr account she had it closed down.

“When Tallulah found out she went berserk,” she said. “She thought these were the people who loved her. That night she really started to lose it. She was on my bed screaming and banging her head and shouting: ‘It’s all going wrong.’

“She was obviously really disturbed that I severed that contact with a lot of these very sick individuals who were brainwashing her basically.

“I couldn’t let her carry on. Who knows who she would have met up with? She thought I was trying to ruin her life because I was trying to stop her running off with these people.”

She added: “I was doing everything I thought I could do to stop her accessing people [online]. She didn’t think she could have friends in the real world. She said: ‘Mum, you just don’t understand. I’m finally happy.’ I could feel that I was losing that grip on her. I was getting very, very scared at that point.”

The night before Tallulah’s death her mother discovered an online alter-ego she had created, claiming she drank alcohol and took cocaine and had anorexia.

“The lies just got out of control,” said Ms Wilson. “I said T this is not you. Why can’t you just be Tallulah, our Tallulah? The one who loves to dance? It is not real. They don’t love you. She said: ‘Mum, you don’t understand I’m finally happy they are finally accepting’.”

A 17-year-old schoolgirl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the inquest how she contacted Tallulah online before they met in person at Canary Wharf station the day before her death.

The teenager told the court that at the time “nothing” would have stopped her from using blogs like Tumblr but that now she felt like something needed to be done.

On Tumblr, Tallulah “hinted at suicide”, she said. “It was almost like she was using it as a diary,” she added. “But the way she was posting about self-harm, it was more like a competition with the other people who are following or you follow – who can get the best scar or things like that.

“It’s quite sick and twisted really. I think something needs to be done about it. I had a close escape. She didn’t. There are other people who have not escaped.”

On the day of her death Tallulah had been driven to her dance class in King’s Cross by her grandfather, Reginald Wilson, 76.

In a statement he said: “I thought she was safe at dance class, but I was wrong, utterly wrong, and I feel that I have failed her.”

After Tallulah died, one of her sisters discovered that her online email status had been: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

The inquest is expected to last until next week.

l For confidential support, call Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or see samaritans.org for details.