December 11, 2009
SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian woman who stripped naked and leapt to her death from a city office block was suffering intense psychosis triggered by a self-help course, a coroner found Tuesday.
"Shy, modest, gentle" Rebekah Lawrence died when she jumped from the second floor of a Sydney office tower in December 2005, singing in a childlike voice and shouting "I love you" after stripping off all of her clothes.
An autopsy found no trace of drugs or alcohol in her system.
But coroner Malcolm MacPherson ruled that a self-help course in which Lawrence had undergone "childhood regression" at the hands of untrained practitioners two days before her death had tipped her over the edge.
"The evidence is overwhelming that the act of stepping out of a window to her death was the tragic culmination of a developing psychosis that had its origins in a self-development course known as the Turning Point," MacPherson said.
The course, which bills itself as a "journey to the core of the human spirit", put participants "through a psychological wringer", the inquest into Lawrence's death was told.
Colleagues said the normally polite and retiring 34-year-old became agitated in the hours before her death and began hurling petulant abuse, singing and ranting, before she undressed and stepped onto the window ledge.
It was remarkably similar behaviour to that taught in the Turning Point's "inner child" session, in which participants were encouraged to regress to their most vulnerable childlike state.
MacPherson said such techniques could be dangerous in the hands of people without the proper skills, and called for tighter regulation of the motivational and self-help industry.
"She was a normal woman in her 30s, grappling with marriage issues, wanting kids - there's probably hundreds of thousands of women out there grappling with exactly those issues," said Lawrence's sister, Kate Lawrence-Hayes, after the coroner's findings.
"She wasn't strange or crazy."
Her husband, David Booth, said Lawrence had not died in vain.
"It's helped a lot of people who may have come to the same grim end in the future," he said.
