Addiction affects every part of your life. Even though you function on a day to day basis and often hold down jobs your life is like this effort to try to keep things together and also to hide. When I stopped drinking I believe it took me about 4 years to really not feel both hopeless and helpless. It must be magnified a 1000 times if you are in the public eye. Also in the UK we do not have the health care to deal with the scale of addiction currently taking place in the UK. Its entrenched at every level in society. I love the NHS and dont want to derail the thread here but due to a variety of factors it cannot in anyway cope with this issue. A rehab place funded by the NHS is incredibly difficult to source. It's a ticking timebomb.
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All depends on the treatment programme x
I agree I don’t think the debt is interesting at all. An average to small mortgage for a house of that value at her stage in life
Also just to say I’m surprised at how- well, not nice that house is for that price and area
Also just to say I’m surprised at how- well, not nice that house is for that price and area
Oh ok like a day plan or something like that?
I saw Peaches in a bathroom at the bbc studios in 2007, I was in the audience for 8 out of 10 cats for the episode she was in. Thought she was a brat at the time on the show and she didn’t really contribute much or come across well in my opinion. By 2012/13 I had a baby similar age to Astala and loved following her on Instagram. I thought she came across really well and seemed very sweet, loved up and devoted to her children. I found her death so shocking and the news of her heroin addiction really threw me as having no experience of the drug myself, I kind of assumed heroin addicts were your stereotypical trainspotting cast.
Thank you to everyone sharing their stories in this thread, I’ve found it so interesting and enlightening.
I hope not to detail further but rehab also has quite a low success rate doesn’t it? I think the odds of serious addicts of the very addictive drugs (benzos, heroin, etc) getting off them ever “permemnatnly” is quite low and only marginally increased by rehab programmes.
what would help(although not people like peaches) is tackling the social problems that make people turn to drugs, education and reform of the drugs laws (some should be softer and some harder imo)
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Sounds like she kept relapsing and returning. When you first go your not even allowed out by yourself!.
It's so hidden in the UK. That's my opinion. There are treatment places available but you have to be really unwell to access them and also have the werewithal to navigate the NHS treatment system or have an advocate who does. Also there is a real subtext of class in Peaches case. Most likely she will have been on a rigorous methadone program but also the earth mother vibe (I am not suggesting it wasnt real) but it will also have kept people at arms length. Also the way she would have been treated by the system will have been completely different.
I’ve just rewatched the KP interview On attachment parenting. Firstly I think that KP was utterly deranged and it is shameful that neither Phil / holly or the staff on the show pulled her up on her incredibly rude behaviour- sitting too close, making faces as peaches spoke etc.
but also I have to say the interview reinforces to me my experience of AP- it’s meaningless, people do a bit of this, bit Of that, harp on about it and it gives them the opportunity to be a member of a “movement” that makes them feel superior about their parenting.
Peaches should never have been a poster girl for attachment parenting which she clearly, due to the other things going on in her life, never did in any meaningful way. Yet there she was, given airtime on this morning, thrown to the lion and it was all a fallacy.
luckily the whole labelling of AP seems to have gone to the wayside, I haven’t really heard anyone mention it until about 2016. As for co sleeping, almost everyone I know has slept with their baby for periods so they can all get rest (and it is safe, particularly as the babies get older - although we used a co sleeping cot from newborn- 9months) it’s really no big deal and tbh I wonder how much it was just easier for peaches because she must’ve had quite unpredictable moods/ comedowns etc and wants to get up and go into nursery at 3am on a drugs
but also I have to say the interview reinforces to me my experience of AP- it’s meaningless, people do a bit of this, bit Of that, harp on about it and it gives them the opportunity to be a member of a “movement” that makes them feel superior about their parenting.
Peaches should never have been a poster girl for attachment parenting which she clearly, due to the other things going on in her life, never did in any meaningful way. Yet there she was, given airtime on this morning, thrown to the lion and it was all a fallacy.
luckily the whole labelling of AP seems to have gone to the wayside, I haven’t really heard anyone mention it until about 2016. As for co sleeping, almost everyone I know has slept with their baby for periods so they can all get rest (and it is safe, particularly as the babies get older - although we used a co sleeping cot from newborn- 9months) it’s really no big deal and tbh I wonder how much it was just easier for peaches because she must’ve had quite unpredictable moods/ comedowns etc and wants to get up and go into nursery at 3am on a drugs
She will have probably have gone to Clouds or the Priory and Bob will have paid. The NHS wont pay for you to be in and out like a yo-yo and its means tested as well.
Totally, also relapse rates are absolutely through the roof. What people dont realise is that it is quite possible for someone to be functionally using heroin for 30 years. Also the reality is that alcohol and drugs are so ingrained in British life that it is a herculean task to stay clean. I live in the countryside now but to be honest apart from work I live a very reclusive life now. I am not saying this out of self pity I have a wonderful peaceful life and am now very close to my family but I am now in my 40s. I have a bit of perspective. AA and NA are wonderful organisations but we dont know how to deal with sobriety in my view in the UK.
I often think of Peaches too.... so so sad for those left behind and her little babies
Also- assuming Thomas was a competent father (which I assume so, the children went straight to him upon her death as you’d expect- HE would be the person that SS expect to keep the children safe from the drug addict parent. SS get involved if he isn’t doing that properly (leaving them alone with her wouldn’t count as not doing it properly unless she was a danger to them) otherwise, 1 competent parent is enough most of the time.
Yes we’ve established that now, thank youHe’s talking about the spare bedroom
There is this false bravado that is always there when you have an addiction. Also there in Amy Winehouse , who was bullish in the face of it all. And the narcissism of addiction. I saw Amy Winehouse in 2008 in Sainsbury's in Chislehurst buying cleaning products. And she was looking around constantly hoping all of us in Sainsburys would watch her. Well she was turning round every 3 seconds. Now she was in the height of her addiction and was incredibly thin and sickly looking. But also it's trhe what they say fame is also a massive addiction.
And let's be honest the tabloids would have had a field day with Peaches and the whole Geldof family.
And let's be honest the tabloids would have had a field day with Peaches and the whole Geldof family.
Would one of the debts be the mortgage? I don't know how these things work, but if not thats a lot of debt! Don't debts get written off if you die? Do your debts become your husbands debts?
Far nicer houses than that for a similar price bracket.
I read she thought it was haunted, she took a selfie in the bath (as you do) and there was an extra hand...will see if l can find it.
Yes I imagine would also be things like unpaid taxes as you don’t pay them until 10 months after the financial year ended. It’s just the position of her estate. (If it’s true! God knows how anyone got that information)
They have to be paid out of the assets. The mortgage may hav been paid off if the insurance covered it for a death from drug addiction.
Since lockdown I have been trying to support more charities and I have been following Mitch Winehouse and the work he has been doing with the Amy Winehouse Foundation. He is really trying to make a lasting legacy. I known he and Bob Geldof got absolutely slated after the deaths if their daughters and I have to say I found it incredibly unfair and almost bordering on gloating. To have your grief picked apart by tabloid journalists and documentary makers. It's the most macabre thing in the world. And then there is this massive blame game. And the notion that the parents are always at fault if the child falls to addiction. Not every person who is an addict has been abused and that is such a prevalent assumption in AA and NA. I had the most wonderful supportive family who only every wanted to see me succeed and fully supported me going to College etc. But I know its incredibly cliched but I was attracted to that dark side. I always was from my teenage years.
The cot debate was rife on Peaches Instagram page due to her strong AP opinions on it (ie that cots shouldn't be used). I don't think he had been put into a cot, as he was found in a different room, playing on the floor.Well this is just my take on things but i believe that probably she did follow attachment parenting in the begininng maybe the first couple of months?
Maybe when she had brief periods of being clean?
I think (or would like to) that when she started using again that as an opiate user she didn't sleep in the same bed as her son and that he was placed in a cot?
Thats just a mother's instinct for protection isn't it?
I can't imagine her not having that drug user or not?
I think she really believed in the attachment parenting theory but for practical reasons would not have been able to follow it strictly?
Lets just hope that some common sense did prevail behind the scene's what with the grandparents and tom helping out and that the baby was secure in his own little cot?
Whatever my opinion on peaches is i don't believe that she would deliberately endanger her sons life?
As another person mentioned thomas checked on peaches first so maybe he was secure in the knowledge that his son was in his cot?
At 11 months old my kids were all still shuffling or crawling none of them had learnt to walk at that age.
I know some babies are walking at that age albeit probably still a bit wobbly on their feet but i still think the probability is that he wasn't walking?
I hope for his sake that he wasn't?
That he'd been settled in his bed and fed and changed and that yes when he woke up he will have started to cry either for food or mummy or both and that getting no response he will have done what all babies do and settled himself lets hope he had a toy or mobile to look at or some tething rings or something to keep him occupied.
Also by that age he will have been weaned and hopefully the hunger pangs wouldn't have hit him as badly as if he was just getting milk?
Babies are very resilient in that sense but losing his mum thats going to be harder to recover from?
Lets hope that Thomas is giving those boys all the love and protection that he can and that the chaos and drama and pain has finally ended?
This article mentions where Thomas found the baby:
"Peaches' body was found slumped in the spare room by her distraught husband Tom Cohen, who had been at his parents' home in south east London for the weekend.
Seeing her splayed out with one leg hanging off the bed, another across her laptop, he knew instantly that she was dead. Their son Phaedra, then one, was playing in another room. He'd been alone for 17 hours."
and
"When Tom rang later that night at 9:48pm but couldn't get an answer, he wasn't concerned. But unbeknown to the singer, his wife had died at about 8pm after injecting a fatal dose of unusually strong heroin.
Becoming increasingly frantic, the next morning he asked a neighbour and a local dog warden to go round and check. When they couldn't get an answer, he drove back to the family home with his mum and Astala at 1:30pm, and found his spouse dead with a pair of knotted tights believed to have been used as a tourniquet beneath her.
He said: "I found her in the spare bedroom. We both used it when the kids were sleeping."
...
The syringe was found in a box of sweets next to the bed, and some 80 others were discovered hidden in the house along with almost seven grams of heroin worth £550. "
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