THE sister of a man who went missing from a mental health unit has pledged her support to help him through his dark days. Sarah Beck said she and her family would help and support her brother after his disappearance from the unit. As reported, an investigation was launched after Wayne Beck, a manic depressive, went missing from a mental health unit he was living in.
Mr Beck, 37, of Grimsby, has previously been described as being a high risk of killing or seriously injuring someone.
He had been given two indefinite hospital orders and was an inpatient at St Andrew's Place in west Hull when he went missing on Monday.
He was found the following day after police released an appeal, which did not mention where he was living. Sarah Beck, 39, of Grimsby, said she and her family had been very upset by some of the cruel comments which had been posted on Facebook about her brother. "He was found and the only person he was hurting was himself," she said. "It's awful, what he has been through. He has put himself through it and he is not well at all. He hates himself for everything he has done. "He's not proud of any of it. He's a likeable lad but he punishes himself. He is now back in hospital, living in Hull and is on medication. He is under the care of the NHS. "I feel really upset about it all but he is getting treatment. It's going to take a time to get him sorted. It's going to be like this for the rest of his life. He needs stabilising." Miss Beck said that, at the moment, her brother was "shutting himself off a little bit" and was not talking to his family. "He feels he needs to get his head together," she added. "I have been helping him all his life. We all have. We are just going to give him the love and support to help him get through it." She said that the Facebook taunts had left her thinking that "nobody appreciated the feelings of the family and the history behind it all" concerning the incident. She said the experience of reading the comments, many of which were later removed, was "horrible". He had been punished for his previous offences and they had been dealt with, she added.
Police officers stressed that Mr Beck did not pose a risk to anyone but himself.
A spokeswoman for Humber NHS Foundation Trust, which runs mental health services, said an investigation into his disappearance from the unit in St George's Road has now been launched.
The spokeswoman said: "It is not appropriate for an NHS organisation to comment on individual patients or the circumstances of their care.
"We can, however, confirm that we take the safety of the people who use our services, our staff and the wider community extremely seriously and are currently investigating an incident at one of our inpatient rehabilitation units earlier this week.
"The unit involved is an open unit."
In 2009, Beck was given an indefinite hospital order for hitting two men with a claw hammer as he attempted to rob Littlefields restaurant on Grimsby's Littlefield Lane.
At the time, doctors told the court there was a high risk of Wayne Beck killing or seriously harming someone if he remained in the community. Two consultants had diagnosed Mr Beck with schizoaffective disorder with manic depressive tendencies.
The following year, he was given another hospital order for holding a knife to a woman's neck during a robbery at the Spar Shop on Laceby Road. It happened two weeks before the hammer attack, but he was not caught for more than a year.
Mr Beck was previously jailed for eight years for robbing a post office in Burwell, near Louth, in 1998, during which an elderly couple were tied up, gagged and slashed with a knife.
In 2010, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder while being treated at the Humber Centre, a medium-secure unit in Willerby.
It is believed he has remained in East Yorkshire since then, despite coming from Grimsby, where he lived in Eskdale Way.
Detective Inspector Pat Goulden, from Humberside Police, said: "As part of a missing person's investigation we evaluate risk to the missing person or members of the public. In this case it was felt that he posed no risk to anyone but himself."
The Humber NHS Foundation Trust website describes St Andrew's Place as a rehabilitation unit for people suffering from "severe and enduring mental illness", particularly schizophrenia.
It says: "The aim of the service is to restore people to their optimal physical, cognitive, psychological and social functioning following a breakdown caused by a mental disorder."
The unit says it helps patients to restore damaged functions, compensate for lost functions and take control over their own lives.
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