Graeme Spinks and Corina Grennell are in the lounge of their Mairehau home, sat either side of the couch where Millie would routinely pass out during an afternoon, once she had finished, hopefully, only one-and-a-half bottles of wine, though most likely three.
Dog hairs are evident on the cushions, her beloved Dolce would rest alongside.
A progressively heavy drinker since the age of 15, the pensive young woman who loved animals and coaching kids on the mats at dad’s judo school, took her last drink on November 11, when she succumbed, mercifully in some respects, to alcohol addiction.
Millie Spinks’ cause of death was a pancreatic haemorrhage, according to a provisional finding by the coroner.
Grennell describes her only daughter’s passing in less scientific terms: “I told her last year the amount she was drinking would kill her. She didn’t believe me.”
A clinical psychologist who spent 17 years at the old North Canterbury Hospital Board dealing with the precise issues confronting her daughter, Grennell sought the help of contemporaries when Millie refused to heed mum’s expert advice, and dad’s pleas.
“We focused on getting her well but she didn’t listen to a word we said,” Grennell said.
For Millie, anxiety had always been an issue – a trait inherited from her dad’s side of the family.
“She was nervous, anxious from a young age, she was a bit edgy,” Spinks explained.
Those fears were exacerbated by the February 22, 2011, earthquake, endometriosis also impacted on her schooling.
Millie also developed an eating disorder, bulimia. Sleep apnea, the end of a four-year relationship and the death of her grandparents strengthened a deadly cocktail, her reliance on alcohol and cannabis.
Four days after the September 4, 2010, earthquake, Grennell’s father Chap suffered a massive stroke.
“It really affected her because he spent the next three months dying, she was really upset with my dad because he was paralysed and blind,” Grennell said.
Millie, then 12, also had a traumatic experience inside The Palms Shopping Centre on February 22, 2011. She was cut by shattered glass, people around her were in the same predicament.
“She didn’t go back to The Palms until a couple of years after it was repaired,” Spinks recalled.
Grennell took Millie to a psychiatrist when she was a teenager, the first step along a treatment pathway that prompted her loved ones to call for a cohesive, and better-funded approach to the handling of addiction and mental health issues.
“The anxiety about going to school … she turned to alcohol and we didn’t know,” he said.
“I don’t drink much but I had a huge box of whisky and all the hard spirits in a box, 15 bottles. She got into that and drunk it all dry over a year when she was 16. We didn’t even know she was going that way.”
Once they realised, Spinks and Grennell were powerless to curb the self-destructive behaviour that extended to suicide attempts preceding her death in the family home.
“Millie didn’t really want to change. Her anxiety was greater than her want to change. She would rather be who she was,” Spinks admitted, before revealing the scope of an addiction financed by part-time cleaning work and a benefit.
“She’d start to shake around 11 o’clock if she hadn’t had a drink. If she ran out of money for dope, she’d get the shakes as well,” he said.
“She’d try and make it three bottles a day, we’d try and make it two. We’d always try and encourage her to drop it to two from three. On a normal day she’d try and sink three.
“We’d think a good day was when she only had two bottles. It was never-ending process.”
And yes, mum and dad hid or smashed bottles, they’d pour the contents down the sink, but no, that wasn’t a solution either.
“We’ve done that. She still needed it. She was at risk of seizures and she’d go nuts,” Spinks said.
“She’d rage. She cut her own throat, she stabbed herself so hard in the head one time the knife wouldn’t come out.”
Spinks, who represented New Zealand in judo at the 1984 and 1992 Olympics, lent on those martial arts skills when trying to prevent Millie wounding herself.
“It’s so dangerous trying to take the knife off her and just control her when she was not listening. I can easily do that because I’m trained in martial arts but it was just horrible to go through all that.”
One other night she fled the house after threatening to drown herself in a nearby creek. A police tracker dog was needed to coax her back inside.
“She blamed herself a lot too because she was passed out on the couch the last time nana came over for a visit,” said her brother Philip, 26.
“Nana gave her a hug and she passed later that week. Millie never forgave herself for that.”
Spinks and Grennell acknowledge healing their daughter was a complex task, and likely an unachievable goal, though a more co-ordinated response may have helped her plight.
A private psychiatrist, psychologist, the Canterbury District Health Board’s Anxiety Disorders Service, Eating Disorders Service and Community Alcohol and Drugs Service, plus the City Mission and Millie’s own GP were involved in what her parents feel was a fragmented approach.
Their main concern was CADS classifying Millie’s alcohol use as ‘mild to moderate’, meaning she was channelled to the City Mission.
“She wasn’t mild to moderate. She should have been more intensive,” said Grennell, an opinion backed by Spinks’ first-hand experience before a relapse prevention meeting.
“Millie glugged a bottle of wine so she could go to the meeting. The guy in the car in front of us was glugging one. They glug them to even go to the meeting,” he said.
Millie completed a 10-day detox programme last year but she resumed drinking soon after.
“At that point,” Grennell said, “CADS should have said this isn’t a mild to moderate issue. Instead she was referred back to the City Mission.”
Grennell, who planned to take Millie to a rehab centre in Bali as a last resort before Covid-19 intervened, will always regret not being more forthright with the services designed to help her daughter, and not heading offshore earlier in search of salvation.
“People do fall between the cracks and I can understand why because (services) have always been under pressure and under-resourced.
“Sometimes people will be treated but other times they’re told to go to another place and that other place can’t take them.
“I really wish Anxiety Disorders had made the connection with CADS, she got worse in the time when she was waiting to get referred to another service. I should have jumped up and down and screamed.
“A problem can be too severe for the service they’ve been referred to, then you have to be referred to someone else … go on a waiting list. It’s just ridiculous, and that’s what happened to Millie.
“It’s different in the adolescent and child area, they’re more of a unit, but adult services are very split,” she said.
“It’s kind of like those pinball machines, it felt like she was being ricocheted around different places and she felt like a failure when she went somewhere and it didn’t work out.
“Towards the end it was getting too late but there was a real missed opportunity and I’ll always kick myself. We should have been more forceful in getting her into a private place earlier.”
“Alcoholics need targeted assistance, there’s limited beds in rehab facilities,” Spinks said.
Grennell bristled at the amount of financial support the Government devotes to high-profile events.
“Look at the America’s Cup. The Government has got money to put into things where there’s a lot of publicity like these glamour sporting events but how many more thousands of families are struggling with the same issues we are.
“We were relatively well resourced and we couldn’t do anything. That’s what really upsets me.”
Spinks, who has fond memories of Millie helping train juniors at the Christchurch Judo School an hour or so once a week in spite of her fragile state, hoped her decline would serve as a warning and initiate change.
“This isn’t a specific story about Millie, this issue is kids have got nowhere to go and they’re dropping off the edge of a cliff. No one cares because they’re doing it to themselves,” he said.
“If there’s more than a couple of deaths at an intersection they start looking at the intersection and modifying it. We’ve got all these kids dying of alcohol and drug problems … suicide.
“Even though Millie wasn’t technically a suicide, to me she didn’t want to live.
“You listen every day to the road toll and other ones (deaths) go quietly by because they’re doing it to themselves. It’s not right.”
Spinks was content Millie’s death had had a positive effect on her mates.
“The only good thing that I can see coming out of this is Millie’s friends, the ones closest to her, have pulled their heads in a wee bit and got them back on their shoulders, hopefully, from her mistakes.
“If that understanding goes to more youth, because they read about somebody else passing then that’s got to be good. I don’t like to see bad things happen to young people.”
So in a sense Millie’s death has been a release, in her mum’s words: “She just went through hell, she’s not doing that anymore.”
Eventually Millie’s ashes will be placed next to her grandfather at Tuahiwi, the tiny settlement between Woodend and Rangiora, a handful of kilometres from Kaiapoi.
Asked if there was a time frame for the reuniting, Grennell paused: “Not really, Graeme likes having her around.”
Where to get help:
- Alcohol Drug Helpline: 0800 787 797
- Christchurch Community Alcohol & Drug Service: Hillmorton Hospital – 03 335 4350
- 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP) (available 24/7) https://www.lifeline.org.nz/services/suicide-crisis-helpline
- YOUTHLINE: 0800 376 633
- NEED TO TALK? Free call or text 1737 (available 24/7)
- KIDSLINE: 0800 543 754 (available 24/7)
- WHATSUP: 0800 942 8787 (1pm to 11pm)
- DEPRESSION HELPLINE: 0800 111 757 or TEXT 4202
- NATIONAL ANXIETY 24 HR HELPLINE: 0800 269 4389
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
