SHE'S TAKEN THE RACOON COAT AND THE BALLGOWN TO THE CLINIC...

But this time Lady B swears she will leave the drugs behind

SOCIALITE GP TELLS HOW SHE HAS TURNED HER BACK ON THE HIGH LIFE TO TAKE A
TOUGH CURE FOR ADDICTION

THE GBP 2,000-A-WEEK COURSE TO RECOVERY

THE Promis Recovery Centre treats compulsive or obsessive behaviour,
including anorexia, bulimia and addiction to drugs, sex, gambling, alcohol,
overspending and nicotine.

It is run as a community, with about 22 patients staying together in a
Victorian mansion set in three acres. The programme costs GBP 2,000 a week.

Treatment lasts eight weeks and is based on the Minnesota Method, which
teaches patients to face up to their addiction and its consequences. As an
integral part of this, patients do their own laundry and housework, setting
tables for meals and washing-up. There is meditation at 7.45 each morning,
followed by a walk in nearby fields and lanes and later therapy sessions.

Staff members are former patients. The centre once treated Clarissa Dickson
Wright of BBC2's Two Fat Ladies cookery programme, who dried out there.

Promis Recovery Centre 24-hour helpline - Freephone 0800 374318.

LADY Brocklebank can pinpoint the moment almost exactly. It was 5am on a
November morning and she was alone in bed unable to sleep, her baby
screaming in the cot next to her.

A GP, she was used to the routine; seemingly endless sleepless nights,
half-crazed by fatigue, and all the time agonising over her broken marriage
to the multimillionaire industrialist Sir Aubrey Brocklebank.

But this time it was different, because she reached into her leather
medical briefcase and pulled out a phial of the opiate painkiller pethidine.

It was then that Lady Brocklebank - Anna to her friends, and a respected
society doctor to a string of wealthy clients - became a junkie.

Not, you have to understand, the typical hollow-eyed, dysfunctional heroin
addict. Indeed, what makes Anna's story so shocking, is that she was (and
still is) an elegant, likeable person who seemed to be getting over her
divorce.

But what no one realised was that, deep down, Anna, who always put on a
brave face, partied with the cream of London society and was regarded as a
coper, was in a severe depression.

Because she was a doctor she knew she could get instant relief from the
anguish by injecting the painkiller.

But the price she paid was enormous - a permanent craving.

Today, as she embarks on an eight-week recovery programme at a clinic, she
gives a chilling account of just how easy it can be to slip into the life
of a junkie, as a warning to those who assume addiction happens to other
people.

Recalling that first time she turned to drugs, ten years ago, she says: 'I
just thought "I can't bear this hurting any longer". I remember thinking
how would I treat a patient who was suffering so much? Pethidine was the
obvious answer.' Perhaps it might have happened anyway, but the immediate
catalyst was the crisis in Anna's ten-year marriage to Old Etonian Sir
Aubrey, who had told her he had a mistress he had fallen in love with, and
that he was leaving her to manage alone with a two-month-old baby and a son
of six.

>From then on, the painkiller became her little secret. On and off, over
the years, to deal with broken romances and other setbacks she'd reach for
her bag, where there was always a supply of pethidine in little phials and
a quantity of clean syringes and needles.

After that first night's relief from bitter pain, she secretly injected
herself each day for six months, handing Hamish, now 11, to his nanny while
the days passed in a numbing blur.

'I had no fear of injections. I did them almost every day. I did it quickly
and neatly without leaving a mark.

The relief was immediate, and my heartache and exhaustion melted away in
seconds. It seemed like the only way to get through those awful days,' she
says. 'But I was also hooked as surely as any squalid heroin addict and
feeling twice as guilty.' A decade on, and still fighting her self-disgust,
she has checked into the Promis Recovery Centre in Nonington, Kent, and
agreed to a severe detoxification programme which involves baring her soul
in daily group therapy sessions.

Lady Brocklebank, 42, cuts an unusual figure at the clinic. Dressed in a
floor-length racoon coat, she marches outside in her high-heeled Gucci
boots for a 10-minute 'fag break' between sessions. When she entered the
Centre last week, she even brought a black velvet and silk Louis Ferraud
ballgown with her, intending to sew on a new zip during a quiet hour or two.

She expects to be struck off the doctors register for illegally prescribing
drugs for herself. It hasn't been easy admitting to her titled friends that
she has fallen so far down their social scale. Usually she is the one
administering help and sensible advice.

'We're all the same in here. We're desperate people sharing pain,' she
says. 'It doesn't matter about our backgrounds. We are all revealing our
feelings in a way we've never done before.

I've never met such brave people, and it's killingly painful to hear some
of their stories.' For the first time since she was a schoolgirl at Malvern
Girls' College she is sharing a room. Her 'buddy' is Caroline, an
accountant who is addicted 'to almost everything', she says.

All the rooms in the sprawling Victorian pile have names meant to inspire,
such as Tranquillity or Peace.

The bathroom is labelled Relief.

'Caroline and I hang out here, in Hope,' she jokes.

Her scissors, nail files, aerosols and deodorant were all confiscated on
arrival. Patients must focus on their detox and any potentially harmful
belongings are kept out of reach. Anna liberated her Coco Chanel perfume
after a couple of days, but staff found a book - also forbidden - hidden
under the mattress and took it. There are supposed to be no distractions,
no phone calls and no TV, apart from the occasional news programme.

Anna believes she is privileged to be there. 'I feel I have no excuse for
what has happened to me,' she says. 'I had a golden childhood with loving
parents, both doctors, and a wonderful home where they still live in Surrey.

'I had ballet classes and music lessons and fun family holidays in the
South of France. My younger brother and I are still close, and he is now an
orthopaedic surgeon, so I am lucky there is a lot of understanding for my
situation.' But 20 years ago, no one would have guessed her fate. One of
the cleverest girls in her year, she went to medical school in Southampton,
and married in 1978. She seemed to have everything.

'It had been a good marriage. I had found the best-looking man around town
and bagged him. We were deeply in love. He was handsome and fun, but we had
problems with intimacy which grew worse over the years.

'Aubrey was a typically repressed public school product, and I had just had
a difficult time with baby Hamish, born prematurely and weighing
two-and-a-half pounds.

'Our sex life floundered. We still loved each other, but it was a time in
my life when I just wasn't physically responding. He had affairs and I
turned a blind eye. Inevitably he fell in love with one of his mistresses
and I lost him. I was devastated.' But Anna eventually pulled herself back
from the brink and weaned herself off pethidine. She was being romanced by
the famously eccentric William Grosvenor, cousin of the Duke of
Westminster, and they became a glamorous item on the London society
circuit. They even talked of marriage and exchanged engagement rings.

'Then I found out he was still married. There was a knock on my door and
this very charming lady told me that she was in fact his wife and had no
intention of divorcing him. She was sympathetic to me and actually hugged me.

So I invited her in and over a drink we worked out that William had been
leading a double life.' In the chaotic aftermath, Anna injected herself
with an overdose of insulin and says she hoped to die.

Her children saw her in hospital in a coma and her shame was complete.

Later, with the wedding off but her social life somehow still intact, Anna
was back in the swing of things.

After her divorce, she took two years off her career to study for a law
degree at London University.

She gained a good degree and was a popular hostess and dinner party guest
again.

'I had stayed clean for eight years.

I had worked as a locum and I had my lovely sons. Hamish is still at prep
school and Beanie, 17, is in his last year at Eton. We don't live in the
same style as we did when I was married, but we have a nice house in
Tooting and everything was going fine for a while.' Then 18 months ago a
man broke her heart again. 'I can't talk about it. It's too upsetting,' she
says.

'The really bad thing is that I resorted to pethidine again, and when I
confessed to doctor colleagues they started prescribing it for me.' A
four-week session in a different clinic didn't work.

'Too much time to myself, getting bored and not taking it seriously,' she
says.

'I need a strict regime, with Gestapo guards as I call them, like the staff
at Promis. I need to get tough with myself. I feel so desperately guilty
and ashamed about what I've done to my sons.' Today she says she has
finally come to her senses.

She has turned her back on the winter ball season and instead faces being
woken daily by a blaring public address system before queueing for the
bathroom, and doing her own laundry for the first time in her life.

'They make you take turns waking everyone up on the Tannoy at 6am. When
it's my turn I'm going to shout "Wakey! wakey all you filthy little drug
addicts!" ' Somehow, you know she's going to finish the course.

'I was as hooked as a heroin addict and felt twice as guilty'

'I feel so guilty and ashamed about what I've done to my sons'

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski