Heartbroken relatives of a “nice Jewish girl” who developed a severe mental illness after secretly binging on drugs with teenage schoolmates have warned other families in the community about the dangers of substance abuse.

Oxford-educated Cordelia Feldman was brought up by her shul-going parents, Teresa and Keith, in the wealthy suburb of Radlett where she went on country excursions and rode horses.

But, as her aunt, Sally Feldman, writes in the JC this week, her family was later told that after evening meals, she headed out for nights of pill-popping with her north London Jewish friends.

Cordelia’s parents only discovered she was taking drugs when they found ecstasy tablets in her bra. As Cordelia dramatised in a novel written earlier this year, her mother was shocked that a “nice Jewish girl” could do such things.

She began to experiment with drugs when she was 17, but signs of her mental illness only began to emerge after she started studying at St Peter’s College, Oxford. After graduation, she spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital where she was finally diagnosed with “a very dangerous level” of bipolar disorder.

Tragically, Cordelia was diagnosed nine years ago with terminal breast cancer.

Since then, she has written and self-published two books, Bloom and Well Done Me, that focus on her drug-taking and mental health struggles, in the hope that her own experiences might be helpful to young people and their families. Well Done Me came out last month.

Cordelia’s family told the JC: “We’ll never know for sure how far Cordelia’s illness was connected to her drug-taking. But parents and teenagers do need to be aware of the dangers, as she explicitly warned in her novel.”

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