A MAN who helped his depressed twin brother commit suicide was spared jail by a judge yesterday.

Paul Dane helped his 20-year-old brother, Kevin, hang himself from the bedroom ceiling at the family home in Carlisle, Cumbria, by drilling the holes in a wooden beam for the noose before feeding the rope through.

Dane, who is now 21, then failed in his attempt to strangle himself with a belt, Carlisle Crown Court heard. He was found "trembling" in front of his brother's body.

Outside court, after Judge John Phillips handed the brother a three-year rehabilitation order on condition that he undergoes psychiatric treatment, the twins' father, Alan Dane, spoke of his relief.

He said: "The judge was very sympathetic. Our main priority now is to make sure that Paul gets better."

At an earlier hearing, Dane admitted a charge under the Suicide Act 1961 of aiding and abetting the suicide of his brother.

Dane, who held hands with his sister in the dock, sat and listened to the judge as he explained the events leading up to the tragic events.

The judge said: "Police interviews suggest that, independently, both you and your brother had attempted to take your own lives before this but had not succeeded.

"Encouraging you to pursue a more normal life, your parents had set a deadline, a target date, by which you were to sign on as a person looking for work.

"You regarded that as an invasion on your social isolation. Neither of you felt able to cope with it, and you both decided to commit suicide."

On October 3, the so-called target date, their father discovered Kevin's body hanging at the family home on the Lowry Hill Estate, Carlisle.

Later, in police interviews, Dane, told how he had last seen his brother "smile at him".

In the years leading up to the tragedy, the pair had led an "unremarkable" upbringing, gradually becoming reclusive and nocturnal, venturing out of their locked rooms only at night, where they would "converse, eat and watch television", said the judge.

"There came a time when the behaviour of yourself and your brother changed in a significant and very worrying way. You had separate bedrooms and each of you started to spend substantial amounts of time in those rooms during late 1997 and early 1998.

"You turned night into day and day into night.

"Both of you slept by day and were up in the house at night.

"You rarely, if ever, left the home. You both became, in effect, totally reclusive."

The reasoning behind their social exclusion, he said, was not easy to discern but appeared to be rooted in a severe mental disorder.