Sam admits she was “a complete wreck” when she first arrived at the supported housing where she now lives in Clacton-on-Sea. She had just been discharged from hospital after four years as a psychiatric inpatient. Mentally and emotionally fragile, she was incapable of looking after herself. Today, over a year later, she feels fitter, stronger and ready to begin looking for a place of her own.
The transformation has been brought about with the help of an “intensive enablement” project run by Essex council, the local mental health trust and the Metropolitan housing association.
Help is on hand to manage medication and learn simple living skills, such as cooking and managing a budget, so people can move on to more independent living within 18 months.
“I get a lot of support here and I feel safe,” says Sam. “So the idea of being on my own is scary. But they don’t just throw you out on the streets. There’s a lot of support when you move on.”
Chris Powell can testify to that. He spent six months with the scheme and has now moved out to more independent accommodation. “They worked very hard with me on stuff like budgeting and making links in the community and now they’ve stepped the support down a bit. There’s still a long way to go, but so far I’m coping.”
Without proper support, Sam and Chris could become “revolving door” patients – in and out of hospital, lurching from one mental health crisis to the next. “If this wasn’t here we would see massive spikes in homelessness and in people going into hospital,” says Russell White, a social work consultant on the intensive enablement project.
“We would see people losing their tenancies and we’d have a whole group of people who were impossible to house. The end game of all that is that their mental health deteriorates, they become an inpatient and it takes a lot of expensive care to get them out of hospital. Then the cycle begins again.”
