I had stumbled through the beginning of the summer of 2022 like a man trying to wake up from a bad dream. The harder I struggled to make sense of the appalling revelations of my disclosed medical records, the more I became stuck. It were as though I were caught in quicksand. I was in desperate need of explanations but there was only one person available to me with authority on the facts: Wanda Reynolds. I continued to pepper her inbox with questions.              

In the meantime I needed to keep my daughter safe. Depression exerted an irresistible gravitational pull and I was fighting the compulsion to walk into the countryside and not return. My adventure along the South Coast Path, interrupted by Dorset Police and the Section 136, felt like an untied shoelace. The situation had been made doubly worse as I was under pressure of eviction from the private property that I had been renting. This was the third such occasion in twelve years that I had been issued a ‘Section 21’, the notice to legally terminate a tenancy agreement through no fault of my own.

There had already been tentative enquiries looking to place Meg into ‘supported living’ with Home Group, a social enterprise that supports people with mental and physical health issues providing a combination of suitable accommodation with some forms of personal care but there was a significant waiting list and a more immediate measure was called for. A temporary arrangement was agreed for Meg to return to the family home in Old Basing.

The next thing I decided to do was to put my scepticism to the test and make contact with the Wellbeing Centre. I was still incredibly cynical about the recommendations following my two mental health assessments at The Bridge Centre. I have already published my account of a telephone conversation with Sean Dale Malloy in the post FOUR AND TWENTY DEAD CROWS # 23 Gatekeepers and recounted his words, ‘If you attend the Recovery College and complete ALL of their courses AND attend the Wellbeing Centre and complete ALL of their courses then I MAY consider you for psychotherapy!’ I absolutely needed urgent access to talking therapies but Sean Dale Malloy wanted to play God. I was, ultimately, proved correct but, for the time being, I was forced into making enquiries.

It actually took the Recovery College several weeks to respond to my initial enquiry which in itself made a mockery of Sean Dale Malloy’s recommendations. My mental health needed a more immediate intervention. While writing this blog post I discovered that the Recovery College had been inspected by the Care Quality Commission and given an ‘overall rating’, ‘Requires improvement’ in 2023. So, even if I had been offered immediate help by the Recovery College, I would have received sub-standard service.

I turned to the Wellbeing Centre, instead. I had already been making regular visits to the Safe Haven, a drop-in service in Basingstoke that offers help to those in self-defined crisis providing emotional and practical support to adults experiencing a mental health crisis. The Wellbeing Centre, which is maintained by Andover Mind, is housed under the same roof as the Safe Haven, a converted, former residential property.

‘Our wellbeing centres provide a relaxed and friendly base, where we offer help to all who need it by delivering a range of services to support people with mental health problems. This could range from aiding people in their recovery from a serious mental health issue to providing advice, services and information to those wishing to keep themselves mentally well and prevent the onset of a mental health condition.’ - https://www.andovermind.org.uk/services/wellbeingandpcn/

Andover Mind also run a number of primary care services from surgeries and community-based settings, providing alternatives to GPs, offering appointments to assess mental health, give advice and signpost to other services.

I signed up for ‘Six Weeks to Wellbeing’, one of the Centre’s therapeutic group courses designed to teach emotional regulation skills. I would eventually go on to complete four therapeutic group courses at the Wellbeing Centre over the following year, including one called ‘Building Confidence’ and another, ‘Be Purposeful’. While the courses were delivered with good intention and were, doubtlessly, of value to some of the participants, they fell considerably short in addressing the real mental healthcare needs of many like me. There was a conspicuous absence of clinical expertise and a noticeable lack of deep knowledge in the course leadership while the materials provided and the information conveyed were often the poor harvest of misguided internet searches, some tangential or even irrelevant. The courses were cobbled, ad-hoc and experimental.

At first I truly resented being there.

We all had our own personal stories to tell. There were common themes: abuse, neglect and a very real sense of abandonment. A general consensus among the group was that we had been signposted to the Wellbeing Centre because we weren’t wanted anywhere else. We had been dumped into a gutter and none of us could fall any further. We were the discarded, the forgotten ones . I listened to first one sad story and then another, saw some of the self-inflicted scars and was reduced to tears by the evident despair and hopelessness. Some of us wanted, dare I suggest, deserved better. I turned to Vicki, the course leader, and asked, on behalf of the majority of us, ‘What expertise did the Wellbeing Centre have to offer those of us suspected to be suffering from severe mental health issues, major depression, potential personality disorder, complex-PTSD  etc? We had been deemed NOT sufficiently unwell to be admitted into the Bridge Centre but we were far beyond the narrow remit of the Wellbeing Centre. Vicki admitted, all to easily, that the Wellbeing Centre couldn’t help us with our clinical presentations.

I completed the ‘Six Weeks to Wellbeing’ course, not because of the merits of the course itself but because of the others in the group. We might have been the abandoned ones but we found consolation and shared kinship with each other. I guess that’s where I found therapeutic value, such as it was. The bond shared between those of us who attended ‘Six Weeks to Wellbeing’ proved unique and, unfortunately, wasn’t replicated quite so authentically during the next three courses.

I continued attending the Wellbeing Centre for almost another year, largely to give Sean Dale Malloy the benefit of doubt and to prove him utterly wrong. But there was something else that kept me engaged and that was the burgeoning need to put things right, not just for me but for all the others, the discarded, the forgotten ones.

Many, many people who suffer from poor mental health are being underserved or completely neglected. Running alongside primary and secondary services are voluntary services: support provided in the community, usually by charities and other non-profits. There are canyon-sized gaps in mental health services in this country that are thinly papered over by charities like Basingstoke Counselling Services and Andover Mind. I wanted to see, first hand, just exactly what was being offered by these charities and evaluate the quality of the services they were providing.