I was on the edge at the highest point on Beachy Head – and unfortunately, I wasn’t alone. Beside me was a man with watery eyes and a sunken head. The problem? He was a businessman, but had lost everything. He didn’t have a penny to his name.
He was wringing his hands up and down, shaking his head and twitching nervously inside a trench coat. I was highly anxious too. He’s going to go over if I don’t find the right words, I thought. I had to find them fast.
I said all I could to try and calm him down, telling him that it just wasn’t worth ending one’s life because of finances. ‘Money makes the world go around,’ I said, ‘but you can’t place a value on human life.’
It seemed to register with him. He stopped wringing his hands, and shoved them into his coat pockets. At least now he was talking to me. We ended up having quite a long chat. Although he agreed with me that suicide was a desperate measure, and that money wasn’t the most important thing in life, he couldn’t cope with the enormity of his situation. It’s all very well being poor, but not having a penny to your name and going bankrupt at the age of 40 is pretty overwhelming. He didn’t know who or what to turn to. He was prepared to step away from the edge, but there was no way of walking away from his problems.
We walked down the hill, and ended up at his car – a beaten-up old Ford Fiesta. He was a smart-looking man – he looked like the type of businessman who should be driving a Mercedes or a Jaguar – and even though I was pleased he’d come back down to the car park, I felt that it would be irresponsible of me to just bid him farewell. I didn’t want to see him up there again, or worse still discover he’d killed himself while I wasn’t around to stop him. Looking at the despair in his eyes as we stood by his car, I decided to try and help him a little more.
Although I’d given plenty of people advice up at the cliff edge, I was no financial adviser. I could persuade him to think twice about killing himself, but I couldn’t tell him how to begin to sort out his money matters. I knew he needed professional help and that’s why, once I’d got him away from danger, I decided to call the chaplains.
I’m just an ordinary bloke on his own, whereas the chaplains are an organisation with support networks that they have built up over the years. They have access to counsellors, and if someone in trouble needs a bed for the night, they can provide it. Also, they have advisors who are there to help people with financial worries.
Whatever my popularity amongst some of the chaplains, it wasn’t going to stop me from getting in touch to tell them I’d found a man in need of their help. I explained everything and a chaplain came to meet the man before I left. I felt I’d done all I could and was glad that the guy was going to get some follow-up advice.
I’m not sure exactly what happened after I left, but it turned out that he ended up getting taken away by the police. I was very shocked when I discovered this, because it didn’t add up. When I’d said goodbye to the bloke, he had been calm, reasonable and ready to accept any help and advice on offer. He thanked me for my help and I assured him he was in good hands.
Having spoken to others who have been talked down by the chaplains, I’ve often heard that part of the conversation tends to involve God. The chaplains are religious, so I suppose it follows that they might say things like ‘God will help you’, ‘We will pray for you’ and that they ask people to turn to the Almighty in their hour of need. This is all very well if the person they are talking to happen to be a Christian, but I think it could cause considerable offence to anyone who isn’t. After all, if you are thinking of ending your life and you are a person of another faith – or no faith at all – you wouldn’t want to hear talk of a Christian God.
The chaplains are good people with the most noble of intentions – saving lives – but I feel that they could downplay their faith a little at times. A dog-walker once said to me that if someone breaks wind up at Beachy Head, it’s an incident for the chaplains. There are times when I’ve been over-cautious too and have approached people who are fine, but I didn’t do it in a red uniform and I didn’t mention God. Nonetheless, the chaplains are doing a great job, which the public should continue to support with their donations.
I was very disappointed that the bankrupted man had been removed by the police. I felt terrible for him. Perhaps he would have been better off if I’d just let him go his own way. It’s hard to know. Either way, I’d arrived at a point where I decided it wasn’t worth me contacting the chaplains again. Even though I had a lot of respect for what they were trying to do up at Beachy Head, we had very different methods.
* * *
The woman looked very depressed. It was a lovely day in late August, but she certainly wasn’t enjoying it. She sat on one of the natural ledges, her head hanging down, her shoulders slumped forwards. I doubted that she was going to jump, but I needed to be sure. Anyway, it was obvious she needed some care and attention, so I sat down next to her and told her about my patrols.
‘What’s making you so depressed?’ I enquired after a few minutes. ‘Is it relationship problems?’
‘No, I’ve got a lovely boyfriend,’ she said. ‘It my job.’
‘Well a job can’t be a reason to kill yourself, can it? What do you do?’
‘I work in mental care.’
Mental care? I thought. I’ve had plenty of people up here who were under mental care, but never have I talked down one of the carers!
‘I get so down and despondent about it,’ she continued sadly. ‘Sufficient facilities for patients aren’t there, the funding isn’t there and every time I get told that a patient needs one thing or another, I realise we’re unable to offer it to them. We simply don’t have enough money and it depresses the hell out of me.
‘I care so much for these people and nothing is being done for them. They become ill, they’re given pills and are shoved off into Care in the Community. There’s much more that should be done for the mentally ill. I feel so bad because I don’t think I can cope with this job any more, but I want to be helping them.’ It was very moving to listen to her story.
Eventually, she walked away. She told me she knew she wasn’t alone among NHS staff. Thanks to limited resources, many of her colleagues were under huge amounts of stress and suffering from depression. The fact of the matter was that they just couldn’t cope with the number of people in need of help and felt terrible that what they could offer was often so limited.
I’d never been a professional carer, but I had met plenty of people up at Beachy Head who felt the NHS was failing them and I had often felt that the state of mental health services was pretty lamentable. Now I was talking to somebody from the other side of the fence and she only served to confirm my worst fears.
When Maggie was suffering from depression, I had often felt disappointed by the treatment she received from the NHS. At one point, I was convinced that she needed to be sectioned for her own safety – she was behaving in a way that made me think she was going to attempt suicide. We were told to wait in A & E, and I was shocked to see a lot of people with cuts, bruises and broken arms mixed up with people who obviously had severe mental health problems. Depressives and people suffering from schizophrenia were being told they may have to wait up to 12 hours to see someone and it just didn’t seem right. There was no access to help in an emergency. People with injuries need attending to, of course, and it’s frustrating for anyone to have to wait a long time to be seen. However, when there are people who feel suicidal in A & E, I feel they should be treated in the same way as anyone with a life-threatening condition and not made to wait – especially as one’s state of mind in these situations can be unpredictable and the person may become increasingly desperate in a short space of time. Waiting just makes things worse.
Maggie was eventually seen, but the doctor had treated her very dismissively. ‘She’s a drunk,’ he’d announced. ‘Sort her out!’
‘All right,’ I’d replied, ‘I’ll take her away. But if my wife kills herself tonight, I’m coming back for you!’
With that, he agreed to section her. Maggie was put in a curtained-off area on a ward, but because of her fragile mental state she felt intimidated and insecure. This wasn’t helped by other patients on the ward lifting the curtain to have a look at her. I had to leave her overnight and it broke my heart when I walked out of that hospital, arrived at my car and looked up at a window to see Maggie peering down at me. She looked so vulnerable and lonely, and I didn’t know what care she was going to receive. I wondered if I was doing more harm than good by leaving her in there.
I don’t blame that doctor for trying to get rid of Maggie – NHS resources are so overstretched that it’s little wonder he initially wanted me simply to take her back home. Maggie didn’t receive much help from the NHS once she had been sectioned, and she went on to kill herself.
I don’t agree with the way mental health is dealt with these days. In many ways, I think the principle of old-fashioned mental hospitals should be brought back. It makes sense to have specialist homes for people with mental difficulties, each of which would have their own equivalent to A & E; physical and mental health should be very much separated and dealt with in different ways. I believe that politicians closed down all the mental hospitals because they were costing too much and unlikely to win public support. The government like to allocate funds to things that win votes – spending money on equipment for fighting cancer and heart disease is worth boasting about, but telling the public that their money is being spent to help the mentally ill isn’t going to make a political party shoot up in the polls.
Depression and mental illness is misunderstood in this country. Many people think of depression as a little bit made-up, and I think they find it hard to accept that it is a real, clinical condition that cripples the victim. If the depression gets too severe, it can lead to suicide. It is a potentially fatal illness that is no different to cancer or heart disease and the government should be doing a lot more to help those suffering from it.
Consider this. Around 2,500 people die on the Britain’s roads each year, and around 5,000 people die from suicide. It is estimated that for every suicide there are around 20 people severely affected by the loss – mums and dads, husband and wives, brothers and sisters and so on – and that out of those, at least two are also likely to go on to kill themselves. Untreated, depression breeds more depression – a snowball effect. Every single person who commits suicide has fallen through the net and treating those who are victims of it only puts more pressure on the NHS. I am not blaming the NHS for every suicide, but I think that much, much more could be done to help those who are depressed and prevent such unnecessary loss of life.
The NHS has been used as a political football for so long – politicians bombard us with figures about how much money is being spent on it, and the opposition always say they would do things differently if only they could, but in my view nothing really changes. I think the only solution to the problem is to take healthcare out of the political arena. It should be run by an all-party committee of politicians, financial experts and managerial staff – much as it is now really, but the key difference would be that money could be allocated wherever it is needed. There would be no bias towards distributing resources in order to win votes, because it wouldn’t be a subject that was part of a political debate – all parties would be responsible and areas such as mental health would stand more of a chance of receiving adequate funding.
I can dream, can’t I? If that dream came true and resources could be properly allocated, then maybe we’d no longer find mental health carers up at Beachy Head…