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Published: 2 December, 2010
by TOM FOOT

‘I want Craig home for Christmas’

GROWING up on the Rowntree estate in West Hampstead was not easy for Craig Redway.

As a teenager he found trouble on his doorstep, was stabbed with a fish knife in the Thameslink station, and later felt the heavy hand of the law. In 2005, aged 16, he was given an anti social behaviour order (Asbo) and spent three months in Feltham Young Offenders Institution after breaching police conditions.

His mother, Amelia Williams, told how her son came out a changed man: shell-shocked by debilitating mental illness and “never the same again”.

Craig spent the next five years locked up in mental health hospitals and has recently been diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia – a rare form of the mental disorder that renders victims unable or unwilling to speak – at the Highgate Mental Health Centre.

Ms Williams visits Craig, now 21, each day taking him hot meals and cigarettes.

He is the latest of a number of inpatients being moved out of Camden because of a shortage in facilities.

Psychiatrists at Highgate want to move Craig to a Low Secure Unit in Chase Farm Hospital, Enfield. A Low Secure Unit was due to open in the Highgate hospital last month with £4million signed off by the Department of Health in 2007. But, according to board-level documents, the unit has been scrapped after NHS Camden and NHS Islington “withdrew their support”. 

Ms Williams is now taking Camden and Islington Foundation Trust to a tribunal ­later this month in a desperate bid to bring her son home in time for Christmas.

She said: “He needs to be given a chance at home, not locked up in Chase Farm. It will take me four or five hours to see him each day if he is moved there.”

Craig was a promising young footballer playing for Hendon Football Club  as  a pupil at Hampstead School when he was given the Asbo in 2005.

Back then Ms Williams told the New Journal, in a front-page story, her son had been systematically “har­assed” by police.

Three months after receiving the order, Craig was stabbed in West Hampstead train station following an altercation in the street. He suffered a 5cm gash next to his pelvis before being sent to Feltham.

Ms Williams said: “Something happened to him in Feltham. I don’t know what – but I don’t think he was well treated. He was never the same again. I know they are there to be punished in prison – but to what extent?”

Craig’s room on Coral Ward in Highgate Mental Health Centre is empty and locked shut. He has no television or music.

Ms Williams said: “He only really has cigarettes to look forward to. It is worse than a prison.”

She said he is injected with three powerful anti-psychotic drugs – Risperidone, Largactil, Haloperidol – which she said have left him “dribbling and shaking”.

Ms Williams said the heavy medication had caused him to lose his hair, and a lot of weight.

“He’s aware he is shaking and it bothers him,” she said. “I just cannot bear to see him like that. The levels of drugs they are giving him are just so high.”

Ms Williams said: “I don’t believe this new diagnosis. He speaks to me when I see him – he asks about his sister. He looks at me and says ‘mum, get me out of here’. The silence is directed towards the staff – I think it’s a kind of protest at the way he has been treated.”

Camden and Islington Foundation Trust – the borough’s mental health authority – is in the process of shutting two mental hospitals because it claims it has 70 beds that are surplus to requirements.

The Trust’s directors argue the rising vacant bed figures are the result of successes in the Care in the Community programme – where patients are treated in home.

A Trust spokesman said: “Whilst we cannot comment on individual cases, we guarantee that all our service users who need an inpatient bed will be provided with one, and we make this as close to their home as we can. 

“This may involve the use of specialist ser­vices, which may not available within the borough, in which case the referral could be outside our borders.”