Health News - Bleak picture of life inside Highgate Mental Health Centre

Published: 24 February 2011
by TOM FOOT

Health centre’s yard refuge ‘is neglected’

THE triangular courtyard within the grounds of Highgate Mental Health Centre was littered with cigarettes, barren and featureless save for a small, dying tree.

For its patients, the yard is the only reminder of the outside world – a place for fresh air and a smoke.

That was one of the images lodged in the mind of a patient who spent three months there under section. Ian, who did not want his full name revealed, said: “For most people who are not granted any leave, like the people on Coral Ward, it is the only time they get to take a break – to be taken back to civilisation. But it is gloomy, lots of fag butts and there is a dead tree in the middle.”

Highgate Mental Health Centre was praised at a meeting of health bosses in Holloway Resource Centre on Monday night and the centre has been rated “good” during a recent inspection.

But to Ian it was a depressing place where young men are being “stripped of every vestige of humanity”. He said skunk, the chemically enhanced version of cannabis, caused “misdiagnosis of schizophrenia” and for so many “young, beautiful, mainly black guys ending up that place”.

Ian, who now lives in Old Street, Islington, has endured a long battle with drug addiction, been in and out of mental institutions and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The 40-year-old said Olanzapine and Closapine – used to treat schizophrenics – were the strongest drugs he had taken.

“It makes people, well, like just animated cadavers, with that look of borrowed flesh,” he said.

While at the centre, last September, Ian spent three weeks with a 24-year-old man who was transferred to Coral Ward after kicking down a door and trying to escape.

Ian said: “I saw eight men holding him down. He wet himself. One week later I was out in the courtyard and I saw him at the window waving at me. He was tap-tapping on the window saying ‘do I know you? Do I remember you?’ We had spent three months hanging around together. But that’s what it does to you.”

A spokesman for Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust said: “Highgate Mental Health Centre is set in professionally maintained grounds and backs on to Waterlow Park. There are smoking and non-smoking courtyards, as well as specific gardens for the [Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit] PICU and older patients’ wards. Patients have regular indoor and outdoor exercise. The centre is regularly audited for a number of aspects and this includes outdoor space.

“One of these tools is our Patient Experience Trackers. The most recent results show that 86.8 per cent of patients felt they have been treated with respect and dignity. All rooms at Highgate are en-suite and the centre scored ‘good’ for environment and ‘excellent’ for food and ‘excellent’ for privacy and dignity in our 2010 PEAT (Patient Environment Action Team) assessment.”