One Cut
So I wrote a story about one public sector cut and what happened next. I'm publishing it just here, nowhere else. Here it is:
This is the story of one cut. Back in October 2010 George Osborne announced £95 billion in cuts to public services, saying he’d leave it to councils to choose what to shut down. Inevitably most of the casualties ended up being unrenowned places, unlikely to stir up much protest - drop-in centers in housing estates, inner-city park rangers, community theatres, etc. I wanted to write about just one of them, about the ripples created by a single closure. I made my selection quite randomly. I chose a place called Youthreach. I didn’t know much about them, only that they offered weekly counseling sessions to young people, aged 11–25, in Greenwich, South East London.
April 8th 2011.
Today is the day the Youthreach counselors learn their fate. They knew the council was slashing their funding, but they hoped it might be by 40%, and maybe they could solicit donations from local businesses. But in fact they’re being cut by 100%. £118,000 a year. So it’s over.
“How long before you close?” I ask them.
“Eleven weeks,” says Maria Day, their director. “We’ve been here 25 years and in eleven weeks it’ll be gone.”
We’re sitting in the staff-room, which is nice and brightly decorated. Youthreach is a unit in a row of shops on Delacourt Road.
“What do you think will happen to the kids?” I ask.
“We’re not mind readers,” says one of the therapists, a little sharply, from across the room. “We’re not fortune tellers.”
There’s a cold silence. One of the volunteer counselors explains that many of them had, as children, been helped by places like Youthreach, and now their chance to do the same for others is being snatched away from them.
“We can’t pass them onto anyone,” says Maria. “There’s only one counselor at Family Action. And they mainly just take sexual abuse cases. It’s really narrow.”
Maria says she’ll put the word around, inviting the kids to contact me once the place closes so I can document their post-Youthreach lives.
June 30th.
I log onto Youthreach’s website. It reads ‘Not Found – 404’. Then the emails start coming in.
I don’t hear from the girl Maria had told me about who lives with her mother and “only leaves the house to come to counseling. It takes her so long to psych herself up and get ready sometimes she only comes for five minutes.” But I hear from a dozen others.
There’s Emily, 20: ‘The problem I have with guilt is actually at an extreme level and it interferes with every part of my life. A lot of my thought processes are extremely flawed, which is why counseling helped. I can realize they're flawed if I'm removed from them. The lows – the urge to self-harm – are more persistent again.’
There’s Grace, 16: ‘I really seriously majorly spilt every single one of my thoughts out onto this counseling guy for 10 months, then I just had to say bye.’
There’s Helen, 21: ‘I had my last counseling session on Wednesday. Since then I have been put BACK on anti-depressants, signed off sick from work, and am generally at a very low point. Normally I would be looking to discuss this with my counselor on Wednesday.’
These are people who, if they had a spare £100 a week, could go private. But they don’t. Maria had told me that a typical Youthreach person was not an offender (a lot of Young Offender support teams are being cut around the country) but the opposite: “They care too much, and usually about other people and not themselves.”
July 15th.
I arrange to meet Alicia at the Starbucks near the Cutty Sark, Greenwich. I spot her right away. We order. I get a muffin. She has herb tea.
Alicia was a classic Youthreach person in that she was very sick but just okay enough – measurably okay enough - to not qualify for help from the NHS. It started a year ago, she says. Before that everything was perfectly normal. But then she split up from her boyfriend of five years.
“I was a bit depressed,” she says. ”I didn’t eat a lot. I noticed I’d lost weight and I liked it. So I started going to the gym every day. I’d run to the gym, spend an hour there, and run back. I remember eating half an apple, and I was completely bloated, I couldn’t eat any more.”
“You were 20 then?” I ask.
“Yes, I’m 21 now,” she says. “I started throwing up. I had panic attacks. I lost my fertility. I felt really angry when people told me how thin I was. I thought they were just trying to get me fat. I was, ‘How dare they?’ I got down to five-and-a-half stone, nearly five stone.”
Which was when her mother convinced her to see her GP.
“They did some blood tests,” she says. “They came back on the borderline of okay. I wasn’t so bad that I was nearly dying, so they said they wouldn’t do anything about it unless I went to an institute and internalized myself.”
I’m curious about what the “borderline of okay” means. So later, after I leave Alicia, I call the NHS. They explain that with eating disorders the blood tests are designed to measure the electrolyte - the minerals. When you fall below a certain level a set of NHS protocols click into place. You’re diagnosed, labeled, and offered out-patient care. It’s the same with anxiety disorders. If your anxiety coalesces into something that has a label – OCD, or whatever – there’s procedure. You’re automatically referred to a cognitive behavioral therapist. But if your anxiety swirls amorphously around, label-less, you can fall through the NHS cracks.
That’s where Youthreach used to come in. They were there for the troubled but unlabeled.
“I loved Youthreach,” says Alicia. “I didn’t have to worry about being judged. My counselor made me feel normal at a time when I wasn’t normal in my head.”
Alicia says she’ll be fine. They closed down just as she had got well enough to not need them any more: “I had to get to seven stone for everything to be all right. I’m just over seven stone now. When I went to Youthreach all I wanted was a boyfriend. Now I’m completely the opposite. I’m fine on my own and I keep having to turn people away. But if they’d closed down when I was worse…” She pauses. “I just feel for those people.”
August 9th.
Emily and I arrange to meet at a coffee place in Lewisham. When she walks in she seems like the sort of person you’d assume to be having a great life – young, good looking, Camden-market-type clothes. But then she sits down and starts talking and what comes out is a loop of devastating anxiety. Her brain is all over the place.
She says she’s been suffering her whole life, but the recent big spiral, the one that took her to Youthreach, began in December 2010. She’d left home for University, found she couldn’t handle it, so returned home and got a job in the council offices. One day last December she was at work when she failed to recognize someone she should have. “My eyesight isn’t very good and I’m not very good at facial recognition,” she explains. “She had a proper go at me in the lift.”
So Emily decided to kill herself.
“Because someone shouted at you in the lift?” I ask.
“It made me think, ‘I clearly can’t function in society,’” says Emily. “Throughout my teenage years I was constantly worried about that. I’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s as a child and had a statement of special needs and hated it. I didn’t want to be dependent on other people all my life, but now I was thinking, ‘Here’s the evidence that I can’t cope in society.”
So Emily went down to a railway track. Nothing happened. Some passers-by quickly talked her out of it. The Greenwich NHS determined that - like Alicia with her blood tests - she wasn’t quite bad enough for the Maudsley Hospital: “I don’t meet the criteria because I’m functioning. I’m not at risk at the moment of hurting myself or others.”
So instead she went to Youthreach.
“It was an enormous relief,” says Emily. “Obviously it wasn’t going to make all my issues suddenly vanish because they’re to do with the way I think. But, seriously, it felt really good.”
And then Youthreach closed down.
Emily pushes her shortbread around her plate and tells me about how one irrational thought snakes it’s way around all the other irrational thoughts. The words come too quickly out of her mouth. There’s the riots: “I’m addicted to rolling news, which is literally the worst addiction you can have if you have anxiety problems. I got really on edge and I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t concentrate.”
There’s the fear of cancer: “Everyone jokes about hypochondria. With me it literally takes over my life. I can spend pretty much all day worried I have cancer.”
There’s the social anxiety: “I get paranoid about everyone I know being in this huge conspiracy against me. This gives me rashes so I become convinced I have septicemia. I manage to tire myself out so I hit a depressed stage. The other day someone told me to cheer up and I felt suicidal for the first time in six or seven months.”
She finally falls silent. We’re both exhausted. “I realize my thought processes are extremely flawed,” she says. Then she shrugs to say, ‘But what can you do?’
“I’ve always wanted to stand up on stage and be a singer, but that’s not going to happen,” she says. “I’m young. I’m supposed to be reckless, doing stupid things, having fun. And I can’t.”
She points at her brain, and just manages to stop herself from bursting into tears.
Over the next few weeks I meet other Youthreachers cast adrift. There’s sixteen-year-old Grace, whose fights with her mother have spiraled so epically she’s decided to leave home and move in with a friend: “She’d say, ‘Take a coat.’ I’d say, ‘Mum, I don’t need a coat.’ ‘Yes, you do.’ ‘Blargh!’ It explodes from the smallest thing.”
And Grace does leave home, in September: ‘It is ok but then again it has only been 4 weeks haha,’ her new roommate, a school-friend of hers, emails. ‘It may get a bit more annoying as she is sleeping in my room, haha.’
But I must admit I’m only half-engaging with Grace’s problems because I’m so worried about Emily. Grace seems basically fine – self-assured, strong-willed. Emily struck me as a mess, like a scared passenger in the runaway train of her thought process. Weeks pass before she answers my emails, and when she does write back the emails sound worrying: ‘Sorry, I've been massively out of it for about a week or so.’
She writes that her suicidal thoughts have started again: “I used to think it was normal to make all these elaborate plans about killing yourself. When I was seventeen I’d go to train stations and seriously contemplate jumping. Then, when I started going to Youthreach, I realized it wasn’t normal. But now the lows are persistent again.” She says she’s started daydreaming elaborate suicide plans: “In one plan, to mitigate the effects on my family, I completely estrange myself from them and then pretend I’m missing. I don’t leave a note. And I make it look like an accident, so they don’t blame themselves. It’s disturbing to be thinking about it in that sort of depth.”
She says she’s decided to enroll again in University, even though she doesn’t hold out much hope. She picks one in the North of England. We agree that I’ll visit her there in a month to see how she’s getting on.
October 17th.
Emily and I have arranged to meet in the Student Union, but I can’t see her anywhere. It crosses my mind that things are so bad she’s forgotten about it. But then I see her walking towards me, giving me a small, low, surreptitious wave.
We find a corner. And she starts to talk. Like at the coffee shop in Lewisham the words seem to be coming out too fast. But that’s the only similarity between the two meetings. She is, amazingly, having a really great time.
“Remember I told you how I always liked the idea of being a singer,” she says. “Well the other night I did it for the first time, at a coffee shop in town. I’d planned on completely bombing and I’d never have to sing in public again. But it went REALLY well. I got loads of applause. One of the organizers has offered me a regular slot there.”
She smiles, with happy bewilderment. “I’m really quite overwhelmed at the moment,” she says.
“You’re like a different person,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says. It’s just really bizarre.”
“Is there nothing bad to tell me at all?” I ask.
She pauses for a second. “I can’t really think of any bad stuff,” she says. “There were some stupid interpersonal dramas in the first week but funnily enough I handled them all right. I locked horns with a few people. A lot of the students are Conservative. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, I AM weird,’ it was, ‘Screw you. You’re wrong.’”
“So it turns out you can function in society,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “And also, no one knows!”
“No one knows what?” I ask.
“No one knows I’m autistic!” she says. “So I’m generally feeling quite good about things. I was worried you’d be disappointed that I’m doing so well! But it is genuinely so weird to not have all this stuff going on in your head all the time.” She pauses. “I honestly don’t believe I’d have done any of this if it wasn’t for Youthreach.”
She shows me a text from her mother. It was sent in the aftermath of her successful singing performance. It reads, ‘Hey, you sound so confident and you really know what you're doing.’
She says she’s going to start volunteering in town, helping kids who are suffering from anxiety and depression.
November 22nd.
I send a final email around to everyone to say my story is nearly finished and do they have any last minute updates about their lives. Emily emails back right away. Things have got even better. ‘Weeeeeell. I have a boyfriend? We started seeing each other a few weeks ago. I really like him. Also I got a first in my first assessed essay for university. Spoke to my seminar leader about it and she said it was the highest mark she gave.’
I hear from Grace’s friend – the girl she moved in with: ‘The living together is good,’ she writes. ‘We get on.’
Then Alicia emails. She says there’s no updates in her life, only that she ‘may have just landed a main role in To Kill A Mockingbird, so everything career wise is going really well! Unfortunately I am having issues with my health, weight, body image. I know of course it won't ever fully disappear but seeing as I'm not at my worst state, I am not eligible for help from the doctors, and seeing as services such as Youthreach have been taken away, there is no help.’
I email back to ask what she weighs now.
‘I don't weigh myself because it kind of only spurs things on a bit more,’ she replies, ‘but last time I did, I was about 6 and three quarters stone.’
Then she adds: ‘So weird to hear from you as I was thinking about Youthreach all of last night! I had one of those evenings where I did really miss my counselor. I was trying to think up of ways to thank her. It used to be so nice to have someone to talk to every week.’
ENDS
