Articles About The Centre

I made a visit to the Arbours Crisis Centre in Crouch End this week. Clients are referred here from all over the country, nay world.

Arbours is an establishment working in the mental health sphere which doesn't fit - doesn't fit into categories thatwould encourage the Government, Haringey Council or any specific body to fund it. And yet it does valuable work and has a world-wide reputation.

I was ushered into a lounge with comfy sofas, tea laid out and a golden-coloured dog. The therapists and clients came and sat and talked to me about the place. I couldn't tell who was who to start - which is certainly a good sign of treatment working well!

It is modelled on being a house - or as near to a normal house as is possible. Clients and therapists live together in the house. The days are filled with individual or group work. The clients have keys and can come and go at will.

Arbours concentrates on relationships - and clearly has highly devoted and committed therapists working to bring those who have had long malfunctions with the world we know back into it - with some success. It can only take six clients, maximum, at a time.

Being so outside the box of traditional mental health treatment approaches, funding is a struggle. And perhaps of even more concern is the Government being unable to treat them as a one-off. So many targets and programs and initiatives and partnerships and jargon and more jargon - but when an excellent project stares it in the face which doesn't fit the bureaucratic boxes, the Government is so often like a rabbit stuck in headlights, frozen in action and not knowing what to do.

It's a bit like Red Gables. This is a fantastic family centre also in Crouch End which Labour councillors want to close. The Government is funding 18 new child centres in the borough - but because Red Gables is in the 'wrong' area and doesn't fit the criteria precisely - rather than make Red Gables on of the eighteen and celebrate this exemplar facility, they plan to close it down. Local campaigners (and the Ham & High) are fighting hard to prevent this happening.

Red Gables and Arbours seem to be two facets of the same problem - they are much loved and successful services, but they don't fit the central Labour model of what should be done where and how - and so the funding flows elsewhere.

I don't (yet) know enough in detail about the Arbours Crisis Centre to be sure of the right way forward, but with so many problems with the provision of mental health facilities, it seems daft to not be supporting one like this. The original idea of "care in the community" had many good points - getting rid of those Dickensian type near jail like facilities for people who need treatment not gaol. But so often, the question now is, "where is the care?".

The reopening - thanks to two years of campaigners' efforts, of Canning Crescent, one of the two mental health day care centres which Haringey closed is a step in the right direction but it opened being able to support far fewer residents than before.

When Parliament comes back in the autumn - and ministers are available again for questioning and prodding in the chamber, I want to pursue these issues.