Newspaper Articles About The Centre

The months of winter, preceded by the weeks leading up to Christmas, introduce the cold dark season of suicide. The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing in 1897, observed that the suicide rate increased from January to June. He also found that there were as many categories of suicide as there are methods. In England and Wales the number of suicides is more than 5,000 per annum with a current 3.5 per cent increase. The statistics raise, the inevitable question, which is, of course, why do we do it?
One idea is that the pursuit of affluence can create a very strict and sterile society. Thus Switzerland has a high rate of suicide, Greece the world's lowest. A recent report by the Office of Health Economies makes one thing very clear: 90 per cent of suicides had been suffering from depression, often aggravated by alcohol.
But what causes depression? I might suggest that it is largely due to a lack of love and empathy, vital both to the individual and to the community; suicide and self-harm are the prices that we must pay for our progress in a materialistic and selfish society. It might then be seen as a re-establishment of the self, for suicide demands great courage and condemning oneself to death is undeniably an exercise in personal power.
Collectively, social suicides act out the deep-rooted fears, the insecurity or the power-aims of society as a whole.
The family circle is a microcosm of these social trends where dramas that end in suicide or self-harm are played out. For example, John, a farm manager in the north of England and a seemingly happily married man, deliberately chopped off his little finger with an axe because lie felt that the love and affection that he took for granted had recently been diverted elsewhere. He was rushed to hospital where they treated his hand, and then decided that the main problem was in his head. They wheeled him into the psychiatric unit and gave him a stiff dose of ECT, or 'shock treatment'.
When depression takes the acute form of a nervous breakdown, it becomes an emotional crisis that can have several outcomes - it's a drastic measure to chop off your finger, but it is better than suicide. The depressed representative of the family group usually ends up in the doctor's surgery - £33 million per annum is spent on drugs prescribed by GP's for patients suffering from depression. But there is an alternative to these drastic forms of treatment, a no-drugs, shock-free system of therapy offered by the Arbours Association.
The Association is unique, and through its Crisis Centre in London provides for those suffering from acute depression, anxiety, psychosis and other problems, an escape from immediate circumstances, a refuge coupled with intensive psychotherapy from a team of experts; three therapists who live at the centre and usually a student or two in training. They give each sufferer a crash course in analysis condensing several years of emotional experience. into a few weeks.
The problem, with all its ramifications, is tackled head-on, and carefully analysed - the true reason for the crisis is usually unacknowledged by sufferers and their families, -and therefore un-diagnosed by the family doctor. When anti-depressants and tranquillisers fail to avert an intolerable situation many people withdraw into themselves, becoming agoraphobic, anorexic, or even schizophrenic. Hospital psychiatrists treat these conditions with drugs and ECT which has no long-term effect. Arbours therapists believe that the problem will invariably return, following ECT treatment, because the true cause still remains untreated.
The Arbours Association has found another invariable: a personal crisis cannot be viewed in isolation since it is the result of corrosive and unsound relationships within the family the various members of which contribute to the eventual crisis.
This is why it is important to include the patient's family in the therapeutic. process whenever possible. John's wife, who bad read about the Arbours Association, brought

her husband to the Crisis Centre, along with their new baby. It soon became obvious to the therapists that the self-inflicted injury was the bizarre expression of rage and jealousy at the arrival of the baby, a measure which, like Van Gogh's ear, the husband took in order to focus and maintain attention on himself.
Over the weeks spent at the Centre the couple were encouraged to arrive at this conclusion themselves. 'It is of little value,' said Arbours director, Dr Joseph Berke, 'to force our interpretations on our patients. They must gradually learn to recognize and accept their own motives.' Sufferers who reach the haven of the Crisis Centre may have been referred by a local hospital, by the Social Welfare service, by an enlightened GP, or by personal recommendation. Over a dozen therapists work at the Centre, including Joseph Berke and Morton Schatzman, who together founded the Association, located in a semi-detached house in a residential area of London where patients may stay until the crisis has passed anything from two weeks to three months.
The system works like this: on arrival at the Centre the distraught and sometimes hysterical patient is comforted and taken in hand by a team whose immediate task, as they see it, is to confine and absorb the crisis in all its frightening and violent character, and to act as a calm, understanding, surrogate family.
A typical example of crisis intervention is that of Jenny, an intelligent, attractive and recently divorced woman in her early thirties. Outwardly she had been leading a successful life, happily married, with a job which she enjoyed. A personal crisis developed and she made three attempts to hang herself. She had been referred to the Crisis Centre by a local hospital and came out of desperation since, like so many people, she was ignorant about the nature of psychotherapy, and highly sceptical of its results. At the Centre. there is a relaxed, low-key and comfortable atmosphere, save for those occasions when emotions spontaneously erupt.
On her arrival Jenny was very frightened and very tense. She was also ashamed - shame and pride form a stern and unforgiving partnership in the complex pattern of psychosis.
During the first few sessions at the Centre the therapists encouraged Jenny to gradually describe the events that led her attempts to hang herself. She learned to share her bitter experiences with someone who showed respect for her and encouraged her to form a therapeutic alliance based on empathy. Jenny later told me that for the first time she had something to hold on to. She will not try suicide again.
One objection to the Arbours technique is that the majority of people do not want the fears and weaknesses exposed in a group of strangers - to these the shock of self-awareness is worse than the shock of ECT. Nevertheless, the success rate, is high, patients eventually learn to go home in a rational frame of mind, or to stay at one of the Arbours community centres.
To stay at the Arbours Crisis Centre costs £40 per day, which includes full board and therapy. Some guests pay privately, but where this is not possible. funding may be available through local council grants. The long-term communities charge £98.50 week, and residents are expected to have at least two sessions therapy each week.
Like so many independent, groups, the Arbours Association operates at a considerable difficulty. In recent years a group of London businessmen have formed a registered charity fund called 'Project Arbours' to cover running costs, and to maintain the Crisis Centre, raising some £15,000 per annum. The Association also provides a therapy training programme, directed by Italian psychologist Andrea Sabadini, with so much success that the London Borough Hammersmith is consider sending trainees to learn Arbours therapeutic skills, with a view in operating an independent crisis centre. If this happens, it might herald the foundation of nation-wide network of crisis groups. It should certainly stimulate a dramatic reduction of suicide rate.