WELCOME TO SUICIDE TOWN
Life and death in the UK’s crisis capital
Years ago, someone scrawled a message in searing red spray paint on the walls of the old Corby bus station. It read, ‘Welcome to hell.’
Today that sign is gone, the old bus station bulldozed away. But still the sentiment of the message remains. It’s here, on the high street that creeps up on you like the cold winter; a place where there’s no noise or commotion, but instead sun-faded paint peels off vacant shopfronts. It’s here, where the canopies of unused market stalls flick in the wind, and locals rattle around in a street far too big for them to fill. At one end, a funeral home; at the other, past betting shops and recruitment agencies, a job centre and a bingo hall.
You may not have heard of Corby. It’s a town in the East Midlands, home to around 62,000 people. Its most famous export is – or was – steel. But its industrial prowess is a thing of the past and now it’s famous for something else entirely. Last year Corby became known as “the suicide capital of the UK”, a place where the suicide rate has climbed significantly higher than the national average.* That moniker quickly took flight in the press and online. And then, just like that, it was gone. The flash of exposure dissipated as quickly as it had formed. But what about the town that was left behind? As I step off the 3.47pm train into Corby, I ask myself, how did we let the situation here get so bleak? And what, if anything, can we learn from it? Tia’s eyes focus pointedly on the far corner of the room, her hands leading the pace of her story as she tells me about the times where, standing in her kitchen, she would peer down the length of her torso and think of the ways in which she could destroy herself.“I’d be cooking dinner and I’d think,‘Just do it, get it over and done with.’ I knew how I wanted to, but I think fear stopped me. My thoughts were so loud. It was constant.” There’s a certain familiarity to Tia’s telling of this story. For her, sitting here in a counsellor’s office – clutching cups of too-strong tea interrupted only by the far-off sound of traffic – is like déjà vu. Now 35, she has suffered from anxiety and depression since she was 16. This is her second time returning to counselling, and she doesn’t think it’ll be her last.
“I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone I had mental health issues; that there’d be someone waiting to take my job. Because of the mass unemployment in this area, you always have that fear, so you go back to work before you’re ready and you just get worse. It’s a never-ending cycle,” she shrugs.
“About eight months in, my body simply took over. I began having panic attacks. I got temporary paralysis; I couldn’t get out of bed. I kept falling in and out of consciousness. I’d wake up fearful, then pass out and not know I’d been sleeping. It was terrifying.”
Tia is happy-looking, with manicured nails and red lipstick. She’s a flight attendant: ambitious and articulate. In a society that is only just learning to open up, she is exactly the kind of person whose mental health problems are met with confusion, and questions like “But you don’t look depressed?”
BROKEN PROMISES
On the outskirts of Corby there used to be a large, decrepit grey sign reading WonderWorld Theme Park. The sign
appeared in 1984 and with it came promises from wealthy developers that WonderWorld would rival Disneyland, and bring the community 23,000 jobs by the year 2000. But three years later, the news emerged that the money had dried up.“WonderWorld” spent the next two decades as a building site. This came like a sucker punch to a town that had long been defined by the closure of its steel works in the ’80s, a move which hurled a third of its residents into unemployment. Today the level of unemployment sits at 4.9% – higher than the rest of Northamptonshire and the UK average.†
“That tells you everything, doesn’t it?” Corby-born-and-bred comedian Alexandra Haddow, 31, tells me. “WonderWorld was symptomatic of how the whole place felt; you were promised change but it always fell through. So eventually people just stop hoping for it. As a child I grew up with the mentality that you get out as soon as you can… you do well in school so that you can get out. That’s what you aim for.”
It was only when Alexandra did get out, moving to Leeds for university, that she realised just how isolated her hometown was.
“People I met [at university] talked about travelling over the summer and how they’d paid for it by working in restaurants. That was my first indication that the
“Eventually people just stop hoping for change”
life we had wasn’t what everyone else had; we didn’t even have any restaurants to work in.
“When you’re in it, it’s so hard to see how bad it is, so when I left and came to realise that other places had something going for them, I started thinking that there should be more anger. It’s demoralising and hopeless.”
Alexandra takes to the stage night after night to do stand-up comedy, so she is no stranger to discomfort. And yet even she can’t shake off how her hometown makes her feel. Her sister, who still lives in Corby, is a paramedic and sees firsthand the effects of a community plunged into struggle. When Alexandra talks to her about the deprivation she sees when she visits Corby, her sister tells her, “You have no idea, no idea at all.”
A COMMUNITY IN NEED
While chatting to the locals, I noticed something. Every time I mentioned the topic of mental health or suicide, whoever I was speaking to had some kind of connection to it. Whether they knew someone with mental health problems, had lost someone to suicide or had also tried to take their own lives, they all had a story to tell.
For Dan, a rakish man with doe eyes and a voice so quiet and gentle I strain to hear him, it was someone in his family. He fiddles with his phone as he moves the conversation along
without telling me who, exactly, it was. It seems as though it had shocked him, that he’d had no idea how low that person was feeling – and Dan wasn’t ready to face up to that just yet. “Round here, the attitude to coping is just ‘have a drink and a line and then you’ll be alright,’” he says, avoiding eye contact. That’s how he was expected to cope after losing his job and finding that life just fell away from him.
Talking to friends, Dan says, isn’t really an option, “They’d probably just take the mick, people don’t know I’m getting help.” For a long time, Tia felt the same: “During one of my worst episodes, I remember crying, hiding in the bedroom from my husband. I couldn’t get up or go to work. He wanted me to get help, but all I knew was that I couldn’t speak about it.”
It was Teamwork Trust who stepped in when Tia needed it most, offering her counselling when she came to them after months of torment. This local mental health charity rallies round to pick up the slack of underfunded, overworked local services .“Increasingly we see people who have suffered with trauma and abuse and those with chronic mental ill-health and mental illness,” says Jackie Sawford, a counsellor for the charity .“Previously that would have been looked after by the NHS but, as their resources decrease, the number of people coming to us rises.”
Jackie typifies the ethos of this and many other charities in the area: never-endingly kind with a palpable desire to show this community that someone is there for them. But the charity is also under strain, with money from grants covering just a proportion of the counselling costs. It scrapes together support from sources like the National Lottery and local supermarkets donating profits from the plastic bag charge. There is a constant pressure hanging over them to find funds to keep the free and critically important counselling service buoyant. Because if not them, then who?
After just three days here, anxiety is curling its claws around my own mind. I feel isolated; abandoned at the end of the line in a town without a pulse. For Dan, Tia and many others in Corby, a sense of security is not just about having a job, home or community. It’s also about having room for loss or mistake. The sense that there is no margin for error hangs over this town like a fog. It has created a feedback loop of unpredictability that leaves many in a constant state of hypervigilance; the ideal breeding ground for familiar villains – anxiety and depression – to thrive.
Problems in Corby continue because they can’t be boiled down to a single factor. From the lack of secure employment to the squeezed resources and political neglect, Corby is being suffocated by pressure from all directions, gradually cutting off the
“‘Have a drink and a line’ is the attitude to coping”
air supply to this town and its people. But it’s not just Corby; the issues faced here could easily grip any community in the same way, because we are a nation in psychological crisis. One in four young women has a mental health problem,* one in 15 people has made a suicide attempt in their life,† and in the past decade, antidepressant prescriptions have doubled.‡ People recount their experiences with mental ill-health online so frequently that you would be forgiven for thinking the taboo surrounding it had long been smashed. And yet, in the UK, there are still 300,000 people with long-term mental health problems who allege discrimination.** Since 2010, funding to mental health services has been cut by almost £600 million†† and the treatment gap has increased to the point that 75% of those suffering with a mental health problem don’t receive help.‡‡ Despite taking up 23% of NHS activity, only 11% of NHS budget is assigned to mental health-related issues.
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
On a sleepy street 30 minutes from the town centre, Teamwork Trust’s weekly support group, Men’s Shed, is in full swing. It’s been three weeks since these local men last met to do woodwork and discuss their mental health, so today’s session is like a reunion.
A tall man with a baritone voice and neatly ironed shirt clears his throat to speak. He begins cautiously: “We all have different issues, but we support each other. If Teamwork didn’t exist, we’d all be lost.” The four men around him nod and one with long hair chips in: “As soon as these guys turn up, my life turns around. It’s like a family.” There is more nodding. More chatter. Suddenly the man on my right speaks up: “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Teamwork Trust.” A Mexican wave of agreement cascades through the room, and I am struck that in this walled-off corner of an old warehouse, in the company of this supportive network, I can see the glimmer of a future for “suicide town”. If only everyone could get a bit more help to access it.
As my train leaves Corby station, I am both relieved and saddened to be going home. Absent-mindedly, I open Instagram and start scrolling. A slew of long, unprovoked monologues in so many of the captions floods my feed; people are talking constantly about their mental health, airing their “demons” and urging us all to do the same. But if the past week has taught me anything, it’s that just because we see the conversation happening online, on our favourite TV shows and in influencer vlogs, that does not mean it’s happening everywhere. Or that those who need help have somewhere to go, even if they do open up. Our collective mental health is worsening, and towns like Corby are on the front line; barometers for our future, if we don’t act soon. Tia says it best: “One of the main reasons I go to counselling is for my daughter. I don’t want history to repeat itself.”
◆ If you’re struggling, call Samaritans for free on 116 123