Catering for mentally ill

Pleased though I was - to read in The Wokingham Paper that the old Nights Inn B&B is to be turned into a hostel for the homeless (August 17), if it is, as indicated, to cater for families, then that is yet another facility now closed to the single, homeless, mentally ill.

They have lost the London Road hostels, the Hornbeam flats, the Reading Road Day Centre, and now, the Nights Inn B&B.

How good Wokingham Borough Council’s services are – depends on your client group. Schools – brilliant – the best in the UK! Services for the elderly – marvellous! I have taken vulnerable, elderly, mentally ill people to Shute End, and had them accommodated there, and then – on the same day!

Wokingham has a lot of accommodation for the elderly – so they get choice, as well.

But of services for single people between the ages of 25 and 65 – not so good. No doubt, this age group are expected to be working, and providing everything for themselves. I agree that they should be working, but, if mentally ill, in sheltered work, and their housing should be staffed – just as the new Broadway Hostel is to be.

Mentally ill people – who were formerly residents of the London Road Hostels, or of the Hornbeam staffed flats – are lucky not to be homeless. They report that the ordinary flats in the community – into which they have moved – are perfectly all right – just as flats. What they miss is the support from staff.

Our charity’s finances always remind me of that old Bible story – ‘Elijah and the Widow’s Cruse’. Your young readers may not know what a cruse is – like the schoolboy who wrote – ‘Elijah took a widow on a cruise!’ It is a pot! We scrape around in the bottom of the pot, and always find enough money to pay for what the mentally ill person, in crisis, needs. God knows how we do it, but we do! If the person can’t get immediate NHS treatment, we send them to the private, and expensive, Cardinal Clinic - in Windsor. I had just posted the cheque for one – earlier

this week, and, crossing the road back to the crisis house, found that a large donation had just

arrived in the post – more than covering the Clinic’s fee. Elijah and the widow have got nothing on us!

We have paid for people to stay in all the Wokingham B&Bs, but the one that we used most frequently, was the old Nights Inn. Mayfair it wasn’t, and ‘breakfast’ existed only in its name, but, as well as being close to all the services, including ours, it was cheap! When you were freezing to death on the streets in January and February, it was a case of ‘Any port in a storm!’ The other B&Bs are infinitely better, but are also infinitely more expensive.

It is good news that the local community is accepting the new Broadway House Hostel for the Homeless, and not seeing it as a stigma. I shall hail the day when the same can be said of services for the mentally ill! Pam Jenkinson, The Wokingham Crisis House