Urgent plea for safe and secure psychiatric facility in Caithness
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An urgent plea has gone out for a safe and secure psychiatric facility to be created in Caithness to cope with the area's growing mental health crisis.
Campaign group No More Lost Souls maintains that mental health is a bigger problem in the county than Covid-19, based on the number of suicides. Its members are seeking to reduce the stigma surrounding the subject.
Group chairman Steven Szyfelbain claims mental health provision has been downgraded at New Craigs Psychiatric Hospital in Inverness, while insisting that in any case the journey to the Highland capital has proved "a step too far" for many Caithness people in desperate need of help.
Members are calling for a suitable unit to be established in Wick by adapting one of the town's empty buildings. At the very least, they say, there is a need for two dedicated psychiatrists working full-time locally within the GP system.
Steven founded No More Lost Souls last summer following the death by suicide of a friend. He said the number of people in Caithness taking their own lives over the past year amounted to "almost a little mini-pandemic in itself".
The 31-year-old from Wick has made a series of impassioned videos about mental health on the group's Facebook page.
“I started it off with a letter that I wrote directly to the Scottish Government," he explained. "At that point there had been three Covid deaths [in Caithness] and at the moment I believe that’s the same as of this year, versus five suicides.
"If you do that as a percentage that shows there is a bigger mental health problem than there is a Covid problem.
A lot has been a result of things being downgraded and this dreaded centralisation to Inverness, as if nothing exists beyond that part of the Highlands.
“When I spoke to one of the mental health nurses, she basically said that Wick and Thurso and the surrounding areas have been seen as a deprived area for 25 years. That’s an entire generation. That’s failure.
“Children have been born, have grown up and have started their own families and things still aren’t getting better. A lot of that has been a result of things being downgraded and this dreaded centralisation to Inverness, as if nothing exists beyond that part of the Highlands."
Plans for a Caithness Mental Wellbeing Pathfinder Project were announced in December at a special meeting of Highland Council's Caithness Committee. The idea was to bring together statutory services, the third sector, politicians, community representatives, families and young people "to move forward in a connected way".
The Scottish Government provided the council with a grant of £534,000 to support young people’s mental health and wellbeing post-Covid, and also gave £178,000 to plan and prepare for the development of community mental health and wellbeing services for five to 24-year-olds, their families and carers. The local Pathfinder initiative is now being rebranded as Caithness Cares and has a project board in place.
“Ultimately the one thing that we would love is a safe and secure mental health facility like New Craigs," Steven said. "But this is in an ideal world where you’d need a lot more funding than £178,000.
“We’ve got a lot of empty buildings here. We’ve got the old high school, we’ve got the old job centre – they are just going to wrack and ruin at the moment.
“With a little bit of funding you could happily get a couple of beds in either of them and in distance terms they’re relatively close to the hospital. We’ve had a lot of people for whom the journey to New Craigs has just been a step too far. For us up here it’s an isolation problem.
"If you want something that’s on a more realistic level, what we would like to see are at least two dedicated psychiatrists full-time here in Caithness, embedded within the GP system, because it has been a decade without a full-time psychiatrist."
He added: "It is a result of everything being downgraded. You can’t expect to take something away and then to have that burden shouldered by an overwhelmed system."
A spokesperson for NHS Highland said: "New Craigs has not been downgraded but there has been a reduction in overall beds to ensure we have a red area for Covid. We are holding more appointments on Near Me due to safety measures that have been put in place and all other services continue. Face-to-face services are available at New Craigs and in the community in Caithness.
"We are working on a number of developments for the future, including enhancing mental health support in both primary care and urgent care services. We are also working in collaboration with the community, partner organisations and mental health service colleagues in Caithness to ensure that we fully understand the local needs as we plan for the future.
"We continue to actively recruit and have had some recent success with the appointment of an urgent and emergency mental health nurse to improve unscheduled care pathways in Caithness."
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