A local charity is working hard to redress the great reduction in mental health support 

Austerity measures and widespread funding cuts by the Government have seen much mental health support disappear in recent years. 

A whole host of worrying statistics have appeared as a result: for example, a recent study by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge found that the number of young people attending A & E due to a psychiatric condition doubled by 2014/2015, compared with 2010/2011.

And a report by the children’s charity Spurgeons found that 40 per cent of patients referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in 2016/17 were never assessed.

Mental illness has long been denied the funding and status of physical illness despite it being every bit as devastating, meaning that invariably this sector will be especially vulnerable to any budget cuts. 

Locally, Rosie Staden and Denise Hubble have been painfully aware of the declining fortunes of public mental healthcare in recent years. Both had experience of working in mental health organisations and found that there was a massive gap between those who can and can’t pay for therapy – which is most people, as most therapy is massively expensive. 

“It coincided with a time when there were lots of cuts in Greenwich Borough, for example YouthReach, a therapeutic service for 13 to 25 year-olds. The cuts were huge: 80 people were being seen weekly at YouthReach. It was cut in the government spending review by the coalition government. It had 25 years of experience and knowing it’s clients, and was just gone. Other charities lost their budgets, they were just gone, overnight.”

The widespread cuts led Rosie and Denise to found the Deborah Ubee Trust in 2011, opening for business at their headquarters just off Greenwich High Road in April 2013.

The charity promotes the value of emotional health and well-being by offering therapeutic services to all, irrespective of ability to pay. It offers a range of therapies and holistic treatments, as well as support and training to placement counsellors, and continuing professional development to practitioners.

“We are a counselling charity set up to provide access to emotional health support for people unable to access it, who would not be able to afford to pay,” says Denise. “It’s a wide range to support: anything from sexual abuse to domestic violence, gay or lesbian, child services. We work with all age groups, we’ve helped people aged three to 80 so far.”

“We are a local organisation  providing a really good service to people in the Greenwich and Blackheath area, but also over a wider area,” says Rosie. “We operate with funds either raised ourselves or through fundraising.

“Its a really worthwhile cause. Mental health is very stigmatised, people don’t talk about it very much. And it’s not a cause that attracts huge amounts of donations. We have absolutely no support from government, local government or the NHS.

“This is something we’ve set up because there’s a real need for it. We know there’s a need for it because we get clients referred from lots of other organisations including the NHS and schools, yet we get no funding from those bodies. 

“All our referrals have come form word of mouth, we’ve never paid for any advertising. That shows the level of need. If we advertised we wouldn’t be able to cope with the influx.

“We try to see people before they are in crisis stage – to be preventative. We’re not psychiatrists, we’re not able to diagnose, and we’re not able to prescribe. But we are able to offer talking therapies that get to the crux of the problem, where they might need to access NHS mental health care.”

The Trust offers different types of therapy, not just cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which is what the NHS tends to offer, because it’s more cost effective. The idea is to find the right therapy to help anyone who comes through the door, which could be psycho-dynamic or person-centred therapy, for example. 

There’s play therapy for young children, who communicate much more with play and body language. There’s things like a sand pit, a doll’s house, musical instruments, and puppets. Counsellors use storytelling techniques too.

“It’s very child led, you tend to follow what they’re attracted to,” says Rosie. “There’s lots of metaphor in the work. You can work through the metaphor. Things they do can trigger things they want to talk about in their own lives. With young people we use dance and movement therapy. They work in a bigger space, it’s creative, and it works very well with children with confidence and self esteem issues. We’ve had some fantastic responses with that.

“We aim to break down the taboo on mental health, take away the stigma, make it really accessible,” says Rosie. “Clients can have up to a year of therapy, but usually they have six months. For a lot of reasons our service is completely confidential. We wouldn’t need to tell anyone older than 14. It’s up to them who they tell.”

The Trust sees children who visit instead of seeing the school counsellor. Some young people don’t like talking to a school counsellor as they are not sure how confidential that is. 

“We have a large number of 14-18 year olds who come here without telling their parents or their school,” says Rosie. “That’s one reason we’re so popular. Lots of people don’t want their parents to know they are coming here.

“We were originally going to call it the Greenwich Centre for Emotional Health, but then we thought it was too obvious for what we’re doing. We are far more anonymous by using the name Deborah Ubee Trust [named after a deceased local resident they felt was typical of someone who was unable to access the help she needed and who would have benefitted from the services they offered]. People rent rooms for holistic therapies here so we’re always having people coming in for things like yoga and meditation. We’re tucked away from the main road, and try to be as discrete as possible. Nobody needs to feel stigmatised.”

“Therapy isn’t for everybody,” says Denise. “It’s not always what someone needs but what we both passionately believe is that if you do need it, you should be able to access it without massive barriers.”

The charity took about four years to set up, and needed to find a suitable building to make the project work. They had a list of needs, such as disabled access, and a pleasant  environment for both the counsellors and the clients. Rosie and Denise set the charity up to be as financially stable as possible because they knew it would be difficult to get and sustain funding. 

“The model we’ve used is to be fully sustainable, to make the space as nice as possible so that it would attract private counsellors,” says Rosie. “We rent out space, so the building brings in an income of its own, and sell some services, like training, and that helps fund most salary costs. It’s an idea that is very copyable: it’s very hard to fund mental health. The NHS budget for mental health is pitiful, it’s a massive problem.

“We’ve done it on a small scale and I think we’ve done it well. If local government can find buildings to do the same thing, it is a very cost-effective way to access people who need help. There are loads of big developments going up all over the country, where there’s a small amount of token housing built into it, but what might be an idea is a requirement to provide space in these big blocks of flats as a community centre or a centre like ours. 

“Qualified counsellors could run it in a similar way as we do here. Because what we’re very aware of is that we have a huge geographical remit. We get clients from Beckenham, Bromley, Southwark, Surrey, a few from north of the Thames. They shouldn’t have to travel so far, they should be able to access support in their own areas. We always have a waiting list of people wanting to access our services, and this shouldn’t be happening.”

However, the Trust also relies heavily on fundraising and donations. Supporters run marathons, have comedy nights, hold art auctions and quiz nights.

“If anyone locally wanted to doing any fundraising for us in any capacity at all it would make a huge difference to us,” says Rosie. “A small amount of money can make a big difference to someone’s life. For example, raising £50 pays the supervision costs for 10 sessions of counselling. Although our counsellors are volunteers, we have overheads and running costs, and supervision costs for them.”

Says Denise: “We have lots of ideas to expand but do not have the funding. Most urgently, we need to cut down our waiting lists. If people have plucked up the courage to ring and are then told there’s a waiting list of a few months, it’s not what they need to hear. Our long term plan is to double the number of clients we see each week. We want to do a lot more outreach to target people who wouldn’t normally access therapy, to run workshops on how people can reduce stress. We have loads of plans but we cannot grow without more funding.”

The Deborah Ubee Trust, 20 Egerton Drive, Greenwich, London SE10 8JS; 020 8305 6460; thedeborahubeetrust.org.uk