On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the closure of Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community

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https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-preserve-the-memory-of-the-henderson

Alexander     Dost thou not know that I am able to give thee a kingdom?

Diogenes      I know thou art able, if I had one, to take it from me; and I shall never place any value on that which such as thou art can deprive me of. …

Alexander     … for which purpose thou hast forsworn society, and art retired to preach to trees and stones.

Diogenes      I have left society, because I cannot endure the evils I see and detest in it.

From “A Dialogue between Alexander the Great, and Diogenes the Cynic” by Henry Fielding (1743)

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On 23 April 2008 at 2.00pm, a certain NHS Mental Health Trust closed the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community on a ‘temporary’ basis – pleading or otherwise peddling the usual piddling managerialist alibis and nostrums.

Even if you weren’t there, you can guess the sort of thing they said. What’s a fellow to do, we were – and are still – invited to consider, when he runs a big business and he can’t secure his cash flow? Our hands are tied. It’s no longer financially viable … and so forth … (if you can bear to look, some of it is laid out in the southwark.gov weblink listed at the bottom here). It’s been the same old song, for many years now, and it never lets up (or lets on) (or lets anyone off) and at some point you just know you’re going to hear those two dread words – ‘luxury flats’ – and another expanse of the Attlee/Bevan post-WW2 welfare settlement will have gone down with all hands on deck and the officers in the lifeboat, to the sound of cash tills singing ‘ker-ching!’ and developers popping corks – and also, somewhere at the edge of audibility, the continuing suffering of the marginalised and traumatised and dispossessed and excluded …

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I was there. A bit player: not one of the residents, or the residential team; not one of the potential candidates for admission suddenly denied an opening – but I was there through the death-throes of the community and I was there the day it was finally evacuated and boarded up. I was working for the Henderson Outreach Service team: it was my first NHS job. I started there in April 2001 and was there for seven eye-opening, humbling, almost overwhelming years that educated and moulded me as a person, as a citizen, as a mental health practitioner and as a psychotherapist. I then joined the massed ranks of the redeployed – an ongoing upheaval still playing out its consequences a decade down the line, in a minor but nonetheless sharply-pointed echo of and parallel process to the upheaval endured by those residents and candidates.

This is not all about me – but I do want to say how vividly I remember my first contact with the Democratic Therapeutic Community (DTC). As part of the interview process I was invited to attend the 9.15 community meeting. I was intensely anxious. Staff and residents congregated in this long rectangular space, dark in my memory but lit by windows and glass doors all along the long side facing the garden and full of assorted faded and shabby but snug and inviting furniture and fittings of the sort that nowadays would have the corporate drones diving for their alarm buttons on about 57 grounds of violation of health and safety edicts (NB this and other photos in this blog were taken the day the hospital closed, by the way) …

Henderson April 2008 006

Visitors were participant observers in the community meeting but active verbal participation was strictly limited to stating one’s name and business when asked and otherwise to remain silent. It’s an old cliché of the DTC, but it was not an easy matter – and why should it have been? – to distinguish staff from residents by any visual cues, and this is one of the things I remember so well: the disorienting (transformative) almost visceral experience of stepping out of the world of vertical hierarchy and rigid structure and into a liminal space where everything seemed to be up for negotiation in a flattened (not entirely flat, but flattened) hierarchy. And the other memory I retain is how excluded I felt: I was wrong, somehow, wrong to the very core of me; I did not understand, there was a language and vocabulary whose key I did not possess; I felt received but not welcomed.

I quickly came to perceive that in this way some fragment of the experience of the residents had been located in me, or I had identified with, as though this community had a sign above the door that said “do not abandon hope, all ye who enter here, but check your privilege, interrogate the quality of your own hospitality and get your head around what it’s like to feel excluded and outcast, and that right speedily, because this is the emotional work we do here and it matters very much” – or something like that, and I’m sure that anyone who lived there for the allotted year would be able to come up with something decidedly more pithy and concise…

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This is not about me and it is also not about recording a formal history of the unit: plenty of other places where that can be researched. But in case you don’t know what all this is about, I’d want to include you in! The Henderson DTC was in its sixty-first year of existence when it was closed. It therefore just pre-dated the inception of the National Health Service. It opened in 1947 essentially as a trauma unit, for ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers struggling to reintegrate back into civilian life after the end of World War Two. It went through changes of identity and changes of location over the years – and changes of funding, especially in the wake of the advent of the ‘internal market’ but if you want to know what people remember and mourn, when the Henderson DTC model is evoked, it is this:

  • Staff had no control over admission and discharge of residents inside the maximum stay of one year
  • Admission was by majority vote of a group of nine residents and three staff members – early departure from treatment depended on the vote of the whole community (in which residents always outnumbered staff)
  • There was no use of psychotropic medication permitted or prescribed
  • There was no coercive psychiatry or medico-legal technologies involved – no use of the Mental Health Act (or Probation Orders or conditions of residence or restriction orders of any kind) – no curfews, no restraints – as far as is possible to sustain in the UK of the late twentieth and very early twenty-first centuries, residents entered and stayed of their own free will
  • There were no ‘one to one’ psychological therapies available but a range of therapy groups, work groups and community meetings, which latter could be called at any time, day or night, if an issue affecting the whole community demanded the community’s whole attention

The American social anthropologist Robert Rapoport studied the Henderson Hospital in the 50s and in 1960 reported that four key characteristics defined the therapeutic milieu of the then twelve-bedded unit (when I joined in 2001, there were 27 beds as well as two other ‘replicated’ communities of similar size, in Crewe (Webb House) and in Birmingham (Main House)). These four characteristics Rapoport identified as democratisation, communalism, permissiveness, and reality confrontation. Transposed to the late period Henderson DTC model, these four ideas relate to major decisions all being taken by majority vote; to the ethos (‘communalism’) of staff and residents sharing with one another all the tasks and processes of daily living in a flattened hierarchy, with conventional roles consciously blurred; to the principle (‘permissiveness’) that there were no transgressions but only enactments, in that there were plenty of ‘house rules’ prohibiting all kinds of violence but it was understood that residents were not expected immediately or magically to relinquish safety practices (such as practices of self-injuring) that had got them to the door; and finally (‘reality confrontation’), to the principle that permissiveness did not preclude challenging the individual to understand that within the communal frame his or her actions had an impact on the rest of the community – and that by engaging in a given safety practice (slamming a door in frustration, for example) it was understood that distress had been expressed but that the individual had still placed themselves thereby outside the (conceptual) boundary of the community and would need to ask the community’s blessing to ‘come back in from the cold’ and to continue their emotional work (again, others may be able to put this into words better than can I who worked mostly at the edge of this system).

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Elsewhere, I have written in perhaps more moderate and balanced tones about the demise of Henderson Hospital and looked at some of the ways in which the DTC  in its defiant persistence may ultimately have contributed to its own dénouement:

“The Henderson DTC … not only represented an affront as well as a reproach to the over-use and abuse of medico-legal technologies deployed by the conventional psychiatric services for trauma and social exclusion that surrounded it: it also rather enjoyed actively poking its thumb in that system’s eye and should not perhaps have been so surprised when it eventually got thumped for its pains.” (Adlam, article in preparation)

“The Henderson’s own fraught relationship with the system of care … perhaps meant that it found itself too closely identified and ‘damned by association’ with the troubled, anti-social outsiders and misfits who were its client group.” (Adlam and Scanlon, 2013)

But what is a blog for, if not for engaging in familiar safety practices – which, in my case, right now, may well mean slamming a door, or even breaking a window or two? In the permissive culture of the therapeutic milieu, it’s understood one can’t be, would not want to be ‘reasonable’ all the time. Confront me, o reader, with reality – but not just yet, if that’s okay … because it’s ten years since Henderson was closed, and I am still influenced and shaped and inspired by my experience then and in the aftermath of its closure and I’m still mourning its loss but most of all at this the tenth anniversary (give or take a week or two of assembling my thoughts) I am really very deeply furious that it was shut down. I read through contemporaneous accounts of the closure process (some of which weblinks I’ve included as references below) and it still makes me furious. And I’m furious to feel that, provocative, even Diogenesque, though we may have been, nonetheless, some of the Alexanders of the field (not those many allies who stood alongside us, but those arbiters and authorities who stood by) did not come to our aid, or came too late, or came with weasel words, when eventually they rocked up outside our barrel…

Most of all, I’m angry because I keep encountering people who I feel would have found hope in the idea of the availability of the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community as a national specialist resource for traumatised and dislocated souls – and for whom that hope has simply not been available. That door has closed – like so many other doors.

People have died.

Who knows if they would still be alive, if they’d made it into the DTC? No-one can know this. And not everyone who did spend time at Henderson felt helped by it. But austerity and managerialism are violent and mendacious discourses and so let’s not get confused. Of course we could afford to keep the Henderson open. We could then and we could now. Spare me all that crap about cross-subsidies. The annual budget of the Henderson was about a third the cost of a Challenger tank (well, I’m approximating this detail off the top of my head, but that’s the joy of a blog, and you get the point I’m making).

In 2001 the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. They felt, so it seems to me, that the Buddhas constituted the wrong sort of evidence base and they hated how much those giant artefacts were revered by those whose hearts and minds they were determined to dominate. The closure of the Henderson was, on a much smaller scale, an analogous act of irrevocable cultural vandalism. I sympathise then with Fielding’s Diogenes, who forswears society because he cannot abide the evils he perceives in it.

We can’t just start up a campaign to re-open the Henderson. It’s gone. It leaves a hole in the fabric of the body politic that can never be repaired.

References/weblinks

Adlam, J. & Scanlon, C. (2013) ‘On agoraphilia: a psychosocial account of the defence and negotiation of public/private spaces’, Forensische Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, 20 (3), 209-227.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261759145_’On_agoraphilia_a_psychosocial_account_of_the_defence_and_negotiation_of_publicprivate_spaces’

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dialogue_between_Alexander_the_Great,_and_Diogenes_the_Cynic

http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/Data/Health%20and%20Adult%20Care%20Scrutiny%20Sub-Committee/20080227/Agenda/Closure%20of%20HendersonHospital.pdf

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/mental-hospital-closure-plan-is-condemned-as-inhumane-765690.html

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2008/05/27/henderson-hospital-staff-and-residents-fight-to-reverse-closure/

https://www.leighday.co.uk/News/Archive/2008/April-2008/Henderson-Hospital-closes-today—a-failure-by-the

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7144686.stm

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/apr/16/mentalhealth

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70 thoughts on “On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the closure of Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community”

  1. Hello John
    I, too, have been mourning the loss of the Henderson more in the last few months, aware of the decade since we ‘temporarily’ closed and the last residents had to leave. I have never stopped mourning its loss. I felt like I was working somewhere very special, somewhere that challenged residents and staff alike. The power of the residents to help each other was inspiring and I, too, have wished many times that the resource was still there for others I have met along the way.
    Thanks for sharing your memories.
    Diana

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  2. Such an interesting article! Despite not having anything to do with psychiatry, I spent the 90s studying in Trieste (Italy), where the influence of  Basaglia was ( is?) still tangible: the different wards and areas of the psychiatric hospital were located in pads, scattered around a park on a hill in the city; there also used to be a radio ( maybe it is still there) that organised great parties and gigs in the bar and park and even the guests (patients)took part. They were involved in what was going on, and belonged to cooperatives which took care of gardening and other activities. I loved the idea of allowing them to have a quasi normal life, and found Basaglia’s approach revolutionary.  Thus, your article on Henderson Hospital and the way it was run absolutely fascinates me! So many things are changing for the worse, it is vital to preserve the memory of such things and let as many people know about it! I hope you don’t mind me sharing!

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    • Hi Maria, it was amazing after your comment on Basaglia to go to a conference in Belfast last week and hear Italian psychiatrists report on what they said was the business of finishing off what Basaglia began, by closing down the forensic hospitals as well (these had remained when the general psychiatric hospitals closed…) The forensic secure hospitals have been replaced by a new generation of smaller and less restrictive units of 12-20 beds called ‘REMs’ and by extended community provision. It’s not the end of coercion, though – but it represents an impressive systemic reconfiguration and reallocation of resources…whether Italy is ready for the revolution, is not clear: the waiting list of referrals for REM beds is very long, apparently, suggesting that the Criminal Justice System is still reaching in reflex for the secure solution, like a man with a phantom leg…

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  3. Hi John,

    As you know very well I wasn’t there at the end – although had dedicated previous, precious 8 years – the best years – of my career to the work. My, less-told bit-story, is that I had left 12 months prior to the closure (without a job …) because I hadn’t the stomach to go down without a proper fight …

    In all probability HH was doomed anywhichway because of the thoughtless thugs who were (de)comissioning it, and the ‘snakes in the grass’ who should have been friends – who also shoved in their brutal/us knives – whom I shall never forgive – nor, just in case you are reading, shall I ever forget. Although in truth I don’t think you ever knew what you did – do you?

    Our “friend’” argument was that we didn’t need residential treatment service because it could all be done in out- and day-patient services (which they just happened to be running) – but they were wrong, very wrong, because now most of their services have also gone – and NHS England has re-established an Advisory Group about the need for new residential treatment service because they couldn’t meet the need.

    The advised new service which is very unlikely to be commissioned of course, must now have some empty 3-letter acronym, MBT, DBT, CBT in order to be considered to have ‘good evidence’. After all there was no good evidence for DTC treatment was there? (By the way for those less familiar with the ‘evidence-debate’ – I was being ironic, in fact, the evidence for DTC was judged to be ‘very promising’ – which is top of the chart anyway).

    It may also be worth noting, in passing at least, that part from a few beds in the Cassel Hospital, at the present time ALL other Tier 4 treatment for people with complex psychosocial trauma (aka Personality disorder?) is being offered by the Private sector (perhaps this was the cunning plan all along – absolutely no irony intended). Just in case any reader thinks that I making this up – just let me say that this history is so ridiculous and unbelievable that None could possibly make it up!

    But the main reason I left was that I thought it better (for us – not only me) to die with boots on, to go down with the ship, and other such romantic notions, but the majority of my other perhaps less-passionate, or less romantic colleagues in the senior management team preferred to try to appease and negotiate with these thugs, snakes and fools – and so unable to find a place for myself in this strategy I felt obliged to resign.

    I often wonder if my more polite friends and colleagues in the management team – all of whom retained their jobs – and underwent “death by a thousand cuts” regret not getting stuck in to a proper dirty fight … because as I say we were probably doomed either way …

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    • I consider my non-resignation one of my more major failures of courage in my career – though I also regret failing to extend the contest by joining others in the scheme to Occupy the building after the unit closed, as was briefly, but strongly, the preferred option at the time…

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  4. Having worked at the Henderson from 2003 to its forced closing alongside you and the many staff and residents, this really touched me. I wanted to say how moved I was to read this. It was so resonant to me, capturing such a similar experience to my “visitor” day with candidates. What you’ve written recalls the quality of the work and of being at the Henderson which seemed so elemental — that it really reverberated through the human experience. At least for me it accurately captures our shared group experience across time. Thank you.

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  6. Hi
    I enjoyed reading your blog I am an ex Henderson resident from 1993-1994 I have fond, happy, sad memories but ultimately this place saved my life. It’s been nearly 25years since I left and it still remains in my subconscious mind. I dream about the place often. I have a life worth living now and Henderson contributed to that. It just so sad that it no longer exists and the government and nhs pay out far more now trying to manage service users who should be in the Henderson.
    I am thinking about setting up a Facebook page for ex residents. Wondered if I could borrow the photos from the blog to put on the group pages

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    • Hi Charlotte, thanks so much for your feedback and I am very glad you made contact. The wordpress notification gave a yahoo email address for you – is it okay to write to you about your FB idea using that address? Very best wishes. John

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  7. Hello everyone
    I was in the Henderson twice in tha 1970s , Stuart Whitely was also there, l had been a patient in Longrove Hospital, end the Henderson was seen as an alternative to a more secure environment. I had tha usual Est, hospitalised at 15 in an adult hospital, dependant on prescribed amphetamines an barbiturates prescribed by my Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Klien.
    I am 66 now end have lived a life because of tha Hendeson, l see its mores end values reflected everywhere, last year l walked half the Camino de Santiago, 15 years ago l trained in th States as a Therapeutic Community Trainer of trainers etc, l also trained as a person Centred Counsellor.
    I have never written this much about my past but , l thought your motivations and thoughts about somewhere very close to me made me want to thank you for your recognition of a true source of meaning and ongoing relevance in this world.
    I am still here,
    Regards Alan
    Shazenalan37@gmail.com

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    • Dear Alan, this is such wonderful feedback, I’m so delighted this reached you and spoke to something of what you had experienced!
      There’s an emergent Henderson Heritage Group looking to take up the task of curating the aftermath and legacy of the community. Would you be interested to be contacted or to participate in some way if things develop? if so, drop me a line here or just ‘like’ this comment and I’ll email you separately…but no pressure at all on any of this, I assure you…
      Thank you again for sharing here, this has absolutely made my day
      With best wishes, John

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    • Hope you’re doing well Alan. I was there in ’79 and Dr Nuttall was there. I remember the community meals where I had the best food ever because they made a special effort for the 2 vegetarians that were there. I remember Interaction, a kind of acting group used to come and help people interact with each other in a safe way. I enjoyed my time there but I can’t say my anxiety was cured but I felt I had a great experience there.It’s the only time in my life I felt popular and liked, a feeling that I haven’t felt since. The year I spent there made me think that life was worth living but alas I couldn’t live in that coccooned environment forever. I thought the daily structure was of benefit to most of us there as some of us had chaos in our lives. I wish you well in the future and hope life is kind to you.

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  8. Hi John
    In the spirit of my learning at The Henderson , I would love to have some input, my last contact with others was at the monthly meeting at Maplin Street in London, l think it was monthly ? my small group staffing was Sophie and Ken Nuthall, l have many thoughts and memories and owe all those people then and now, it would have real meaning for me to contribute in some shape or form, currently living in Devon.
    Regards Alan

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  9. The Henderson showed me that I was capable of a lot more than I thought I was, marvellous times as well as low .I think I was there in 96 or 97, can’t be sure. Kingsley was an inspiration as was Kevin, not saying others wasn’t but they stood out. Shame on whoever’s accountable for closing the place. Xx

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  10. I was a resident 98/99 the best decision I made. But it was life changing. I was so sad and angry about the closure. I have fond memories of staff Sally, Steve, kevin and Kingsley. I even met my husband at the Henderson even though relationships were discouraged!! We have been married 17 years with 3 kids.

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  12. Dear Naomi
    I am sure you will appreciate that within an NHS service there are strict rules of confidentiality, which still apply regardless of closure or time passed.
    I’m afraid it wouldn’t be possible for ex-patients/staff to discuss any possible former patient, or to confirm or deny whether the person you have mentioned was a patient or not.
    Many thanks for your understanding.
    LHS

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  13. I spent a year there and still dream about the place. I felt I belonged when I was there as I you could be honest with each other there. It was a great place and I had great times there never to be repeated in the outside world. I don’t think it cured me of my anxiety or depression but I know it helped a lot of people. It was the best year of my life and the staff and residents were amazing people. Unfortunately there were some suicides which is only inevitable when people are in a bad way. I was lucky to go there and I’m sorry they closed it down.

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  15. And who can forget that amazing home made furniture there. Just saying to anyone who has been there, I wish them all the best as we all have something special in common. Thank you barrelblog10 for the opportunity to speak about this outstanding experience we all had there.

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  16. How is everyone doing with this lockdown. I’ve been doing it for many years so social distancing is more than familiar to me. I read a bit of Arthur Koestler, a bit to high brow for me but I tried my best to understand what he was saying. The extreme situations he was in and survived. I have felt like that but I was very sad when I heard the rumours about him after his death. But art is art whoever creates it. I had hoped that getting on the net would create some connection between me and the rest of the world but alas I don’t think that could ever be the case as you have to put your head above the parapet and if you lack courage you don’t win. With an anxious psyche he who dares gets his head shot off. Anyway I wish you well in your pursuits and I am humbled by your excellent writing and historic references . Thank you.

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  17. Pingback: Henderson Hospital, Peggy Seeger and the Blue Plastic Cups | Norman Lamont

  18. Hi, I was a resident at Main House 2009 – 2010. I chaired the last meeting on the last day. There were only 4 residents in the building, the other three were in acute wards after the madness of a night that if we weren’t down for closing we certainly would have been.
    We had the same reasons thrown at us as you at the Henderson. I had no arguments . Not any anyone wanted to hear . That was why I was at Main House. People like myself at those times are always invited to contribute to ongoing reviews. But we are like children in the eyes of the corporate group. Easy to knock away. Bastards.
    It’s Main House ten years anniversary. Funnily enough on two weeks. The fact that I’m writing this suggests my time there left an impression.
    I’m still in psychotherapy. Still at risk of rambling on.
    There is a difference between residents and staff. Staff reminisce and go on to Cambridge. Residents still cut and cry. Lockdown I find is my natural state so I have no problem with it. I was on my own anyway. Didn’t mix. Never hugged easily. I have an extensive dvd collection so am not without entertainment. And I paint.
    I learned to paint in Main House. Sure it was necessary in Art therapy but Lee the therapist knew I was also keen to learn. She was an amazing person. Many of the staff were. That’s another gift from my time there. And yes I am aware I have little to say about other residents. They were like me ill.
    As I’ve lost my way with the scroll of this small box I’ll wind up and leave that as an image.
    Still getting lost in a small box. Still pointing out the bloody obvious.
    Good for you by the way for setting up a memory site.

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  19. Correction

    It’s not tenth anniversary of Main House closing, it’s the eleventh. That’s the lockdown for you. We’ve lost a year and if you haven’t been on the frontline you feel numb. Lost. (Debate if you must)

    Just needed to clarify that before it wakes me.

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  20. Hi Steven, Hope you are okay with lockdown and everything else going on. I was at the Henderson 31 years before you so I’m an oldie. It was a magical place for me in that people liked me more than I ever had on the outside. I could be myself there. I never succeeded in the real world but tried my best. I think life is easier if you have a talent for something that takes your interest. I’m glad you can paint and I hope it brings you joy. My whole life is this computer as I am housebound for many years and enjoy the entertainment I am lucky enough to get from the net. I was surprised the Henderson was still going when you were there. I can remember taking meetings with up to 60 people there. I took it all seriously as I knew how ill some were and many took their lives, one I was close to. I hope one day they find a cure for mental distress but it won’t be in my lifetime. I hope you write back Steven as I haven’t seen a soul since last March apart from the flu jab nurse. If you don’t reply I wish you well and everyone else who went to the Henderson.

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  21. Dear All who visit and interact with this post: The Henderson Heritage Group ‘Experiences in Communities’ project is gathering oral histories of the Democratic Therapeutic Community experience. We are audio-recording twenty-minute conversations using Zoom – ex-staff, ex-residents, and combinations of the two 🙂 … If you would be interested to participate, drop me a line with your email address and I will send more information… We would of course need your permission to use the recordings and we have processes for attending to this as well… Very best Barrel-wishes to all!

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  25. Hi John

    Just Stumbled on your blog so was disappointed to have missed the 75th bash.

    I was resident at the Henderson 83/84. I recall my first day and being in the informal 10pm meeting in the Green Room. A girl was relating how she was raped by her father from a very early age and thinking “I don’t have the right to be here, these people are hurting far more than me”, but came to realize that this is one of the ways the Henderson works through understanding as a community and trying to help each other with problems from depression to arson and thereby finding a greater understanding of ones own. I entered the Henderson with low esteem and no self confidence, I left ready to take on the world though unfortunately I have slipped back into my old ways since. There were many highs and many lows and like others on here I often dream of the place but it the experience was bloody marvelous and it is a bloody crime it is now closed and unable to help those in need.

    I have one of the 9.15 log/minute books but can’t find it anywhere, will keep searching
    but I do have several photos of life at the Henderson, group pics, Hatchlands and the 83 Christmas party, don’t know who might be interested or where to post them. I am 70 now and wouldn’t like to think of them being trashed when I am gone.

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  26. Thank you John for this work. It is wonderful to have come across this blog today, accidentally via some idle exploration triggered by reading Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to all that”, which mentioned Craiglockhart . . . and so on and so on: other times when compassionate, respectful and open minds fought so steadily to promote humane and caring understandings and practice.
    It is so lovely to hear once again some voices from, and about the Henderson, including those whom I knew, residents and staff, and remember well, and on the whole very fondly (including you John – you’re right, it’s not about you, or me or any individual. And, yet of course it is equally very much about each and all of us. That was the point wasn’t it).

    Perhaps I should challenge in myself more robustly a narrative I seem still prone to adopt – a vague sense of seeming so often to come “late to the party” – a narrative I could apply both to this blog, and to my arrival as a member of the residential team at the Henderson just in time for it’s final, sad 2 years. I don’t hold any lasting sadness on my own account – indeed working at HH, even for just less than 2 years – contributed very substantially to the resilience and joy I am fortunate enough to be able to feel in my own life and ongoing work. But it is very sad to contemplate the huge amount that was lost, when the Henderson closed.

    I do not regret a minute spent there. It will always remain in my mind as far and away the most exciting, interesting and worthwhile job I ever had; equally, the service in which I felt properly and fully supported. For me, that alone cemented the idea that staff working in this very challenging field absolutely do need to be properly supported, and I would set that as the first test of the worth and quality of any mental health service. Sadly, I have found little or nothing that came anywhere near the standard set at the Henderson.

    I feel the closure was just one of countless Eddys in an outgoing tide. Somewhere, sometime, that should mean another tide coming in.

    I applaud both the fight, and the tireless efforts to find some way through, even if neither were eventually successful. It is important to keep the ideas alive. None of us can know their destiny.

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  27. I was there at the Henderson in about 1976. I have so much to say about it. But who is ever interested? In my view it saved my life. Not my actual life as I have never been suicidal or self harmed. But it saved my life in that what I learned there made my life productive, useful and fulfilled. Which it would not have ever been without the stay at the Henderson.
    I’m soon to be 71.
    I woudl not be who I am if it was not for the Henderson

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    • Dear Veritee, this is just my favourite thing, when someone such as you finds this blog and posts a comment! Thank you so much for getting in touch. The Henderson Heritage Group, of which I am a member, is certainly interested to hear of your experiences, would you be up for a longer conversation? Please let me know here and if you follow or sign up to this blog that will provide your email address to contact you or you can email us at hendersonheritagegroup@gmail.com
      I very much hope to hear from you!

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  28. I have just come across your blog and it has brought back so many memories. I can’t pinpoint the exact year I was there but it must have been in the late 1960s. It was the last resort for me and turned my life around. I am now 78. I was Chair of the Top Three and we dealt with many traumatic situations but only one suicide and that was a visiting psychiatrist who wished he could have been a resident. The whole community went into shock as he was such a nice guy.

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    • That’s a very sad story you have to tell, there, of course…the Henderson Heritage Group is collecting oral histories of anyone who lived in or worked at the democratic therapeutic community. If you would be at all interested to share your recollections with us, no pressure or obligation, please email us at hendersonheritagegroup@gmail.com and we could explore the possibilities….

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