Sue Willgoss knows more than most the terrible human cost of a deficient mental health system. Two years ago, she lost her 25-year-old son, Daniel, to a prescription drug overdose after his carers failed to heed her warnings that he was an imminent suicide risk. Since then, Willgoss, a publican in Lowestoft on the north Suffolk coast, has been campaigning to stop other young people losing their lives to mental illness. She runs weekly drop-ins for locals who are lonely and isolated, champions the rights of service users in the community, and has been a bulwark for people in crisis.
It’s an uphill battle in a place with more than its share of social problems. Demand for psychological support has risen alarmingly in Lowestoft in recent years, community leaders say, and its overstretched mental health services haven’t been able to keep up. The Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, the authority responsible for the region, was graded “inadequate” by official inspectors three times in the past five years because of a host of safety and management failings.
New leadership brought modest improvements in the months before the coronavirus outbreak, Willgoss told me, but the service is still hampered by excessive waiting times, poor communication and overburdened staff. “Things have to change,” Willgoss says. “Daniel’s experience cannot be how it is. Our people can’t be treated like that.”
