The sad story of how hard it is to keep an advanced psychiatric unit running

http://bvmh.co.uk/kayahouse.htm

Kaya House was a small house in North London. It looked no different
from any other. It had 4 bedrooms for people to use as an altnerative to
psychiatric hospitalisation.

This could have been the future model of hospitalisation fora large
number of the people who voluntarily use a psychiatric ward. It offered
things impossible to find in most psychatirc wards. A sense of normality
for example.

The problem is when cut backs are made it's these sorts of facilities
which are slashed. They didn't have a strong economics argument though
75% of the people using the facility said it stopped their entry into a
psychiatric ward where care is worse, costs can be higher and trauma can
occur.

Modern psychiatric wards are not therapeutic places no matter how high
the doses of antipsychotics they use to knock people out. They're
challenging environments which are underfunded and understaffed. People
are cast together in confined surroundings little different from a low
security prison.

Kaya House offered a sane alternative to the systematic lunacy of the
current psychiatric ward system. It closed two years ago.