Mentally Unwell Of York

The Late, Great, Bootham Park Hospital  |  York, UK

York health services messed up mental healthcare for its local residents for years – there was a chance to create a separate mental health trust, as they did in Leeds. Instead, they chose to keep it under the general hospital services and it continued as a Cinderella service thereafter.
 
Then Thatcher came along with “Care In The Community”. Of course she wasn’t cared for in the community when she developed Alzheimer’s... Hey ho.
 
Then the mental health services were taken under the wing of the community health services in Selby and York. Didn’t do much better. Then Leeds came along...
 
And took over the service and totally f***ed up. Disinvested, ran the service and infrastructure into the ground. Bootham Park Hospital which is an astoundingly beautiful building (I aim to blip that side of it soon, before the barbed wire goes up), was allowed to founder for lack of maintenance. So, because of a leaking roof (I’m not making this up) it was closed by the “inspectors”, pending...
 
A take-over by Middlesborough mental health services. Who shut it. They’ll likely make a bomb by turning it into gentrified real estate that only the super-rich can afford.

Now there is no public mental health in-patient facility within a forty mile radius of this, the proud city at the centre of Yorkshire. I know to our American cousins that doesn’t sound a big deal, but in our small island...