An award-winning project is reaching out further as lockdown increases mental health problems in Aberdeenshire. Robert Armour finds out more.
Rathlestone is a breakfast club with a difference. Normally these vital community initiatives are there to enable parents to go to work while getting their kids fed and educated. Rathlestone, however, was created for middle-aged men in the community in Aberdeenshire who had mental health issues and needed people to talk to and make contact outside their own world. Of course things have just got a whole lot worse for those who are isolated but Mary Cairney, the club’s pioneering founder, says it is coming into its own while reaching out to the community and beyond.
They started the physically-distanced but “socially connected” project through need as, explains Mary, not everyone finds it easy to make friends. “When a lot of the traditional industry in Aberdeen and the shire closed in the '90s and '00s, it left thousands of men effectively muted,” she said. “Their friends, connections and often family all worked with them faded with the industries. These works were the social and financial blood of these people. When they closed, men were mentally lost.” Mary has first-hand experience of the effect. Her dad, Walther, a tooling engineer, killed himself two years after being made redundant. He was 59. “He didn’t recover, kept his thoughts to himself and basically couldn’t cope with being what he felt was unwanted and not needed,” says Mary. That tragedy spurned her on to start the group after becoming aware that suicide rates among middle-aged men in the area were higher than elsewhere.
The mission is simple: reaching out to those, like her dad, who feel it hard or even impossible to open up about their feelings. “We don’t manage our mental health well; men are more exposed to this and it’s about being in a place, a comfort zone, where you can talk if you want to. That’s all the club does: creates a comfort zone to encourage men to chat about anything.”
During lockdown, mental health problems have been exacerbated by the increased isolation. However Rathlestone’s volunteers faithfully make flasks of tea and coffee each day and home-baked cakes and drop them off at the homes of the men they support. The contact is crucial: often a volunteer will chat outside a window or at a safe distance, rain or shine. Sometimes they’ll go more than once a day with different volunteers if a person is feeling especially isolated or vulnerable. “We saw the effect on older people who were isolated in care homes last year; that was horrific. It wasn’t right either,” says Mary. “Isolating people totally can be an actual death sentence and we can’t allow that to happen. That was a big fear but our members are generally coping well because we actively engage them. But we shouldn’t be the exception; our organisation should be the norm in every community and supported by council, government and NHS.”
However like all these things, adversity has created opportunity for the support group. Now the Covid vaccine is taking hold, Mary says the group will build on the work it has done over the lockdown periods and use it as a “gifted insight” on how to challenge extreme social isolation.
“Being forced to isolate from normal, everyday tasks, such as going on public transport, meeting people, eating out, that’s been a huge change in people’s mental health. But we’ve seen that we can cope with that extreme through support. If we can cope through this, then we can cope better in normal times. It’s what we want to build on: to tell people that lockdown was the worst it could get and to feel proud they managed through it well.”
The other benefit has been an upturn in volunteers to the cause. Rathlestone can rely on around 14 people to lend support. Now that’s doubled if only because lockdown made people look for new challenges.
“There’s a lot of good come out of this if you’re able to see it that way,” says Mary. “There’s no point looking back and being negative. When people say 2020 was a write-off I understand the sentiment but not the reality. For us we reached out to the community and did a lot more than we’ve ever done. No, 2020 will go down as a year of adversity but also opportunity. And we managed to capitalise on that and make some people’s lives better.”
