St. Mungo's – Lifeworks
St. Mungo's is a prominent housing and specialist support service provider for London's homeless and socially excluded. We work with over 5000 vulnerable people every year, finding responsive and integrated solutions for problems with housing, employment, training and health. We specialise in working with rough sleepers, people with complex needs including mental health problems and substance dependencies, and offenders.
Many of the people accessing our services have long histories of traumatic experience ranging from childhood abuse to the loss of their own children and partners as adults; in a survey by a clinical psychologist, 85% of those surveyed had some kind of severe psychological disorder, most of them compounded by substance dependency. There is strong evidence that such disorders originate in damaged developmental processes and attachment histories, and respond to psychodynamic and narrative approaches. Despite these levels of need and the evidence for psychotherapeutic responses, homeless individuals rarely gain access to psychotherapy services. As part of our range of specialist help St. Mungo's ACE-funded LifeWorks Psychotherapy Service therefore looks to provide a model of individual and group therapy to support already excluded people to embark on an individual journey towards recovery.
The project's overall objective is to tackle chronic social exclusion through helping individuals regain control of their own life stories. Our specific outcomes will be improvements in wellbeing and positive change in our clients.
The service will be delivered from various sites across London including first and second stage homeless housing provision, a healthy living centre, a mental health inpatient unit, and a statutory mental health homeless outreach team. It is available to all of St Mungo's clients, and will soon be available to the clients of various statutory services in Lambeth (who were helpful and supportive in developing the proposal). It is indicative of the social exclusion of this group of people with complex needs that even statutory services provided by a large mental health trust struggle to access psychotherapy for them.
There will be up to eight part-time therapists supported by clinical supervision, a project manager and directorial lead. The approach taken is psychodynamic in recognition that for many their difficulties in coping and relating stem from early attachment problems, and from difficulties in thinking about their feelings. We are also offering narrative testimony-based individual work for survivors of trauma; from this aspect of the work, the project hopes to publish a book of life stories, comprising individual testimony from people's experience and illustrative of survival, hope and success.
The last word must go to our clients themselves:
“I'm doing this because I want normal people, whatever normal is, to know what it's really like being in the gutter. I've had it all and lost it all.”
“I think it all started when my mum married my step dad, he was a nasty person and I had a personal war with him in my head. If I got away with something I thought I had got one over on him. This turned into a war with the police, but at the age of thirty five I stopped going to prison and breaking the law, but it had taken me twenty odd years to realise as I was only hurting myself, but change can happen.”
For more information please contact:
Lee Murphy (Manager, Mental Health Team, St. Mungo's)
Tel: 020 7549 8236/ 0771 469 9608
Email: leem@mungos.org
Peter Cockersell (Director of Programmes, St. Mungo's)
Tel: 020 8762 5670/ 0771 469 9634
Email: peterc@mungos.org
