Beacon: Grace Lodge has kept me alive
TORMENTED by mental health conditions from an early age, David* turned to heroin in his early teens to ‘drown out the voices’ in his head and because he thought it would kill him.
It didn’t kill him, but he did become addicted. His mum threw him out of the family home when he was 16 to get a job and live with his dad but when dad also couldn’t cope, at 17 David was homeless and alone.
Initially he got a room, but his wages didn’t cover the rent. He began sleeping at the factory where he worked but was fired when his boss found him.
Homeless, penniless, jobless, tired, emotional and starving David went to the housing office in Leeds only to be told in 2000, the start of the new Millennium, there was no hostel accommodation for under 18s.
All they could do was help equip him with a tent and sleeping bag. The tent disappeared within hours of David pitching it in the city centre and he was arrested for vagrancy after being found sleeping in a doorway later that night.
Here began a cycle of sleeping rough, hostel accommodation and prison all while struggling with his mental health, drug addiction and alcohol dependency.
For many years he travelled the length and breadth of the UK, walking through the countryside from place to place, gaining an appreciation for wildlife, animals and insects but desperate to find somewhere he felt he fit in.
Eventually he landed back on the streets of Leeds until a conviction for robbery put him back in prison for two years. While inside he met the woman he went on to marry two months after his release but within 18 months the marriage was over and David was back rough sleeping in Leeds and the cycle began again.
Just before Covid struck in 2020 David came to Grace Lodge and the Beacon Leeds service for the first time. He liked it there, felt at home and supported. With that support he began putting his life back together. He successfully secured the tenancy of a flat but within a couple of years, missing the structured support he’d had in supported accommodation, he fell back into his old ways and was back on the streets.
Just before Christmas 2023 he self-referred to Beacon and came back to Grace Lodge. Within just a few months he was in a much better place, hopeful of finally getting medicated support for his mental health if his physical health can withstand it and following a methadone programme to successfully help him come off heroin.
When he moves on from Grace Lodge this time, he is hoping to finally break the cycle by going to detox to help him come off methadone followed by a lengthy spell in residential rehab.
“Being at Grace Lodge has kept me alive. I’d been highly suicidal for many years and tried to take my own life on a few occasions, but they’ve shown me it’s not just me going through this, feeling lost, confused in addiction. There are a million and one other people with mental health illnesses, half of whom, like me, aren’t medicated and that has put a little bit of love in my heart,” explained David.
* Client names and images may have been changed to protect their privacy. Thank you for your understanding.