Some More Truth About Medicine and the Health Service
The MP and his Mental Health
About Glen
I thought I'd put in this article about a friend of mine who died last year. It's not the most cheerful piece of modern history I have had the misfortune to consider, and it is a case of better late than never in the matter of adding a few of my own thoughts.....
It can be said in fairness that Glen had a certain freedom of spirit that is all too often lacking in the bland selfishness of the materialistic individualism fashionable by the 1980's & 90's.
People have said lately of Winston Churchill that his warlike reputation may have derived from the fact that his Mother was partly descended from one of the more aggressive native American tribes ; how many know I wonder that Glen was also partly descended from native americans through his serviceman Father. His life had been dogged by tragedy, as well as typified by the presumed distaste for conventional living and so on that this article (and others) make a great deal out of : his Mother had been killed in a freak household accident.
Glen, with friend Sue in happier times !
From an article in the Ipswich 'Evening Star' October 25 2000
Ipswich Father Glen Collier died on October 14th. He was found in a house on Portman Road and an inquest into his death is due to open today. In a powerful interview with Evening Star reporter Tina Heath his daughter pays a moving tribute to her free-spirited father and offers a damning criticism of the social system that she believes failed to save him.
When l8-year-old Rachael Collier took her father to St Clement's psychiatric hospital in Ipswich she begged them to keep him in their care. At 49 Glenn had deteriorated out of recognition from the proud and energetic man she had grown to love.
He had walked away from his home and was painfully thin after months of living on the streets. His body was covered in the raw, scratching sores of scabies and psychologically his mind was in tatters. Rachael, a bright, beautiful and deeply-caring daughter, left her father in Playford House as a last resort unable to help him any more and desperate to see him get the professional care he gravely needed.
Less than 48 hours later he was back on the streets. Only a few months later he was found hanged in the bathroom of a house on Portman Road.
Glenn or Glynn or even the Beacon as he was sometimes known, was always a free spirit who didn't like to stay in one place for too long, refused to conform to the everyday strictures of work and a house and family. He was also, as his daughter admits, a man who harboured "a depressive streak," for much of his life, whose highs and lows were perhaps as much a matter of his own mental instability and his leaning towards drug and alcohol misuse as they were of the throes of chance and circumstance.
But his death, only a week ago, has shocked and saddened a great number of people. Shocking, perhaps, because of its sudden and brutal nature, and saddening because however Glenn chose to live his life he did not, according to friends, receive all the help and support he needed.
Said Rachael: "Dad didn't have a lot to live for, but he knew that he had me and that of all the people in the world I would not have given up on him. In many ways I think my dad was a strong person and with enough of the right help he would have been able to get back on track again.”
Rachael is Glenn's shining legacy: The moving tribute she pays him and her angry words hitting out against the authorities she feels failed him testament to the fact that however low her father’s self esteem had slipped in the darkest hours of life, his battle was not in vain.
“I am speaking to you because I don’t want any person my age to see their Dad deteriorate like mine did,” she added. For the slim dark haired 18-year-old watching her Father falter and fail was the "worst thing that could ever happen."
Yet once already this year her life was touched by turmoil as she watched her stepsister haul herself through a traumatic court case where her hoyfriend Meyrick Fowler, stood accused of shaking to death their six-month-old daughter. Then only seven months later there was the sudden and tragic death of her father. The drama's roots twist through the last three years of her life and merge into the very time her family stood in court.
Although Glenn had lived in and around Ipswich for most of his life he had no contact with daughter until she was 15, when they were brought together by a mutual friend.
At that time Glenn had a house in Downside Close. He was selling the Big Issue from his regular patch outside Tower Ramparts. Rachael said: "I would come into town and I knew where he would be. I would meet him and we would go for a burger or just sit on a bench and talk. Sometimes we would shopping."
After 15 years apart this was how they built up a relationship - Rachael coming into town without prejudice or expectation to get to know the man who had introduced himself as her Father.
"I think he was chuffed that I didn't ignore him after his not getting in touch for so long. He was happy we were talking and that I didn't judge him. He wasn't a saint but he never hurt me. I was never the kind of person to look down on him because he liked a drink or he didn't dress brilliantly."
I wasn't embarrassed about sitting on a street corner and talking to him and his street friends. I wasn’t impressed he was selling the Big Issue. I suppose like anyone I would have imagined a Dad with a job and a nice house and stuff like that but in a way I was proud of him.
"He sold the Big Issue and he sold it well. He told me he was the top seller in Cambridge and London. "He would stand right in the middle of the street and he was loud. You could hear him a mile away and he would spin around in circles, but people still would come up to him and buy his magazine."
These are Rachael's fine memories of her Father. He had, she says, a great mind. He was like a walking dictionary who knew every answer to every question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He would sometimes help her with course work and their bond became strong.
"Sometimes I would be on the way to college and people would make comments and say, 'Look at that man picking butts off the street,' but I wouldn't care. I would say, 'that's my dad,' and I would go over and talk to him. Sometimes I would go and see him and he was high, he would spin round and say, 'come and live on the streets with me, Rachael, wear old clothes and mess your hair up a bit. You'll do fine, it will be fun.”
Rachael, now of London Road, is studying Performing Arts at Suffolk College. She remembers how things started to deteriorate when her father left his flat on Downside Close. Throughout his time there he had maintained an open-door policy to anyone needing a bed for the night or a warm meal inside them - and this was to be his downfall.
"Some of them were not the kind of person you would want staying in your house. He would go back and find his TV or cooker missing and these people ran up the bills. "As unpaid bills mounted, Glenn, who had no means to cover them, left the flat. He feared he would be sent to prison if he approached the authorities for help and instead he fled, as he had done on other occasions in his life, and went to live on the streets.
During February and March he divided his time between Cambridge where his aunt would put him up and occasional sleeping on the streets of Ipswich. "He seemed happy at my aunt's,” Rachael remembers.
"He put on weight and looked healthy but then I don't know if he was really happy. He didn't go out much, which wasn't like him. He sat indoors and watched TV. He spoke to me more. We would take the dog out and have a proper chat but when he got back on the streets he plummeted."
The next time. Rachael saw her Father she was shocked at his decline. "He had lost stones and stones, he was so skinny. In many ways I think my Dad was a strong person and with enough of the right help he would have been able to get back on track again... I don't want any person my age to see deteriorate like mine did.
"He wasn't eating but he swore he wasn't taking drugs and I believed him. I didn't get to see him much around that time. I managed to see him on my birthday in May, but not enough really."
Back on the streets Glenn found himself caught in a vicious circle of poverty and decline. Without a Job he was unable to clear his debts and find himself accommodation, but without accommodation he couldn't get a job and clear his debts.
Added to this, depression began to take a cold grip on his psyche. He told friends "nobody could help him.” He believed he wasn't entitled to anything steadfastly refused to go for help. Around this time Glenn started sleeping in the porch way of St Helen's Church. Friends at Ipswich Community Resource Centre would take him in.............
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I haven't reproduced all of this article not having been able to find the rest of it in my wasteground of an Office : it's fatalistic tone is all too clear with regard to anyone obtaining any 'medicine' from the authorities in such extreme cases and for those of us who might be under the impression that we live in a caring society where alcoholics, the feeble minded illiterate, dropouts, drug addicts and the elderly are all going to get 'meaningful' medical treatment I hope the article(s) provide something of a wake up call. I can only conclude that the Officials involved must be very wicked people indeed to tell a poor teenage girl who's lost her Father such cruel and callous lies about the chance of a meaningful investigation into the refusal of medical treatment for him. There is a price to be paid for the changing attitudes toward tax policy in the last 25 years and the return of a vagrant class to the streets of our towns and cities is one of them.