The Vision Project

FROM RAT PARK TO
HOUSING FIRST
WHY MASLOW STILL MATTERS
WRITTEN BY ROSIE PHILLIPS
Rosie is the Chief Executive and founder of Developing Health & Independence (DHI)
‘Oh, the craic was good in Cricklewood,
And they wouldn’t leave the Crown,
With glasses flying and Biddy’s crying,
Sure Paddy was going to town.’
McAlpines Fusiliers, The Dubliners, 1966
In 1990, as a fresh faced graduate working for a
London PR consultancy, every morning I would
walk down Cricklewood Broadway, past the then
infamous Crown, and the men waiting for the
vans to take them to work. But the craic was not
so good in Cricklewood by then. The building
boom, that had offered opportunity for many
disadvantaged Irish men, had collapsed, and
their world unravelled at alarming speed. Living in
insecure crowded rented accommodation without
purpose, family or friends, most drank to overcome
boredom, disappointment or pain, and soon
swelled a rapidly growing homeless population in
London...
So I started volunteering at Cricklewood Homeless
Concern at weekends. I eventually got a paid job,
initially by raising enough money to cover my
own salary! I worked there for seven years. Mostly
we gave out food and clothing, we tried to find
housing, or repatriate people back to Ireland, but
as the evidence now clearly shows, the longer a
person is on the street, the more entrenched that
lifestyle becomes. Having mostly arrived because
of the Troubles, intolerance or lack of opportunity
back home, too many then drank themselves to
death when the financial crash signalled the end
of industry’s need for their labour. Productive one
day, expendable the next.
Eventually I became tired of the sticking plaster we
offered, and of the perverse effect the segregation
of services and funding led to. So when I saw
the opportunity to run a project called the Drugs
and Homeless Initiative in Bath, setting up a dry
house that sought to bridge the gap between drug
treatment and housing, I jumped at it.
I was then fortunate to be given free rein to
broaden its scope. And so began DHI in 1999,
a charity that seeks to turn around the lives of
those who face multiple disadvantage, by focusing
on the clustering of serious social harms such as
homelessness, substance misuse, mental ill health,
violence, abuse and poverty. Not catchy, appealing
or an easy ‘brand’ to sell, such is the interlocking
nature of these issues, and their cumulative
impact.
20 years on and where are we? Treating drug
addiction will always be an uphill battle while they
remain illegal, since the law is by nature always
one step behind the criminals that supply, market
and sell it. Drug related deaths are sadly heading
upwards, and the young, the vulnerable and the
poor are those most likely to be caught up at the
rough end. Yet, whatever your view of drug policy
or current funding, treatment is in a much better
place than it was: better understood, better funded
and more joined up. Having shifted the paradigm
from viewing addiction as a moral failing, to the
disease model of the 70s, this too was challenged,
largely thanks to the insights of psychologist Bruce
Alexander and an experiment called ‘Rat Park’.
When the disease model was first gaining ground,
evidence was thought to come from the fact
that rats, given unlimited access to cocaine,
would take it relentlessly, sometimes foregoing
food and water even to the point of death.
What explanation could there be for an animal
neglecting basic needs? The answer seemed to be
that drugs were so powerful they could override
evolutionary instinct. But rats are highly social
animals like us. Wondering why no one thought
it noteworthy that the disease model was based
on experiments with rats that had been removed
from their family groups and kept isolated for
the course of the experiment in small cages, with
nothing but cocaine, Alexander constructed his
own experiment: Rat Park.
Alexander took morphine dependent rats out of
their isolated cages and put them in rat park, a
naturalistic setting where rats were able to cohabit
and reproduce. His overwhelming finding, since
corroborated, was that if given a choice between
drugs and either sugar, saccharine or same sex
snuggling, the rats addicted to drugs chose the
sugar, saccharine or snuggling over the morphine.
Rats in the isolated cages took cocaine until
they died, because without it, there was nothing
but suffering in that environment. In rat park,
the morphine dependent rats stopped taking
the morphine as there were other alternatives
available.
Of course, people are not rats, but the basic
lessons still apply. Fortunately, treatment services
no longer view those struggling as morally
bankrupt or helpless addicts, or ignore the wider
determinants of a person’s drink or drug use.
For the men on Cricklewood Broadway, lacking
opportunity to prove their self-worth through work,
and without family or love, the alcohol served to
anesthetise the pain.
To really understand and treat addiction, we
need to understand what drugs do for people in
general, and in particular when they are suffering,
where the alternatives are of limited help. Don’t
just blame the drugs – look at how people feel,
what opportunities they have and what’s wrong
in our world. People need self-worth and a sense
of purpose in order to want to change, to seek to
achieve their potential, and this requires a basic
level of material and financial security. Talk to
any of DHI’s staff today, and you’ll hear that
housing is the single biggest barrier our clients
face in attempts to turn their lives around. For the
majority, this is not the street homelessness of the
headlines (no, that is the canary in the mine; and
worryingly on the rise), it is the daily grind of living
insecurely, be that on a friend’s sofa, in a hostel
or just through the weekly struggle to make ends
meet to pay the rent.
8
THE VISION PROJECT