When the people you’re trying to help seek to deceive #2: Nigel

 

From the early 80’s to the late 90’s I used to do out of hours standby duty sessions. I covered nights and weekends, in addition to the day job.

It always seemed to be that the most extraordinary and perplexing cases turned up outside normal working hours. Nigel was certainly one of those.

One Saturday, I received a call from the Samaritans in a town in the county I covered. They needed the help of a social worker. But it wasn’t the sort of problem they usually dealt with.

Nigel had just turned up at their offices in some distress. It took a while to coax the story out of him. They eventually gathered that Nigel had been living in some sort of residential facility in a county 150 miles away. They thought he had learning difficulties. He told them one of the staff had shouted at him, so he had decided to leave. He had packed a few belongings in a bag and left.

He went to the local coach station and got on a random coach, which had eventually dropped him off in the town. Lost and upset, he had found the first place that seemed to offer help.

My first step was to try and find out more about him. If he had left a residential care home, then he would have been reported as missing. I rang the standby service for the area he had apparently come from to see if they had an alert out on him. Unfortunately, they were unable to tell me one way or the other.

I decided I would have to see Nigel, and make an assessment. If he appeared to be a vulnerable person, I would then need either to arrange bed and breakfast for him through the local housing authority, or if necessary, try and find an emergency residential placement for him until we could return him to his home area.

When I arrived, one of the volunteers took me through to a side room where Nigel was ensconced with a cup of tea, milk three sugars, and a sandwich.

Nigel appeared to be in his forties. He was wearing an anorak zipped up to his neck and had a round face and rosy cheeks.

“Hello,” I said to him gently, and told him my name. He peered up at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. “I Nigel,” he replied.

I attempted to find out his full name, his address, and a contact phone number. He told me the place he had come from, but was unable to give me any other information.

“The bad man did shout at me,” he said. “I didn’t like it. So I wanted to leave. I got a coach. I got off here. Here I am.”

I asked him if he had any sort of identification. He shook his head. I asked him if he had any medication with him. He took a bottle of pills out of his duffel bag and showed them to me. They were anticonvulsants. They came from a pharmacy in the town where he said he had run away from.

I decided that we would have to look after him until he could be returned to his home county. He seemed far too vulnerable just to arrange bed and breakfast.

In those days I didn’t have a mobile phone, so I was reliant on the Samaritans to let me use their phone. They were only too pleased to help. They showed me into a small cubicle which contained a small desk, a phone, and a chair.

I made some calls to the local social services residential homes that specialised in learning difficulties. Eventually,  one of the homes called back, confirming that they would accommodate Nigel over the weekend, until further enquiries could be made.

I went to see Nigel and explained to him what was happening. This seemed to distress him.

“They won’t hurt me? They won’t hurt me? I don’t like it when they hurt me!”

He stood up and picked up his duffel bag.

“I go to the bus station. I get a bus.”

“It’s OK, Nigel, nothing’s going to happen. You’ll be safe.”

He eventually calmed down and allowed me to take him to the care home.

The next day being Sunday, I rang the next social worker on duty and explained the situation to them. They would chase up the local authority where he came from and get some more information, and hopefully arrange for his safe return.

I saw my standby colleague a week or two later.

“Remember Nigel?” he said. “I got through to his local authority. I managed to speak to someone who knew him. They knew him all right. He wasn’t missing – but they did accommodate him in one of their care homes a few weeks ago when he turned up one weekend saying that he’d run off from somewhere in another county a long way away. That is, until they made their own enquiries – and got the same story. Then they sent him on his way! Once we found this out, we confronted him with it and he left, rather quickly. I wonder where he is now?”

There is a postscript to this story.

A couple of years later I was speaking to a social worker in a neighbouring county. I told him the story of Nigel. He immediately recognised him.

“We put Nigel up in one of our mental health care homes for about 6 months,” he said. “Then we had a full psychological assessment done, and it turned out he had a completely normal IQ and everything. Then he mysteriously disappeared.”

From time to time I think of Nigel, traveling the country, turning up in distress, like a lost person with learning difficulties, in need of care and shelter, being taken in and looked after, at least until the truth about him was found out, then moving on again. What drives someone to live their life like that?

He’s not the only one who does it. I knew of another case, of a young girl, apparently in her early teens, who turned up one day, wearing a nightie and clutching a teddy bear, claiming to have been abandoned. She was placed with foster carers for several months, until it was discovered that she was actually 25 and had the tenancy of a flat in another part of the country.

Does it constitute a mental disorder, or is it simply a means to an end, a way of being looked after without any responsibilities? How many are there like Nigel and the “little lost girl”? And how many are so successful that they’re never found out?