North East towns rot whilst suicide rates skyrocket

Content warning: this article contains discussions around suicide which some readers may find distressing

I remember moving away from Middlesbrough when I was 17. My life was up and down, I struggled with poor mental health and dropped out of college. Yet, looking back, I was one of the lucky ones who got out of the North East.

Over the years, I came back from time to time. Every time I returned the air felt heavier and the streets looked emptier. The towns in the North East are slowly falling apart, degenerating into nothing. Boro is a shadow of its former industrious self, and its neighbour, Darlington, has just been named the sixth worst town for suicides in the UK.

I have so many friends I left behind. They didn’t move on and they got stuck and I’ve lost four of them because of it. The first was Laura, she was 20 when she gave up. Then Adam, an overdose. Next, Sauve, who used his own insulin to end his life, and finally Kieran who died from an intentional cocaine overdose.

Their deaths are not just tragedies; they’re the casualties of a region that’s been left to fucking rot.

The economic noose around the North East

The North East has the highest rates of suicide in the UK, at 15.1 deaths per 100,000. For my friends, the slow decline of the town was ruthless. They were trapped in a place where unemployment was rife, cruel benefit sanctions meant they constantly struggled. Or if they could find work, it was in insecure, zero-hour contracts. When money is up and down, so is your mental health. Middlesbrough is the second most deprived local authority in England, beaten only by Blackpool.

And people in the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods are twice as likely to develop mental health issues.

In Darlington, the male suicide rate is now 29.1 per 100,000. This isn’t a coincidence. When you’re stuck in a town with no jobs, no facilities, people lose hope. Middlesbrough was once the beating heart of UK industry. Darlington gave the world the railway. And now, they’re nothing.

Highstreets are a graveyard of boarded shops and all the community hubs have closed.

In the North East, 9.5% of the population is economically inactive due to poor health.

That’s more than double the 4.5% in the South East.

This economic stagnation is so fucking obviously forced. My friends were battling a system that is designed to break them. Benefit sanctions are weaponised. So many times they come back from the Job Centre broken as their last scraps of dignity were ripped away. Those on zero-hour contracts didn’t know if they could eat one week to the next.

Constant instability is a known driver of suicide.

They left the north to rot

Middlesbrough used to have a pulse. I remember it being vibrant and busy as a kid. Now, you walk through the town and see nothing but “to let” signs and broken windows. There’s nowhere left for young people to meet. When there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, drugs and alcohol so often fill that void.

The North East has the highest rate of drug related deaths in England.

Adam and Kieran were victims of this environment. It was inevitable when they lived in a town where the only thing growing is the queue to the food bank. In the North East, child poverty stands at 38%. This creates a cycle of trauma from birth which carries into adulthood. Kids are growing up in a house where the gas has been cut off and the cupboards are bare. Their brains stay in survival mode.

This lack of investment is intentional. Real-terms per person funding for health has been cut by up to 26% since 2015. These cuts have been deepest in the most deprived local authorities like Boro and Darlington.

The South East sees investment, the North East sees decimation.

A system built to fail

I know how it feels to be at the mercy of this broken-ass system. I have ADHD but it was years of hell and misdiagnosis before someone worked it out. What follows was years on a waiting list, which can be as long as 10 years which literally kills people. Until that diagnosis I was given meds and therapy which simply didn’t work.

I was a chronic self-harmer and, due to my mental health tanking, I turned to drugs. During this time I was constantly passed off, told to “go for a walk” or “take a bath” to calm down. I was rushed to A&E after a suicide attempt, the system’s response was hollow. I was left with no support, sewn up and sent back into the world when I should have been in a hospital bed. But the truth is, there were no beds.

Across England the number of mental health nurses per patient has nearly halved since 2014 and there’s 3,699 fewer beds that we had a decade ago. When I was at my lowest, there simply wasn’t a place for me.

Exhaustion on the frontlines

I spoke to a mental health nurse in the North East, we shall call her Sarah, and she says that the situation is worse than the media are letting on. She described chronic understaffing, wards run by exhausted skeleton staff. Every single service is oversubscribed, crisis lines are gridlocked and failing. People seeking immediate mental health support has increased by 20% since 2019. 

When NHS workers are pushed to the brink, it’s patients like my friends who fall through the cracks. Only 31% of nurses think there’s enough staff to enable them to do their job properly. This leads to “minimal support” for emergency cases. Staff are so burnt out they can no longer provide the care and dignity people in a crisis deserve.

People like Suave needed years of therapy, not a rushed 20 minutes in a hospital waiting room.

The cost of ignoring the North East and its people

NHS trusts have been set a ridiculous £11bn efficiency savings target for 2025. Within that 47% of trust leaders say they’re already scaling back to meet that goal.

We are severing the lifelines that could save so many people, people like the friends I lost.

During 2023/24 NHS spending on mental health fell from 9% to 8.78% in 2024/25 and it’s due to fall even further. It’s a fucking national scandal. We are watching our mates die whilst the government shovels our money into the pockets of their rich paymasters. Why, when improving mental health in the North East alone could add £6.6bn to the economy? 

I wrote the names of the people I lost today and I felt rage and guilt. They were left in towns doomed to fall, towns that aren’t just names on a map. They’re places where people try so hard to survive, but their populations are pushed to the brink by a broken system.

How many more names do I need to add to that list before someone fucking listens?

Featured image via the Canary