News

Women’s project fear

A successful and unique women’s therapy services faces closure because a financially hard-pressed health authority may be unable to meet its running costs.

The Shanti Women’s Counselling Service, based in Brixton in south London, may be forced to close its doors in August unless West Lambeth health authority, which is £3.8m overspent for the current financial year, can generate the £140,000 needed to keep it going.

The Shanti project, begun in April 1988 with £270,000 in Inner City Partnership money from the Department of the Environment, provides free mental health counselling for women in the community who would not otherwise have access to therapy services. Utilising preventive psychotherapy, the group functions with a multi-racial staff reflecting the make-up of the surrounding community.

Clients include black women, women who speak a different language and/or come from a different culture, working-class women, lesbians, differently-abled and older women.

Therapy involves a ‘global’ approach that allows women to work through life events and experiences to resolve immediate symptoms.

The project’s work with women — on an individual and group basis — was ‘with a clear consciousness of their external existence in this society’, said counsellor Carol Topolski. ‘That means giving attention to what it means to be a black woman, a lesbian, etc, so we build that into our understanding of the work we do with them.’

The health authority agrees the service is a valuable and necessary one for the community.

’Shanti are something special,’ said Maggie Mansell, locality director for the authority’s priority services unit. The district’s financial crisis, however, meant that Shanti had to take its place in the funding queue, along with a number of other unfunded commitments.