By Vee Greaves
A mental health crisis should trigger care, clarity and action. Instead, community organisations are too often left holding people together while statutory thresholds decide whether they are unwell enough to qualify for help.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines urgent as “requiring immediate action or attention”. It defines a crisis as “a time of intense difficulty or danger when immediate action is needed”. These are not vague words. They describe a situation that cannot safely be parked, postponed or passed to somebody else.
Across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland, people experiencing an urgent mental health crisis are directed to NHS 111 and asked to select Option 2. Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust states that callers will be connected to a trained professional who can provide support, advice or signposting. Where needed, callers will be transferred to a mental health practitioner or receive a call back within twenty-four hours. The service is described as available day and night, without referral criteria, for anyone of any age seeking urgent support for themselves or somebody else.
So let us ask the question plainly.
When did urgent stop meaning urgent?
Because from where I stand, it no longer seems to mean what the dictionary says it means.
I co-founded NEU Community Wellbeing CIC because I was tired of watching people fall into the spaces between services. We are not clinicians. We are not social workers. We are not psychiatrists. We are not commissioned by the NHS or Leicester City Council to provide crisis intervention. Yet somehow, we have become one of the places people arrive when every other door has closed, redirected them, or told them they do not meet the threshold.
That should concern every one of us. Not because NEU exists, but because organisations like ours have to.
This is not an attack on frontline NHS staff, GPs, social workers or crisis workers. Many are doing difficult work inside a system under extraordinary pressure. This is about the system itself: how it is designed, what it funds, what it calls urgent and who is expected to carry the risk while people wait.
When I was fifteen years old, I took an overdose. I saw a psychiatrist once. That was it. There was no follow-up from mental health services that I remember, no ongoing support from my GP and no plan at school. When I returned to school and became upset because other pupils were talking about what had happened, my form tutor looked at me and said, “Well, what did you expect after doing something like that?”
Twenty-five years later, I can still remember those words. Twenty-five years later, I find myself asking whether enough has really changed.
Recently, one of our volunteers experienced what anybody would recognise as an acute mental health crisis while she was at NEU. She became increasingly distressed. She began hitting herself and pulling out her own hair. She said she was not going home. She disclosed that she intended to walk in front of a bus.
I immediately called NHS 111 and selected Option 2. I was asked whether the call handler could speak directly to the person I was calling about, despite the service being advertised for people seeking urgent support for themselves or others. Over approximately forty-five minutes, our volunteer and I repeatedly explained the seriousness of the situation.
We were told that she would receive contact within twenty-four hours. When I asked why the situation was not being treated as urgent, I was told there were no mental health practitioners available and that twenty-four hours was urgent.
Later that evening, she received a telephone call and was told that another call would follow within the next twenty-four hours. According to her, that follow-up never came.
The crisis should never have been a surprise. Months earlier, NEU had referred her to Adult Social Care. We documented self-harm, deteriorating mental health, social isolation, vulnerability, concerns about the environment in which she was living, risk of reoffending and the need for supported accommodation. We repeatedly explained that NEU is a community wellbeing organisation, not a statutory mental health provider, and that we could not safely carry the level of risk being presented.
One statement in correspondence following the first call NEU made to the mental health crisis team in April 2026 is particularly troubling:
“The outcome of this intervention was limited to the prescription of sleeping medication. No further crisis or follow-up support has been implemented, with the rationale provided that NEU Community Wellbeing was currently meeting the patient’s needs.”
Community organisations should complement statutory services. They should not become the reason statutory intervention is considered unnecessary.
When an allocated social worker eventually met the volunteer, approximately three months after the referral, I was told before any conversation with her had taken place that supported accommodation would be difficult because the work she was doing at NEU suggested she did not meet the threshold.
My response was simple: she appeared to be coping because somebody was already holding her up.
The support keeping her afloat was being treated as evidence that she did not need a life jacket. The fact that she could complete meaningful tasks in a safe, relational environment did not erase the distress, self-harm, isolation and risk that existed beyond our doors.
This is not an isolated story. Community organisations regularly meet people living with complex mental health needs, addiction, exploitation risks, housing insecurity, contact with the justice system and profound loneliness. They may be too unwell to cope safely, but not unwell enough, in the right way or at the right moment, to pass a statutory threshold.
Every service has a threshold. Adult Social Care has one. Mental health services have one. Housing has one. Probation has one. But people do not live their lives according to organisational thresholds. They live in the gaps between them.
That is why I have come to believe that we do not simply have a mental health crisis. We have a prevention crisis.
Crises rarely begin on the day somebody says they want to die. They begin months or years earlier with trauma, loneliness, isolation, poverty, unsafe housing, waiting lists, repeated referrals, closed cases and support ending before stability has begun. By the time a person reaches a point that everyone agrees is a crisis, the warning signs have often been visible for a very long time.
Organisations like NEU see those warning signs because people trust us enough to keep coming back. We notice when someone becomes quieter, stops attending, loses hope, begins to self-harm or cannot manage the ordinary demands of daily life. We answer the phone, make referrals, take referrals, chase responses, sit with people while they cry and try to keep them safe.
But trust is not a substitute for clinical care, and goodwill is not a crisis pathway. Community organisations cannot be expected to absorb statutory risk simply because they are present, responsive and unwilling to abandon somebody.
Leicester has an opportunity to think differently. Imagine if community wellbeing organisations were properly funded as part of the prevention pathway, rather than surviving on goodwill, volunteers and short-term grants. Imagine a system in which community support, mental health services, social care, housing and justice partners shared information, responsibility and escalation plans before a person reached breaking point.
We are not asking to replace the NHS or any statutory service. We are asking to work alongside them, with clear boundaries and proper recognition of what community organisations can do. We can build trust, reduce isolation, strengthen coping strategies, identify deterioration early and support people to engage with services. What we cannot safely do is become the service of last resort while everyone else waits for a threshold to be crossed.
This is ultimately a question for the people who commission, design and fund public services: if people only qualify for help once they reach crisis, who is responsible for stopping them getting there?
Until that question is answered, organisations like NEU will continue to answer the calls, make the referrals, hold the risk and hope that somebody listens. But sooner or later, one of these stories will not end with a phone call.
When that happens, we should not ask why somebody reached crisis. We should ask why we waited for crisis before deciding they mattered.
So I return to the question I started with,
When did urgent stop meaning urgent?
Perhaps it was when waiting became normal. It does not have to stay that way.
Sources
• Oxford English Dictionary, definitions of “urgent” and “crisis”.
• Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, Mental Health Central Access Point, NHS 111 mental health option. Accessed 2 August 2026.
• NEU Community Wellbeing CIC correspondence and referral records relating to the anonymised case described in this article.
