Claire is one of those patients who enters the room with a quiet whirlwind behind her. She doesn’t look chaotic—in fact, she looks composed. But tired. Tired in a way only someone surviving every day can be. Not dramatic. Not complaining. Just there, holding herself together with a kind smile, an antihistamine, and a palette of paints.
She lives in a terraced house that the council calls temporary accommodation, which is polite code for a social purgatory. No privacy. No dignity. No insulation. Everyone’s business is everyone’s business, and everyone is either watching you, borrowing your food and never returning it, or using the communal garden as a toilet.
Claire is surrounded by people who are unwell. Drug use, violence, shouting at walls at 3am. Not bad people—just broken. But when you’re already barely afloat yourself, it’s hard to keep handing out life jackets.
She tries though. Claire has tried helping. But they bite the hand that feeds them. She wants to trust those who can’t be trusted. She is the sort of woman who would give you her last fiver and then cry quietly later because it means no milk, no swim, and no escape from her own thoughts.
And swimming—well, that’s her passion. But her swimsuit is in storage, locked away by the council until she pays a debt she can’t afford. A swimsuit. A small piece of fabric held hostage while her mental health screams for mercy.
She came to see me because her skin was breaking out in angry welts. Urticaria, triggered by stress. She didn’t need me to tell her what was causing it. The story is all over her body. And her hair, which is now falling out.
Why? Because life has been one long cortisol surge since she fled her home in the neighbouring council. That’s where the sexual assault happened. A family friend, no less. A dangerous younger generation of the family. She can’t go back and she’s not told anyone. The place, the people, the trauma—it’s all tangled up in a threat she’s still running from. But our Council isn’t helping at all. She’s stuck in the very best accommodation available. The neighbouring Council she came from offers her better housing conditions, but she cannot go back to where the perpetrators run riot. Meanwhile, our Council raises its eyebrows, shrugs its shoulders, and drops another bureaucratic boulder on her chest.
She’s tried private landlords because she has some money. But the temporary accommodation address on her application marks her out as a red flag. “You’re in that place? Sorry love, no rooms at the inn.”
When you’re poor, vulnerable, and come from trauma, a part of the World doesn’t just close doors—it slams them, bolts them, and then lobs a penalty charge at the back of your head as you leave.
But Claire keeps painting. She has an art exhibit soon. Her work is an expression of her suffering—fractured yet lovely.Â
Claire has fibromyalgia, alopecia, wheals, grief, and a council debt. She’s got friends who turn out not to be friends. She’s got strength that I don’t understand. And somehow she’s got this faint, flickering hope that one day she’ll get a clean, safe space with a locked front door and a fridge no one raids.
I’ve written letters. I’ve chased housing officers. I’ve handed her antihistamines and encouragement. But what she needs isn’t a diagnosis or a drug. She needs dignity. A place to belong, to get some peace, some rest, and time to heal.
Claire isn’t the problem. The society we’re letting evolve is. The fact that we put someone like her into a pit and then expect her to climb out, build a CV, charm a landlord, and smile through her trauma—that’s the madness. That’s the cruelty.
Mindful Medic 