COLIN CAMPBELL: Craig Dunain cast a shadow, but we could do with it now

A blaze of lights tops the evening skyline a couple of miles to the west of Inverness city centre. They come from a huge block of flats and are no doubt a welcoming beacon for their owners as they head home after work.

These flats replaced Craig Dunain Hospital, which formerly dominated that skyline. And as anyone who’s lived in Inverness for a long time will tell you, it was viewed as a welcoming beacon by absolutely no one.

Craig Dunain cast an intimidating shadow over the town, was considered a darkly ominous place, and was the very last place people wanted to end up.

But it served a purpose, and a massively beneficial one. It had the scope, capacity and resources to cope with hundreds of people suffering from what are now termed “mental health issues”.

That phrase is now routinely used and everyone knows what it means. But it did not exist in the Craig Dunain era, when attitudes to many things were very different.

Mental or psychological problems were considered by many to be not an “issue” but a weakness and a defect, and there was a stigma attached to them accordingly. And there undoubtedly was a stigma emanating from any time spent in Craig Dunain, which is why people suffering from drink or other problems would resist going there or being sent there until they finally crumbled and maybe were hauled in manually by relatives at the end of their tether.

Once inside, most found it wasn’t that bad at all. It was a relief to get help within its greenwashed walls. The nurses, and there were plenty of them, were friendly and the doctors, there were plenty of them too, usually had a sympathetic manner.

But it was still no place for messing around. Sympathy and understanding only went so far. Patients were expected to toe the line and do as they were told. Lights went out at night and lights went on in the morning and in 40-bed wards no disruption was expected in between. And during the day they were required to attend treatment sessions without demur.

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Craig Dunain had the capacity to provide treatment for a large number of people when they needed it, whether they wanted to be there or not – with no waiting lists.

Now things have swung full circle. “Mental health issues” are out of the closet and far from trying to conceal or disguise them – as happened in the Craig Dunain era – more and more people are revealing them and insisting they need treatment for them. And the spectrum of these “issues” seems to be widening all the time. “Climate anxiety” is now apparently considered a mental health issue. Really? But of course in this day and age it is unwise to raise any sceptical doubts.

But at a time when mental health is such a hot topic there is no Craig Dunain sanctuary to treat them. Figures show in the Highlands people are having to wait extraordinary lengths of time for consultation treatment. What good is that for anyone’s mental wellbeing?

It’s a grim irony that resources to assist people with mental health issues are now more scant and threadbare than they were in an era when keeping problems bottled up was the norm.

Craig Dunain was no beacon of light at the time but how desperately many would wish such a bastion and safety net – that anyone could readily turn to – was there now. This is in an era when young people now risk being the psychological victims of a plague of social media, those on a payroll often face the acute strain of round the clock job pressures unknown to any previous workforce, and many elderly folk are beset by an epidemic of loneliness in a world where regular face-to-face contact is often replaced by the need to form a desolate relationship only with a computer.