A war veteran who spent nearly 50 hours in a police cell after trying to kill himself says he will never be able to fully move on from his experience.

Craig, who asked for his identity to be protected, was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and had lost his job when he attempted to take his life.

The Medway resident was locked in a police cell because there were no mental health beds available anywhere in Kent.

Scroll down for audio

“When you go into custody you are given the standard pat-down, your belongings are taken away from you, the same as with an offender, you’re logged into custody and placed into a cell,” he told KentOnline.

“Rather stupidly you are on your own, despite being a suicide risk and offered no support and left to your own devices.

“It’s a cold, horrible place sitting inside this smelly, damp cell not talking to anyone, and no natural sunlight, except a tiny spotlight in the ceiling.

“You feel abandoned, very alone, and lost and buried in the system.”

Dozens suffering mental health crisis ended up behind bars

Craig, who is in his 20s, said once in that environment time seems to stand still, which only serves to exacerbate the sense of anxiety.

“You’ve got no watch, no clock, the only thing you’ve got to measure time is the tiny little spotlight when it gets darker and when it gets lighter and the occasional person who walks past the cell,” he said.

“You go into the cell already at the edge of what you can deal with and you’re left there to get worse and worse and worse without any intervention.”

A friend first advised Craig to go to hospital when he admitted to having thoughts about killing himself, but it ended up taking 70 hours after he was arrested before he was finally admitted to a hospital for specialist treatment.

Before he got there he had tried to slit his throat at home and later attempted to strangle himself in a police cell.

“You feel like you are contaminated in some way. You’re sat there being passed from pillar to post, the police are burdened with you and the people that are actually there to help you are going ‘sorry, no I’m not dealing with that’.

“After my unique situation it’s been very hard to move on knowing that what I did when I was in that custody block should mean that I shouldn’t be walking around,” he said.

“I’m very grateful to police for the action they took to recover me from that situation, but it’s not something I’ve been able to move on fully from.

“It’s been putting a lot of strain on my relationship going forward.”

Craig described the average length of time people in mental health crisis are spending in police cells in Kent as “ridiculous”.

“The time between the initial arrest and being assessed by the mental health team is catastrophic, a lot can go wrong in that time,” he said.

“Using a police station to deal with mental health should be a criminal offence, I’m pretty sure it’s a breach of human rights.

"You feel like you are contaminated in some way... you're sat there being passed from pillar to post" - mental health patient Craig

“It’s not good for anybody with a mental health illness to be locked within a cell in the first place.

“They need to be kept in an environment where they can interact with professionals such as medical staff.

“The police are forced into a situation that they are not really there to be dealing with.

“In a way they’re being abused by the NHS because they are overrun, the police are having to pick everything up, and they can just tell the police ‘no, you can’t bring them here, they’re your problem now until we can get round to dealing with it’.

“The police need to stop being used as a scapegoat and lackey by the NHS.”

Craig says the only solution is more investment.

“Medway are building a new A&E department and a large sum of the money taken from that came out of the mental health budget,” he said.

“We’re all fully aware that mental health is an invisible illness and because it’s invisible it is ignored.

“I find that by drastically reducing the mental health budget like they have done is creating a deadly situation that cannot recover unless there’s a cash injection.

“Unless that changes soon there’s going to be a lot more people finding themselves in police cells, there’s going to be a lot more deaths in custody.”

• The Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust earlier said it was working with the police on mental health detentions and looking at street triage as an alternative to hospital admissions.

It also pointed out it has a Single Point of Access contact centre which supports people in crisis.

Statistics show scale of mental health problemRelated story: