and she has asked to come and see it. pleased to meet you. you are very welcome! thank you! this place is being called - the beating heart of the recovery community of birkenhead. she has written the latest major report on addiction and recovery services in england. there are very good areas of practice but what i found was a broken service. i didn t find good, ifound bad. she wants improvements a morejoined up approach. how many people you take it once? as many as you can fit in the door. we don t have a limit. a huge investment in specialist staff, maybe something like we are seeing here. we have been working with people who are often amongst the most marginalised in our communities, who come in broken and who leave healed. dame carol told the government they needed to spend £1 billion to change things.
if you did have a slip, would one slip be a catastrophe? yeah, one slip would kill me. seriously? seriously. genuinely, seriously, one slip would kill me, because i would feel like there would be no going back. broken promises again, this is the thing i have tried to understand with the academy about finding your values, your core values. to me that s scary, because you re setting your own bar so high, you re incredibly tough on yourself. yeah, you need to be, you need to be disciplined. and if i m not a disciplined i ll fall. at birkenhead, mike s not the only one who s been struggling. just across the mersey from liverpool, this place took the full force of the 1980s recession, as the shipyards failed and unemployment rose and heroin and other drugs took hold. birkenhead is a deprived area.
and stuff but he got out - of a routine, then that took you a step back from not i sticking to a routine, i but he has been good. you ve identified it, haven t you? yeah. and corrected it. have you been low, mike? yeah, i have had moments of depression and moments of being down and that can creep up at any time. you could have the greatest day and something that happens is, like, oh, what if i could do that? what if i could have a drink? it s the first 30 seconds but then it s about realising, back to reality sort of thing and then, boom, you know where you need to be. it s march and andrew is welcoming a vip visitor to birkenhead. shipbuilding was closing. young people didn t see a future. literally, in some estates in birkenhead, were some of the first places where the heroin epidemic started. we ve been telling dame carol black, the country s top independent advisor on tackling drug misuse, about the recovery village here. this is our cafe. is this your cafe? yeah!
of the drugs or the drink, that things can change. that there can be life after addiction. i am extremely happy, i m not depressed. there are things that drugs and alcohol stripped me of but there is a lot of things now that i am rebuilding. you can follow more of my year in birkenhead next weekend on the bbc news channel as i discover the toxic link between addiction and mental health. and an extended version is also available from today on the bbc iplayer addiction: the road to recovery. if you ve been affected by any of the issues in this film, you can get advice and support at bbc.co.uk/actionline.
the sort of place we know can be especially vulnerable to drug and alcohol problems. but this is a community which is fighting back. and here in birkenhead they ve come up with this concept of a recovery village. what is that? a recovery village? there are already loads of different services here working to help people struggling with addiction, but now they re working together in much closer cooperation so the rehab hub, the recovery cafe down here, and the place where groups meet for mutual support round the corner, they re all working on really close co ordination to get people off the drink and off the drugs. it is organisations coming together as a collective of the wirral to work with a kind of shared goal. so we will do this test for you today. one of the main players here is wirral ways, a drug and alcohol service, and they re right at the heart of the recovery village. it s notjust another person that is coming in, it is an individual and that individual has got their own need