UK - North v South

Two Patients Who Escaped From A Psychiatric Hospital Demand To Be let Back In

Jason Ford, 23, and 35-year-old Barry Powell, absconded from a secure hosptial in the South of England last week and headed up North. After spending a week in the North of England, they handed themselves in at a police station in Bradford.

Both men had been making progress while in hospital but a week up North had left them looking like they had lost all hope.

"It was grim," Jason Ford told authorities. "The places we visited had lost much of their raison d'etre."

"I felt trapped. It was like a madhouse," added Barry Powell. "I said to Jason that it's hard to imagine them prospering at their current sizes and he agreed."

Both men began to question whether they had actually escaped or whether they were still in the grounds of hospital. "It was messing with my mind," said Jason. "It was cold, dark, scary, dirty, poverty-stricken and filled with delusional people. Part of me wanted to tell people the reality of the position: regeneration, in the sense of convergence, will not happen, because it is not possible. Another part of me told me to 'run like the wind' back down South."

Doctors have warned that both men are now showing irreversible psychological problems.
They said that Barry and Jason told then that dynamic economies require dynamic economic geography and then they made proposals that appeared to be unworkable, unreasonable and perhaps plain barmy.

"They are in a terrible state, but in a better place now and should regain some hope out of their current despair," said doctors.

"The South has a permanent smell of roses, is crime free, rich, full of well-rounded, friendly, unpretentious people," said Jason. "I don't know what possessed us to run away back to the dark ages," said the thoughtful mental patient

Doctors have suggested that people up North would do well to move down South into secure hospitals where they can have their Northernness removed through constant put-downs.
Police also returned six other escapees who doctors didn't recognise and said must be from a different hospital.

"They kept saying they were part of a 'Think Tank' but they were clearly unwell. The worst I've seen in 25 years," said one senior doctor.