The duchess and the drug addicts: charity salutes new royal patron

Action on Addiction welcomes 'incredibly brave' decision by Duchess of Cambridge to cast light on shadowy world
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The Duchess of Cambridge: her patronage of Action on Addiction could not have come at a better time for charities feeling the squeeze of council cuts. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

There is a skittish atmosphere inside Hope House in Clapham, south London, which is because Christmas is awful when you're a recovering addict, and Christmas is over. This is a residential establishment, but not a detox unit. Women who come here ‑ it's single sex ‑ will have already been clean for 14 days, and ideally been through a preliminary programme in Clouds House, Wiltshire.

Suzanne Hakimi runs Hope House, and Action on Addiction is the umbrella organisation that has just announced the patronage of the Duchess of Cambridge. There's nothing unusual about royals choosing quite edgy, borderline political charities, and trying to keep the sad-looking donkeys to a minimum – Princess Diana famously went for the pariah issues of Aids and landmines, but even Princess Anne, a much straighter figure, is patron of the Butler Trust, which involves doing more prison visits than the home secretary. But this is still a bold and unusual move by the duchess, when addicts have all the stigma of prisoners but none of the containment and invisibility.

"It's incredibly brave for someone who's new in the royal family to take on a charity that works with the darker side of life, and also the lighter side of life," says Hakimi. "These women have been living in the shadows of chronic addiction, in the shadows of abuse and domestic violence, all their lives. They're trying to come out of the shadows, and this makes a huge difference. It's just phenomenal. I don't know what else to say."

Women rarely arrive at the second, residential stage of addiction recovery with just one problem. For a start, it's expensive for a local authority, although at £780 a week, much cheaper than an addict ending up in prison, or having their children taken into care. But let's not get mired in budgets, it's depressing.

They tend not to refer people with one "straightforward" addiction.

There are often past compulsions, eating disorders that were submerged by drug use but resurface on detox, mental health problems, illiteracy. The centre might uncover a history of personality disorders. Some women are referred from prison, others have had their children taken into foster care. Which isn't to say addiction's a function of deprivation – women also come here from the Priory.

A woman passes us on the stairs with a sheaf of letters from her solicitor as thick as a novel, relating to when and under what circumstances she could live with her kids.

"It's got my ex's full criminal record at the back," she says with amusement. "I've never seen that before."

Hakimi describes a fairly volatile atmosphere: "If you think about someone who's self-harmed, who's cut themselves, that's an incredibly angry statement against the self, and they're doing that because they haven't been able to get angry and attack the person who caused the anger. So when you're trying to teach people to express anger, that," she says wryly, "is going to make them really angry. Women can be angrier than men. It can all get a bit scary."

I've heard that on prison anger management courses, things get much hairier in Holloway than they do in Pentonville, but the general rationale there is that female prisoners have higher stress levels, because they're worried about their kids – they were more often sole carers before they were convicted.

The situation is different for those recovering from addiction; there's such a constellation of pain, all of it anaesthetised by some or other substance, all of it unleashed at the same time. The news of the new patron could not have come at a better time, when other news is so bad – local authorities are having their budgets cut, obviously.

The payment-by-results fixation of the current government is causing huge anxiety to the third sector, especially in addiction, where results can go, erm, down as well as up. Hope House has had a 100% success rate for the past five months. But it's always possible that someone will walk out after four weeks, relapse catastrophically, and be back six months later. It seems peculiar to try to impose inflexible standards on organisations that have to be flexible, because they're the last chance.

Hakimi has been working in addiction counselling for nearly 20 years, and says: "England has always been a big boozy nation, but what was never anticipated was how bad it was going to get, how young people were going to be. We've had 18 and 19-year-old alcoholics in here. People are despairing sooner."

Even while the situation deteriorates, the stigma around addiction remains – that it's a self-inflicted problem and unworthy of sympathy.

So I suppose that's what makes this royal patronage impressive, when the very idea of rehabilitation has been nothing like rehabilitated.

"But it's a huge privilege," Hakimi says, "to see how these women unfold."

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