service is going to be the best one to meet their
needs. It’s really about trying to remove those
barriers.’
Nonetheless his organisation has done a good
deal of training with mainstream services over the
past decade, and more so recently as chemsex has
started to ‘become more widely understood and
people have started to present at services’, he says.
‘There’s definitely not a lack of willing from services
– they’re really keen for training, keen to try to be
meeting that need, and there’s some really good
pieces of work developing. There’s still a way to go,
but I think progress is being made.’
Even predating the issues around chemsex, levels
of substance use in the LGBT community tended to be
higher, for a range of different reasons – the more
central role of the bar and club scene, or people self-
medicating to deal with things like anxiety or
depression. Are mainstream treatment services
getting better at understanding and addressing those
wider issues? ‘I think there’s still a long way to go
there as well,’ he says. ‘With almost all of the clients
we’ve worked with – whatever the trigger for them
coming into the service – when we’ve started to look
at the issues behind their using it’s so closely linked to
their identity, their self-esteem, and how good they
feel about themselves. That’s still a very difficult thing
for mainstream services to do. That’s not to say that
mainstream services can’t do that, but I think there is
a limitation sometimes to that kind of empathy.’
So, more broadly, what else could services and
commissioners be doing to support LGBT service
users? ‘I think what we want is that
acknowledgement of a community with different
needs, to see that better represented within a local
needs assessment,’ he says. ‘But we’d also love to see
more collaborative commissioning across areas.
Localism isn’t an agenda that serves LGBT people
particularly well, because they’re a community of
identity, not a community of geography.’
12 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| April 2015
Profile
Read the full interview online
‘I’d managed a
pub, so having
spent five years
getting people
pissed I was
then helping
them to get
sober, which
was a bit of an
interesting shift’
London Friend chief executive Monty Moncrieff
talks to David Gilliver about the treatment
needs of the LGBT community and the
challenge posed by the ‘chemsex’ scene
User friendly
E
stablished more than 40 years ago,
London Friend is the country’s oldest
LGBT support charity and also operates
what is still the only LGBT-specific drug
and alcohol treatment service, Antidote.
‘There are pockets of LGBT work, and workers within
local services, but it’s the only one that offers such a
comprehensive range of support,’ says chief
executive Monty Moncrieff.
He’s been at London Friend for three and a half
years, moving to the top spot in 2012 from his role as
head of services, but it was during his nine years at
Turning Point that he originally set up Antidote, in
2002. His interest in drug and alcohol treatment
came about ‘almost by chance’, however.
‘I didn’t really have any experience of doing drug
and alcohol work – I’d managed a pub, so having
spent five years getting people pissed I was then
helping them to get sober, which was a bit of an
interesting shift,’ he laughs. ‘It was really the LGBT
angle that brought me in, although I found quite
quickly that it was an interesting sector to be
working in. We were noticing some different trends –
even over a decade ago – in the drugs being used by
LGBT people compared to those that mainstream
services typically worked with.’
Obviously, one of the most high profile issues of
the moment is the ‘chemsex’ scene, with people
getting into real problems with mephedrone, crystal
meth and GHB/GBL. Does he feel this is something
that mainstream services are now properly equipped
to deal with?
‘I think it’s starting to improve,’ he says. ‘We were
getting a lot of feedback from our service users that,
with local services, they didn’t always feel they really
had any experience of working with the drugs they
were using and also, very often, the cultural issues as
well. It’s that feeling of “how can I go in and talk to a
mainstream drugs worker about the fact that I was
involved in quite extreme sexual behaviour at the
weekend?” Those sort of feelings of shame and guilt
and embarrassment, which are all very closely tied to
people’s sense of self and identity. So it’s that ability
to come into a service and feel safe and understood
and not judged.’
Many Antidote service users prefer to work with
LGBT staff for precisely those reasons of empathy
and understanding, he says. ‘I know that’s a tricky
area when you’re talking about therapeutic services –
whether sometimes you should match like for like –
but we’ve got a very strong sense that our service
users are opting to come to us because an LGBT
