The Welsh town at the centre of Britain's anxiety epidemic

Telegraph

06-05-2025

A willowy blonde woman is pushing a buggy along Rhymney High Street, past boarded up shops, the now defunct solicitor's office, the closed bank branch. Sheep are incongruously grazing on a nearby verge – but this is no rural idyll.
'I hate this place so much, I just want out,' says Lisa Jones, 36, vehemently. 'My daughter Charli is seven months old and this is not a safe environment to bring up a child because of the drugs, the parties and the antisocial behaviour of people living off benefits they have no right to claim.
'I'm not well. I suffer from arthritis, hip dysplasia and lupus, but I am having to go to a tribunal to get enough money to live on, while neighbours on my street milk the system and make our lives a misery.'
Like every other town here in the South Wales Valleys, regimented terraces of former miners' cottages slope downwards off the main road. And beyond them rise up the hills which were once an economic powerhouse of rich coal seams, iron works and steel mills.
But they are gone, as is, it seems, the community spirit and the life – some would say soul – of once-bustling Rhymney. In their wake all that remains is worklessness, addiction – and the unsettling label of the most anxious place not just in Wales but in Britain.
According to official figures, here in the constituency of Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney one in 30 people – some 2,289 in total – is claiming benefits for anxiety.
As the Government seeks to slash the UK's stratospheric welfare spending – the benefits bill for people of working age has soared to almost £118 billion each year, a real-terms increase of 46 per cent over the last five years alone – Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has homed in on the Personal Independence Payment, known as PiP, which she believes has been awarded too freely.
The benefit is awarded to those aged 16 and above with long-term health conditions or disabilities, and is intended to assist those who experience difficulties with daily living or mobility with their costs. (The standard rate is £73.90 per week for living expenses, and £29.20 for mobility support.)
Alongside claimants suffering from debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, there are a great many others citing more nebulous 'depression' and 'anxiety' as grounds to receive such support.
While PiP can be received by those in work, the vast majority of claimants are jobless. Figures show mental ill health is now the most common cause of work-limiting conditions among those aged 44 years and younger.
'There's actually a phrase round here; 'off on a Pip trip', to describe when someone gets their money and goes on a minibreak,' says Robert Andrew, 75, a company director and owner of various businesses in the hospitality sector. 'Claiming benefits is easier than working and they get more money for it – apart from factory work there are no jobs around here. Maybe that's why people say they are suffering from anxiety?'
It's a weekday lunchtime and Andrew stands behind the bar of his Royal Arms Hotel, where a pint of Carling costs £3.20; the average price in the UK is nudging £5. The only drinkers are a man who pays for his pint of Strongbow with carefully-counted small change and a tiny baby being fed a bottle by his mother, who just came in to pass the time.
'This is a dying trade,' says Andrew. 'I close most nights. The country is a mess and Wales has been forgotten. Ffos-y-fran opencast coal mine in Merthyr Tydfil was the last in the UK and it closed in 2023 with nothing to replace the jobs that were lost. The Government brought in an emergency bill to save Scunthorpe steelworks – but nobody lifted a finger to help Port Talbot's Tata Steelworks last year. I feel like we're doomed.'
He's not the only one. Strolling down the street in the sunshine with friends, factory worker Libby Lewis, 18, is determined to escape. 'I'm working to get some money together but ultimately I'm joining the army to get away from Rhymney,' she says. 'I want to make something of myself and this is not the place to do it.'
As we speak, the musky scent of cannabis drifts across the air from a passing car. One of Lewis's friends, aged 17, agrees that the only way to succeed is to leave.
'I am an optimistic person, I kept applying for job after job until I got one,' says the teenager, who works part time while studying for the Welsh Baccalaureate. 'Rhymney is depressing now; when I was little there was a cake shop and a butcher's on the high street. Today there's nothing; it's the hottest day of the year and the streets and parks are empty. People – even those my age – just sit at home being depressed and anxious because they can't see a future.
'Those who do leave the house only want to cause trouble; windows get egged or smashed, bins get stolen. Not so long ago a bus broke down near the community centre and a 14-year-old jumped on board and drove it off.'
After that incident in 2023, residents met with police. Patrols were increased, dispersal orders issued and pledges made to clamp down on antisocial behaviour. But locals say the situation is no better.
Living in an atmosphere of low level lawlessness would certainly constitute a worry by any standards. 'I wouldn't dream of walking down the high street at night,' says Julie Williams, 61, a retired civil servant. 'Even if my dog, Cynog, was with me. There are people hanging around I wouldn't want to go near.'
But do safety concerns necessarily equate with a clinical diagnosis of anxiety? Given the air of gloom and despondency I encounter, it's genuinely hard to argue the exact point at which an 'ordinary' – which is to say, perfectly understandable emotional response to a bleak situation – tips over into a deeper sense of hopelessness.
Wales has previously recorded higher levels of anxiety among its population than other parts of the UK. A study by the Mental Health Foundation charity in 2023 revealed that six in 10 adults living in the country had experienced anxiety that interfered with their daily lives in the previous two weeks.
Throughout the UK, meanwhile, of the almost 11 million working-age adults who don't have a job, 2.8 million are signed off with long-term sickness. While no-one disputes that there are people who cannot and perhaps may never be able to work, when it comes to anxiety and depression, studies have shown that interventions to help people secure stable employment do improve symptoms of depression and quality of life.
The link between employment and mental health was acknowledged by National Mental Health Director Claire Murdoch last year. 'As part of treating people's mental illness, the NHS supports people to achieve their goals, including getting back to work, with research showing that employment can help improve symptoms of anxiety or depression,' she said.
Four out of five GPs (84 per cent) are worried that the stresses and strains of everyday life are being too readily labelled as medical problems, according to research carried out earlier this year for the Centre for Social Justice think tank. And for consultant neuropsychiatrist Alastair Santhouse, author of the recently-published No More Normal: Mental Health in an Age of Over-Diagnosis, the current trend means that if someone says they have a mental disorder, 'they will almost invariably find a professional to endorse it.'
'Anxiety I always think of as a threat event, in other words a future threat over which you don't have control, or believe that you don't have control,' says Santhouse. 'When that becomes a diagnosable anxiety disorder, it can be a complex decision. Anxiety disorders can share a boundary with normal worry, and, of course, the worries may be realistic.
'Undoubtedly in all cases individuals are suffering, but by reducing suffering to a diagnostic label, and entering a treatment pathway often involving psychotropic medication, for many people this misses the wider issues that need addressing.'
By 'psychotrophic medication' he means antidepressants, mood stabilisers and anti-anxiety drugs. By 'wider issues', look no further than the shuttered desolation of Rhymney. It is not alone in its pain. Just a 12-minute drive away is the town of Ebbw Vale, which for 200 years relied on the heavy industries of coal and iron that emerged there in the late 18th century and then on its steelworks. But by the late 1990s a collapse of the international steel market led to the eventual closure of the Ebbw Vale steelworks in 2002. It had employed 14,000 people at its peak. When the works shut down, 850 jobs were lost.
Those secure jobs have not been replaced and the consequences of the closure are still being felt. Sir Keir Starmer's government may be determined to find £5 billion worth of savings, but in truth there is no quick fix. Simply removing people's access to PiP will not solve the myriad problems facing those who live in the constituency of Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney.
'I think estimates that 20 per cent of GPs' time is spent dealing with anxiety is far short of the mark,' says Rowena Christmas, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners in Wales and herself a working GP. 'People come in ostensibly with joint pain but then you discover their anxiety levels are incredibly high. It's present in patients across the board and we need to get upstream and stop it from developing, rather than just prescribing medication. Unemployment brings with it a great deal of stress and we would very much support anything that helps people take up healthier habits as a way of reducing their anxiety levels so they can get back into work again.'
Resources must be channelled towards provision of group activities that get people out of the house and into social situations to boost their mood and build their confidence, Christmas argues. She cites group gardening projects, group walking and even singing as powerful ways of effecting change.
'I sing in a choir myself and I have lost count of the number of people who were on antidepressants when they joined and then, within months, are off them permanently because their mental health has improved so much,' she says.
'If we can get people to take part in voluntary work that would be great, too. Helping others has a tremendously positive effect and when they feel ready to look for paid work, they will have something to put on their CV that demonstrates their reliability.'
Back in Rhymney's deserted high street even this modest ambition seems out of reach; by all accounts St David's Community Centre is crying out for helpers. The malaise here goes deeper than economic inactivity; the long term unemployed need carrots as well as sticks.
The Government's Get Britain Working white paper, published at the end of last year, announced a £240 million trailblazing package of personalised services for jobseekers, souped-up job centres and improved NHS waiting times.
The question is this; will a trail be blazed to the isolated towns of the South Wales Valleys, safeguarding their future? Or will the decline continue? All governments are judged on results; what happens in Rhymney will be a bellwether of Labour's commitment to genuinely radical reform.