Meet Brendan Quinn, The Psychiatric Nurse Turned Entrepreneur Putting the Calm Back Into Life

I’m 33 – from Tiperary. I started out working in psychiatric nursing, grew very disillusioned with the NHS, so I went to work in the private sector. Ten years ago, I set up a company called 1-1 Detox with the help of my wife Lisa. What it does is help to medically detox clients from any addictive substance in their own home, negating the need for them to go to a treatment centre. It’s done in partnership with a medical team, and a nurse who lives-in 24 hours a day with client, while the detox is going on.

Through working with clients in the music industry, I met Nigel Frieda, owner of the Matrix Studio empire. He had been taking holidays on the island of Osea near Maldon in Essex. When the island came up for sale in 2004, Nigel bought it and together we decided what to do with it. Under a floorboard in one of the houses, we discovered an old book about the amazing history of the island. This is how the idea for The Causeway Retreat came about.

In 1903, when the brewer Frederick Charrington realised the damage alcohol was doing to society, he relinquished his chairmanship of he family business and put his money into developing the island as a haven on the Temperance Society model, aiming to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed in a community. He was a great philanthropist. He turned the island into a sanctuary for people with alcohol and general mental health problems. Palms and fuchsias were planted and wallabies were imported from Australia to roam free around the place. It was quite exotic.

At the time of The Great War, the island was requisitioned by the admiralty and the project came to a halt. Now, we are very much picking up the baton that Charrington dropped in 1914, and bringing his vision for the place back to life.

We didn’t start out with a business plan or aspirations we would conquer the world of psychological and addition care. Slowly but surely over the past few years, The Causeway Retreat was conceived. Our idea was that it would be somewhere people with psychological and addiction problems could come: a remote island with world-class treatment, away from everything.

At any psychiatric hospital I ever worked in, clients would be diagnosed, pumped with tablets and sent on their way. We do things very differently. We look at them very carefully and work out how we can get them back into the world fully functioning. We also provide aftercare for 12 months after being discharged.

We are very small and we work intensively with our clients of which at one time there are between 15-20. Many of our clients come from the City. We see a lot of high flyers coming to us with alcohol or cocaine addiction or executive burn-out. The average cost of treatment is from 20,000-40,000 and the majority stay for four to six weeks. Once the business gets to a certain level we plan to offer a certain number of free placements – that’s the next phase of our growth.

I ask people who come to us what’s important to them and they say: “Privacy, anonymity – I don’t want any record that I was ever here”. We offer that. People can work here. You can go fishing. We have kayaking, sailing and there’s even a digital recording studio. The island is a registered bird sanctuary, too – the only place in Britain where you get five types of owl. You can bring your cat, your dog, go for walks on the beach. Therapy isn’t all about being in front of a therapist all day. It can be something as subtle as sitting ina field listening to the birds.

It’s a retreat in every sense. But we do have some very unwell people here – and we offer a de-stigmatised experience. People who need very serious treatment feel like guests rather than patients. One of the joys of it is that we are bringing back to life a derelict island.

- Coutts Article, Jan 2009