Leeds Survivor-Led Crisis Service

What Dial House offers

Dial House is a place of sanctuary open 6pm–1am every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings (when other services are closed). Visitors can access Dial House when they are in crisis, relax in a homely environment and have an hour of one-to-one support from the team of Crisis Support Workers.

At Dial House, we have a family room so parents in crisis can bring children with them. We transport visitors to and from the house by taxi to ensure their journeys are safe and comfortable.

We work regularly with people at the extreme end of mental health crisis, who present with behaviour other services find challenging; with issues such as dissociation, hearing voices, self-harm and plans to end their lives. We aim to provide a compassionate and containing experience for visitors.

We can also support deaf visitors using BSL.

How to visit

We open at 6pm. If you wish to visit, call 0113 260 9328 or text 07922 249 452 on the night you want to come; we don’t book appointments for future days, sorry.

We get busy early so please contact us sooner rather than later. If we don’t pick up the phone, Please leave a voicemail with your name and phone number. Most of our spaces are allocated by 7:30pm.

BSL users: text us at 6pm on 07922 249 452 and we will ask an interpreter to come in to Dial House (we do not have BSL crisis staff on shift).

However, Deaf Connect provides online BSL support on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, 7–11pm, Text/FaceTime: 07984396001.

More about Dial House and our approach

Dial House is a welcoming and safe sanctuary from which we run an out-of-hours service for people in crisis. We have an open attitude to “crisis”, seeing it as something that could be related to a person’s mental health problems being particularly bad, or a “life crisis” such as relationship breakdown, losing a job etc. You are welcome to use Dial House as little or as often as feels useful to you, though we do stress that we are here for your worst times.

Some people visit Dial House once or only a few times, until their crisis has passed. Others use the service in a more long-term way, for out-of-hours support with serious mental health problems or because their lives are very difficult. We welcome both of these approaches and anything in between. Regular visitors may be invited in for a review with a senior worker, but this is usually just to “check-in” to make sure we are providing the best possible support and get feedback.

At Dial House, we aim to provide a welcoming, safe place, so staff are always around in the social areas to support you to feel safe. We offer one-to-one support sessions where you can talk about what’s going on for you; you can socialise with staff and other visitors; or even use our facilities and have something to eat, a shower etc.

Our therapeutic work with visitors is based on the Person-Centred Approach, devised by American Psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1950s. This means we try to maintain certain conditions in our relationships with visitors
– including empathy (we try to understand what’s going on for you), congruence (we’ll be honest about how we feel), we will not judge you, and we let you direct your own life (and your time in Dial House).

Listen to Barry (former DH Manager) and Simon (former DH Senior Worker) talking about our application of the Person-Centred Approach:

More information on our approach can be found here.

If you have any comments or feedback about Dial House, please feel free to contact Carol Gatewood, Dial House Manager on 0113 260 9328 or email carol.gatewood@lslcs.org.uk.