A carer’s compassion fatigue: ‘I felt like I was abandoning an already-abandoned subset of the population’

“No”, he said, aghast as he looked back at me with his big brown eyes – as if to pierce me where it already hurt. I’d explain that it was time for me to make this change; that I needed it. His broken English couldn’t seem to conjure up the right words. I’d be leaving this 18-year-old alongside another 20 or so late teens and young adults. His journey from Somalia to the Northern Ireland...