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I write this post with a somewhat heavy heart but at the same time feeling inspired.  I received some bad news over the weekend: Gary Dighton, a chap who I used to work with and a prolific part of the local cycling community that I’m a part of, took his own life on Friday.  As is usually the case in these situations, everyone who knew him is shocked and saddened by the news.

I’m not so good at receiving news like this.  When I was told, the first thing I said was “which Gary?”, knowing full well who was being spoken of but unable to accept what had happened.  Once I realised it was true, my first thought was that I wished I could’ve spoken to him, found out what was troubling him so deeply that he saw no other way through, and tried to help him find that alternative path.  “I wish I could save you”, to use a lyric from the emotive song that I’ve used to name this post.

This has led me to a bit of a period of self-reflection.  I realised that for me, possibly the most upsetting element of the whole situation is knowing that his family and close friends – people I know and am very fond of – are going through such a horrendous time.  I know that because, as you may have read in my post The Stairway to Heaven… one of my brothers took his own life when we were teens, which also probably makes me more sensitive to hearing this kind of news.  But the other thing I realised is that even though this area is so close to my heart, I’ve never taken a great deal of interest in it.

What I mean by that is I haven’t spent time reading research papers on suicide, I tend to skip past posts about suicide prevention when they pop up on social media, and I’ve never had the urge to raise money specifically for suicide prevention charities.  I’ve gotten thinking about this over the last few days and have realised this is probably a subconscious self-preservation thing.  It’s just too close to home so I avoid it and channel my passion elsewhere.

I hope to inspire people to discover optimum wellbeing

Instead, I have become enormously enthusiastic and passionate about wellbeing; about helping people make the most of life and getting through distress and trauma.  I guess that may have come from a fascination over how people react to trauma, based on my family experiences growing up.  But what I’ve realised over the last few days is that by doing this I’m actually indirectly working on suicide prevention too.

My passion, my goal and my life’s work is to teach people about how to optimise their wellbeing; how to be self-aware, know when something needs to change and how to change it to maintain and improve wellbeing.  Receiving that terrible news over the weekend has reinforced that what I’m doing is right: if I can reach out to people and make them realise that there are lots of things they can do to get out of those horrible, dark places, as well as inspiring people to truly make the best of a life that’s already quite good, perhaps I can make some sort of contribution to preventing people from reaching that point where they simply can’t make it through another day.

I generally believe that there’s always something good that comes from even the most devastating situations: in this case, the loss of a local legend has strengthened my passion for helping people through distress and made me realise that my aspirations hit even closer to home than even I realised before this point.  With a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope that my life’s work will help many, and in some cases even ‘save you’ from the depth of despair. The fight for a healthier, happier society continues.

Life Left To Go

If you’ve read my earlier post Staring at The Sun, you’ll know that I’m passionate about issues surrounding mental health.  One of my main concerns is lack of awareness of mental health issues and the treatment available amongst young people, and one of the bodies that I think can be most helpful in tackling this is schooling.  Today, one of my colleagues showed me a report on mental health services provision in schools, which was put together by the St Albans Youth Council (SAYC).  The report is based on research into the awareness of and need for counselling services in schools, and makes some amazingly pertinent and important observations and recommendations, most of which I whole-heartedly agree with.  I’d like to summarise some of them here in the hope that others will share my enthusiasm, spread the word and where possible take steps to act on them. 

The SAYC contextualise their report by noting that their concern for mental health was brought on by what they saw as an alarmingly high number of incidences of suicide among young people in their region.  Touchingly, they dedicate the report to those young people who felt that this was the only option available to them.  What better reason could we want to work towards improved mental health, to ensure young people get the support they need during difficult times?  I share a vision with SAYC that by providing appropriate levels of support and signposting, we can make all those who are suffering realise that there are other solutions to their problems.  I find that songs can express my own thoughts and feelings better than I can half the time, and a simple but effective lyric that springs to mind is “There’s more life left to go…”.

One of the main points I want to iterate is that there quite clearly is not enough mental health provision out there for young people.  In their report the SAYC note that a local charity that provides talking therapies for young people had recently had to close their waiting list, because the need for help was simply too great for the provision available.  Whether this is due to a lack of funding, lack of willingness by those in power, or something else, I don’t know.  What I do know is that, if we want to stop young people from reaching a critical stage in their mental illness, whatever the cost, the need for mental health services needs to be given a lot more attention in the coming years on both local and national levels. 

The SAYC collected data using questionnaires in 11 schools in their region. Whilst all but one of the schools provided a counselling service, an average of 65% of pupils were not aware of this provision; in some schools this figure was in excess of 80%.  Quite rightly, the authors therefore recommend that schools use better signposting to ensure that pupils know what help is available to them, both inside and outside of the school setting.  As we can see from my previous point, the need for services is far greater than the provision as it is.  But I ask this:  what is the point in providing a service for young people if they simply aren’t aware of it and therefore cannot make use of it?

Another part of this report I find particularly striking is to do with factors that deter pupils from seeking counselling.  Those rated highest were those regarding privacy, such as ‘fear of friends finding out’ and ‘school setting’.  In other words, young people do not want to seek help for mental health issues because of fear of people finding out.  At first glance, this might suggest that we need to provide better signposting to services outside of schools, to reduce the fear of friends finding out.  But the wider issue highlighted here is the stigma around seeking help for mental health problems.  If young people saw it as socially acceptable to do this, then surely friends finding out would not be a deterrent from seeking help? 

For me, this all goes back to the need to educate young people about mental health, bringing it to their awareness in the same way as physical health.  I’m pretty sure a young person wouldn’t think twice about seeking medical attention for, let’s say, a sprained ankle, so why on earth should they feel any differently about a mental health problem?  As Nick Clegg has recently noted, “mental health must have the same priority as physical health”.  I don’t often have a great deal of time for what our ‘top’ politicians say, but I couldn’t agree more with this!

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’ll leave it here to keep this a reasonable reading length!  I hope you will all agree that this is absolutely one of the most critically important issued faced by our society today.  If there is one small thing you can do to help the cause, such as sign the Time To Change pledge (link below), increase awareness by sharing this page with other people, or signposting a young person in need to a local mental health service yourself, that would be amazing.  If you’re someone who has the power to do something big like take steps towards increasing funding, or set up a new mental health service, even better!  As my song lyric from earlier goes, ‘there’s more life left to go’, and I really do believe that the quality of that life can be enhanced for a lot of people with the right services and strategies in place. 

Thanks for reading and comments welcome as always.

Links:

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/pledgewall