Ep.53 How I Processed My Brother's Suicide: Dr Alex On Tackling The Men's Mental Health Crisis.

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0:34It's one of the most irreversible decisions ever. And he would have rather not be here anymore than actually ask for help. Alex Campain is inspired, of course, by the death of his little brother, who took his own life due to mental health. I've been to the darkest places. Grief is something that everyone experiences. So how do you tackle that? And I told all my consultants, oh my God, I love Love Island. Like, why don't you just go with the interview? It would be fun. So the last three years, I've worked on getting early support hubs funded. So I'm asking the government to fund£200 million to put 190 support hubs across England.

1:05men are up to 10 times more likely to take their own life than a woman. So I think one of the biggest solutions to men's mental health and suicide prevention and improving illnesses...

1:23What is up guys and welcome back to Working Hard Hardly Working, the podcast. Today I am talking to Dr Alex George. I would like to point out at this point that there is going to be a trigger warning in this episode for suicide. so if that subject or related subjects trigger you in any way please feel free to turn this podcast off now and please look after yourself. Dr Alex has become known for talking really openly and honestly about his journey with mental health both in the grief of losing his younger brother to suicide a few years ago, talking about the help of medication in him getting through that and has spent a lot of time advocating for real change to the government in terms of genuine policies that we could put in place to protect people's mental health especially younger and in schools and universities.

2:03I loved this conversation. I thought it was really heartfelt, showed a lot of kind of his experience with social media and the public eye, but also what we can genuinely do to make a difference to our own mental health and mental health as a society. So I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, as always, please make sure to rate and follow the podcast on whichever platform you're listening to. It really makes a difference in terms of the types of guests we can get on and the types of conversations we can have. And I am greatly appreciative if you do decide to do that but anyway i hope you enjoyed this episode i hope you have a lovely day and i have nothing else to add rising to fame in 2018 for his dating escapades on love island dr alex george has since taken the media world by storm becoming a tv doctor writer and now youth mental health ambassador to the government improving the support that young people receive regarding their mental health he has also since published two sunday times number one bestsellers as well as bringing out his newest book, The Mind Manual.

3:00From his years as an A &E doctor, Alex has become a well-known and respected figure, bringing the nation accessible and reassuring advice directly from the front line throughout the pandemic. He is honest about the struggle with his own mental health, hoping to break the stigma, being an advocate for post your pill on Instagram, and has since opened up about the tragedy of losing his younger brother to suicide, raising awareness and sharing his grief journey. Recounting his experiences with social backlash, mental health, grief and failure, Alex aims to use his social platform for good. thanks for having me it's great to be along i'm appreciating the comfort this couch very different to the rainy weather and stomp cast i'm very sorry about that i couldn't control the context i went on alex's podcast the other day and it is an outside podcast where you go and walk which sounds like it would be calming on a stormy day with lightning it was not calming it wasn't ideal it was sunny in the morning so i can't i guess your attire you came kind of summery of stripes exactly that because then i was like well i've been dressed terribly but then i was like i couldn't have got to work in this and not thought you know this is terrible if it wasn't appropriate for the morning which obviously is very much the uk but i came back to the office literally looking like i'd gone for a swim and the odd thing is as soon as you went back it was beautiful sunshine it was like an hour of genuine someone's got some bad karma everything i know but there we go we did it we muscled through we did it so you know if you want another installment after this episode please uh you're welcome to go and listen to that one we're gonna dive straight in I'd love for you to give everyone just a little bit of background on you who you are how you got to where you are now sure my name is Alex George um I am Welsh I was born in West Wales I went to um state schools there and my family lived in kind of a small cottage and I think my childhood was very much the opposite to living in central London doing all the things I do now I think people often think that I'm this extrovert and maybe I always wanted to do TV or these things but to be honest like it's it couldn't be further from how I grew up or in a way who I am I'm actually an introverted person I went to uni at Exeter uni and studied medicine and came to London started working in Kings and then all of a sudden a little thing called Love Island happened and I guess here we are and you know I think I'm very fortunate that I've lived a life where I've not been too afraid of failure and I've gone to things and I think that's led me to have so far a relatively interesting life quite a lot of ups and downs but interesting because I can imagine that is like I mean obviously I know a lot of people see something like Love Island as obviously I mean it is an amazing opportunity but also for you to be taking that almost risk when you're already in a job that is you know I'm sure you would have perceived to be your kind of idea of success at that point did you always know that you wanted to be a doctor yeah I think probably from the age of like 13 or 14 I think early enough I was kind of like this is the kind of career I want to do I found out I have ADHD about eight months ago and so much of my life has now suddenly made sense I love adrenaline I like to be generally quite impulsive I like doing lots of different things like to focus for short periods and do different things and therefore it makes quite a lot of sense I really wanted to be an A &E doctor if you have ADHD and work in A &E it's kind of quite nice because you go and see one patient and you run on to the next to the next next one for someone that's perhaps neurotypical maybe sometimes more challenging you wouldn't want me to be a surgeon because standing around for eight hours and focusing is not good I don't think I'd make a good surgeon but for me it was perfect and so I guess in some ways I just followed my instinct I kind of wanted to follow this career and yeah with the Love Island stuff I mean I was 27 years old, had 200 followers, not 200 ,000, 200 followers on Instagram, didn't care about social media at all, didn't apply to go on the show.

6:47It was kind of through almost like a friend of a friend who actually saw me on a dating app and then DM'd me and said, do you want to come on Love Island? And I was like, cool. Sorry, what? Were they like a producer? It was a friend of a friend who was a producer, but on a dating app and saw me on the dating app. I was like, maybe we should think about asking him for Love Island, which I genuinely have no idea why. I genuinely don't know what made that person think about it. I need to go back and ask them, really. But anyway, I thought it was a prank, genuinely. I went around to all my friends saying, what are you on about?

7:13You're having me on here. And I told one of my consultants, called Anna Kulkuff, at Lewisham Hospital I was working at the time, said, oh, I've just had this message. And she's like, oh my God, I love Love Island. Like, why don't you just go with the interview? It would be fun. And anyway, like, I had an hour-long chat with these people, and I was so chill. I'd turn up genuinely just casual. People turned up dressed up. The guys were just, like, tan to the max, and, like, big guys. and I just turned up just literally I was going to the pub afterwards and then on Monday I was cycling home from A &E phone was buzzing I've got it to show the map on the bicycle I pulled over and I was like hello and it was when the execs at ITV were like we want you to not only go on we want you to be like an original cast member like to be a starting member and I was like what the hell and I had to the last second and I'd imagine to this day I probably can say I was the only person to go on the show that genuinely didn't want to go on the show and even to the last moment that I was like I'm not going to do this because I enjoyed my life I was doing my dream job already but deep down I always knew that I'd go back and that was a big thing and to be honest like I thought I'd be on there for a week or two weeks I was in between jobs in a way in between contracts and they were like just go and have a holiday and come back to A &E you know it's always here things turned out very differently so logistically did you have to quit your job at that stage or did you have to say I'm you know on sabbatical for I didn't because the way contracts work with doctors is that you do it's every it's basically every summer you're in your contract so I was going to be in between contracts I was like well I finished this contract I'll just start my next one when I get back right so it was kind of perfect timing in a way like I just I just said to the hospitals I'm going off um I finished my contract anyway like yeah fine as I'll be two weeks basically taking a little break and a little holiday.

8:59I'll be back. And what made you say yes to the experience? I had a very close friend at uni called Freya Barlow and she was the most amazing person. To give an idea for people listening what kind of person she was, in the summers she went out to Africa and was doing vaccination programs. She started charities. She was just the most incredible person. A year and a half into med school I remember seeing some bruises on her arms and she played hockey and stuff and I said well those bruises are in quite random places for bruised she's like yeah that's odd i've not knocked it so you really should see the doctor about that i went to the doctor they did a blood test and i was sent to the hospital immediately and i have a really severe type of leukemia called acute myeloid leukemia she had six months or something of chemotherapy did her studies and her exams in an isolation cubicle which was just unbelievable she had a bone marrow transplant from someone in germany who donated the bone marrow and she came out and ran a marathon within like a couple of months of of coming out to raise money for leukemia but very sadly she um she relapsed um uh just before the christmas of the following year and um basically was told she had two weeks to live basically i saw her a couple of days before she passed and she said to me she was like alex you're you're someone who has a lot to give in life but often you say no and you you you you kind of turn things down because you're an introvert and you don't, you know, I just want you to live your life.

10:27Go for it and say yes to things and live your life. Genuinely, I know that sounds ridiculous. I laugh. I still laugh about it. I'm like, I'm not sure Love Island was the context of her thoughts, but I was like, let's just do it. And, you know, whether you love or hate Love Island, excuse the pun, it's allowed me to do so much now and I hope so much good in this space. And I feel like as a result, I hope I've helped, you know, a significant number of people. I hope I can continue helping people because of that thing. Yeah, no, that is such a beautiful story. And I think that like a lot can be learned from that type of attitude in terms of just, you know, I completely agree that there's a lot of reasons to think about things before you do them.

11:09But I also think that we can often think too much and try and plan every single step. And ultimately, you wouldn't even be able to plan your life a year from now. Like you don't know all of the things that are going to happen in order to, you know, get you to where you're going to be next year. And so how can you expect to try and have that kind of control and planning over everything? I often try and channel a little bit more of that as someone who is such a planner. Like I just plan absolutely everything. And I want to be able to plan like trajectories of things and all of that. And just a lot of the time I literally just have to be like, no, not how it works.

11:42Like just essentially just do it, work out the next steps later. And it's kind of like there's a balance because like, you know, you run multiple businesses and all the ventures you do. you can't just be living a life on a whim of something all the time. And it's never the suggestion because actually that's not a way to live either. I find it interesting. I love the analogy of thinking of a clock timer. So the sand timer, you know, the sand above and the sand below is the time that's passed in the middle is your second, the second or the present moment. And I love the idea that when you flip that over and you think that's the beginning of your life, you know, the time that's above that narrow bottleneck is the time that you have and obviously the time that passes.

12:22the thing about life though is you don't know how much sand you have above that bottleneck you don't know when that time is done and when it's gone it's gone and the most precious asset we have we think of assets and business and investments and so on the most precious thing that you have is your time so spend it wisely that doesn't mean going out living a life like partying all the time it just means being present like i love i spend my evenings in with rolo i have a very boring life in many ways but i enjoy that i don't go to lots of social events don't go to big parties or things like that.

12:53I just want to enjoy the time that I have. And I think, you know, when you do have opportunities, you know, I talk about, there's a whole chapter in the mind manual about this, you know, it's not about saying yes to everything because you should be living life saying yes to everything. It's about saying yes to the right things in life and learning to say no and having boundaries to the points whereby like for you and your work and what you do, like if you were just all the time saying yes to everything, you must have millions of opportunities you wouldn't get anything done that you really want to do and i think learning to do that's really important yeah yeah no definitely this is hannah burner from giggly squad opil is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the u.s let's be real getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin in fact about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control between scheduling appointments missing work class or just trying to exist it's a lot but now opil is putting birth control in our control opil is a daily birth control that's fda approved full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98 effective when used as directed grab it online or at most major retailers no prescription or doctor's appointment needed so if you're thinking about birth control check out opil to see if it's right for you use code giggly for 25 off your first month of opill at o-p-i-l-l.com that's code giggly at o-p-i-l-l.com birth control in your control we love to see it

14:24in terms of you know the idea of like what you should be spending your time doing again just like what are you literally what do you enjoy like what are you that kind of like it doesn't have to be partying all the time but also it can be like going out more if you're the type of person who's kind of like you know you're prioritizing too many things over actually just like having a good time and that's what you want um then kind of being able to prioritize that and just shift your priorities a little bit and how did you find the love island experience in terms of your mental health i think it was hard being on there in terms of um it was just such a different environment you know i'm an introvert and you put my you put someone who's an introvert in a very extroverted environment i think that becomes draining and for people for contacting lots of people think um being an actual introvert is based on how you appear how you present that isn't true at all um extroversion introversion is about where you gather your energy so an introvert will gather their energy on themselves by themselves or with a small group of people and they'll spend energy um or spend their tokens if you like when they're in situations like this so i enjoy doing this but it is spending energy where it was an extrovert would gather energy from being in social situations and yeah them it's actually quite exhausting beyond their own too much so you know it was tiring at points but you know I came away being like this was an incredible experience yeah quite literally once in a lifetime thing yeah very few people will do that but yeah it was tough I mean I came off the first few months I was like whoa this is crazy I have a million followers on Instagram you know I went in with a I went on the show and they took my phone off me and nine weeks later I had my crappy old iPhone back and it literally died when I turn it on because I had about I think it was four or five thousand messages through Instagram WhatsApp and then my Instagram as soon as it opened and I saw and I had no context of how many followers I had like a million followers as I was what was going on so that was a huge shock for me and it took me time to work out how to navigate social media and do what I wanted and I think my audience is probably very different now you know i you know it's grown i've got like nearly two million followers now but i think the audience and the reason that people were with me then is very different to why they're with me now and i think that's i hope that's a lot to do with the fact that i you know i'm a big believer in life that you know what you put out you get back and also in the same way if you set up stall and this is what you care about this is what you're doing the people who are interested in what you've got on the stall will come to your stall um and i and i feel that that has been very important for my own mental health or social media because I don't want to pretend to be someone else I'm not someone you don't want me repping fashion you don't really want me out there uh you know going to pies all the time that's just not my thing it's not how I really live an inauthentic life if I did those things yeah so when you came out of Love Island did you know straight away that you were going to kind of shape your career in the direction of mental health was it something you were talking about and really caring about at the time or When I was at university in Exeter, it was the first time I'd ever really thought about mental health, which sounds like an odd thing for someone who's already studying at med school.

17:29But we don't actually do a lot of mental health. We didn't at med school at that time. But I personally went through a really difficult time, my fourth year med school. And I was down in Truro, which is a beautiful part of the world, but I was away from family and friends. I was on placement. And my mental health just went to the floor. And I had this weird thing where I was like, I feel awful. I don't know what's happening. but I can't tell anyone because if I tell the university they'll stop me being a doctor that was what I thought I don't necessarily know that's true I don't think that's true but rumors based on kind of I think if you ask a lot of people in the medical profession and actually a lot of people in any industry people are afraid the stigma about mental illness prevent them in career progression and things so I was like I'm not saying anything things got worse as they often do if you don't kind of try and tackle problems they often get worse and eventually I was like this is so bad i know i'm gonna do it and speak to my mom which i should have done at the start mom uh i feel awful and all of a sudden i had like a huge outpouring emotion i remember at the time like just crying crying but i felt amazing i was like i've offloaded this huge horrible secret off my shoulders and me and my mom we did thought of the day every evening we talk about like how i what i was thinking about what things i was worried about the context i'm a very big over think I struggle a lot with anxiety that's what drove my mood down so anxious about everything so we did thought of the day I planned suddenly that I was like I've been out of the gym I've been sleeping terribly I've not been eating well I was like let's create a routine get up in the morning go to bed at seven go to bed at ten go for a walk every morning I'm going to exercise four or five times a week I'm going to eat a much better I started cooking and making myself food and after six to eight weeks I was like I feel completely different I went I was a completely different person again it's not to say that just doing those things is going to fix everyone's mental illness it isn't at the time i was experiencing probably mild depression and therefore those lifestyle factors were huge for me but it really taught me something that first of all i was nearly adopted and didn't have a clue about mental health how to look after myself or how to treat mental illness and also that stigma is so bad and it's preventing even people who work in health from getting help so when i came out of love island i was like well first of all, I know that routine is so important for me and I'm lost and it's chaos at the moment.

19:44And it's like when people go, I get my dream, I've finished from university, get my dream job in a new city. You go to the new city and you think, this is my dream job. You're going to have to make new friends. You're going to have to find a new gym. You're going to feel lost for a bit. You might have to find somewhere to live. You've got a new job. And sometimes even our dream situations can shake us to the core. And we all know that to be true. So going back to A &E was one of the best things I ever did because it gave me my grounding. It reminded me who I was again. and suddenly I just started talking about the things I cared about on social media and everything else came on from them and the mental health stuff back in the day thinking do you know what if I'm going to use this platform for one thing if I can do one thing with this I'm going to change the way that we view mental health that was the thing for me do you think that at the point that you were at university and really struggling and not talking about things do you think that a lot of that was because of the kind of not just the stigma of you know being a doctor but also the stigma of men talking about their feelings was it something where did you feel like you had an open line of communication with your friends or you know would you be able to like talk about that for a second it's interesting because um people talk about why is there such a difference between men and women in terms of suicide and just for context the biggest killer for under 35s is suicide which is is huge for how we actually think about like looking after people and things like workplaces universities i always find it in fact one of the biggest things i'm trying to work on in my role as ambassador is to create a legislative legislative framework around mental health in the workplace i find it fascinating when you start a new job you've got to do fire safety which is great um you have to have a certain number of first aiders if you've got a company certain side size in in physical health but the thing that kills most people that work in any place or any university isn't a fire or physical injury it's actually suicide but we don't have any plans to deal with that so when it comes to men uh the biggest factor i believe is simply how we bring up men to be like i remember growing up being told things like big boys don't cry man up don't be a girl as if being a girl was somehow like emasculating or something and and you were basically brought up in a way to not speak and not talk about you're struggling so when you're struggling to open the curtain in the morning because your mental health is so bad or you're feeling so low how are you going to overcome everything you've been conditioned not to be and find the strength to change everything that you are and ask for help and that's why men are up to 10 times more likely to take their own life than a woman and one of the big mistakes we make in men's mental health is we keep just talking about men women have been conditioned through society to generally talk a lot more have open forms of communication and and share a lot more in their problems earlier on why don't we engage this skill set that women have with men so i think one of the biggest solutions to men's mental health and in terms of suicide prevention and improving illness is actually just involve the women in their lives as well get men and women talking you'll find actually you know together that combination it'll make a huge difference but also i think i it always astounds me how little the patriarchy is talked about when talking about something like mental health and the patriarchy is often like raised as a you know talking about the gender pay gap or talking about improving um you know rights for women which obviously incredibly important i mean some of the if you actually look at like recent history in terms of like really not that long ago women literally couldn't get like a credit card or own a property without being married or whatever like not the early part of the last century like literally the later part which is crazy but you actually when you're thinking about when you're talking about things like mental health the patriarchy absolutely harms men just as much or in very different ways but in significant ways it is not just about harming women the whole expectation of the need to you know the need to work hard the need to be the breadwinner the need to like take the brunt of everything the need to like not talk about your feelings all of these things for for being at risk of essentially emasculating yourself or making yourself not a worthy kind of man is crazy and entirely ingrained in the patriarchy it's you know it it's crazy really that we, our idea of masculinity of what it has been is around like, men don't, don't need to ask for help, be tough, you know, nothing should affect you, shake it off and get it on, be the leader all the time.

24:17And to me, it's just, it's so stupid. Because actually, I don't think it's emasculating to talk about the way you feel. I don't think it's emasculating to have female leaders and to be led by females. I don't think it's emasculating to show vulnerability at times in fact I think that being a man is absolutely yes it's about I think being human actually is that sometimes we have to be tough when times are tough but actually to be a man to show vulnerability and to be open and confident within yourself enough to allow that vulnerability is a huge sign of strength and you're absolutely right I think that one of the biggest harmful things of the of the masculine of that idea of masculinity is that it makes everything worse for men it's the irony isn't it's like tough to be a man but actually you're making life tougher for men and boys because of that yeah so so much of that's why you know mental health awareness because people go oh what's the point in this talking we cannot make change without people talking about it and recognizing it you know you could have the shiniest mental health clinics in the world the most amazing support services but men won't walk through your door and until you tackle that first point where men won't go to the clinic there's not there's no point having clinics i clearly want to invest in services and so on but you've got you can't just focus on the let's have great clinics tackle the root issue which is that men don't talk don't ask for help and so how do you think we can encourage that more and how does your work relate to you know getting for example men to talk about their feelings well look i mean you know i i um i lost my brother three years ago to suicide he made a choice where he had a binary decision it's one of the most irreversible decisions ever and i'm sorry if that's triggering for anyone it's it's it is completely binary and he would have rather do something and not be here anymore than actually ask for help and i think that's so important to consider that for a moment because it shows how far men will go rather than than get help so how do you tackle that well do you know what we start a young age we teach emotional literacy which means understanding thoughts and feelings and understanding how to label understanding what they are and people go well how young is young enough or how is it too young if you're old enough to have thoughts and feelings you're old enough to start learning about them and understanding them and if you ingrain and you educate throughout school you will have people that are more resilient they're more capable and people got a snowflake generation if you develop emotional resilience and an ability to recognize when you need support from the outside and that can be in a number of ways not just in terms of your mental health and you develop an ability of to have awareness of yourself and others you become like a really great asset to society as well as being a happier person you're great and you're great i would love to have you in a and e working i'd love to have you in a business you'll be a great member of society so there's a huge imperative i think for the whole of society on many levels to actually build people that are more resilient and resilience is not about being tough and you know not never admitting weakness it's about bending and flexing under pressure and coming back to your original state.

27:17Yeah, no, I think that is really powerful and really important to talk about. Would you mind talking about the experience of losing your brother for a second? You know, grief is something that everyone experiences. We often talk about grief in the context of death and loss, but relationship or loss of relationship or breakup is grief. Your pets is grief. Losing a former self or seeing a former life or a former version of you change or left in the past and moving on to new chapter is a form of grief. So everyone's going to experience it. And I think one of the things sometimes we're mis-souled about grief is that we need to get over it or solve it.

27:53And if you think about with my brother, do I ever want to be in a position where the fact that he died is okay? No. Why would I ever be like, do you know what? I'm over it now. It's okay that he died. Why would I want to feel that? You know, what I think it is about is taking something that is entirely unmanageable and overwhelming into something that you can harness more and I think for anyone listening that beating themselves up because they cry about something they've lost or they cry about a relationship or they feel sad stop expecting yourself to get over things just focus on the fact that self-compassion take each day at a time invest in yourself in terms of your health and everything else around it and share talk about it because I'm certain you'll have experiences of grief and loss I am certain that everyone watching will be able to relate to times where, yeah, they've had to let go of something, you know, and we've all been there.

28:44So be kinder to yourself. Yeah, no, absolutely. And at that stage in your life, you'd been out of Love Island for a bit and you were working in mental health. Is that right? In A &E. So effectively, I came out of Love Island in 2018. My brother died in 2020. 20 so I I went back to A &E in Lewisham I'd worked throughout the whole pandemic um the tough thing was is that I was working in Lewisham hospital which was absolutely hammered by COVID um and I saw a lot of very difficult things I made a decision to stay in London worked there my family were at home and I was on my own and he passed away a week before I was going home to see my family I hadn't seen them for so so long um and yeah it just was awful it was it was just the whole thing was awful so it shook me to the core and I had to go back to like what is life what am I doing I had to learn to go outside and go for a walk I need to learn to like just do the things that sound so obvious in your life like eat again I stopped eating for like four or five days completely all those things that I had to rebuild into my life but again if you think about the shaking like when you're shook and shaken go back to the things that anchor you so going back to A &E again helped me and from that time onwards I'd already been speaking a lot about mental health and I'd seen the challenges of the pandemic but I was like we need to do something yeah so I used social media the platform I had to put a post out there saying Boris Johnson the Prime Minister I need to speak to you I need to take all this stuff that I've learned over the years and all the work that I'd done with the charities and organizations I'd spoken to after my brother passing I need to show you this stuff and social media went viral I mean it was it was it was quite unbelievable within two weeks I had a call from cabinet office and within a few weeks from then I was appointed youth mental health ambassador I'm a volunteer in that role and since then it's been my relentless mission you know I've written three books now the mind manual is the latest one I was proud that a better day um is one children's book of the year which is all about teaching young people about all of these things which I'm really proud of but ultimately I want to make a change I want early intervention out there so I'm looking to get early support hubs funded across the country so that people can go and get help and not wait two years and that's at a stage where you're kind of thinking that you're you know having some problems in terms of your mental health exactly one of the biggest challenges as we sit here right now there are six Wembley stadiums full of children who are waiting for help with their mental health some of those children will wait two years.

31:15How many things in life are we happy to wait two weeks for, let alone two years when you're struggling with your mental health? Some of the children that are waiting right now won't be here in two years. And I know that's really difficult for people to hear, but that is the reality of the situation, and it doesn't need to be that way. The Children's Mental Health Service is really important. The people who work with it do an amazing job, but it's overwhelmed, and it was never designed for early intervention. What I mean when I say that is that when people initially start noticing symptoms of mental illness and struggles by intervening and have taking a 360 view of 360 perspective of that person and thinking about what challenges they're facing but also thinking about what their sleep is like do they need therapy are they getting movement are they isolated one of the biggest challenges for young people right now is loneliness it's the loneliest generation and for context most people will understand that smoking is bad for you loneliness is as harmful to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and that is scientific that is absolutely factual is as harmful and and children are lonely we need to get them back into communities and more connected and these hubs will provide community center points for them to go to to build all of these things and to help them and prevent them waiting two years it's wrong yeah and what were your biggest coping mechanisms at that point in terms of dealing with your grief talking um i i i talk and i talk and i talk and i have therapy and that has been life-saving for me i've also i took medication i started a campaign called post your pill um it's not a pro medication campaign it's a pro getting what you need to get through campaign and taking away the stigma yeah taking away the stigma and it saved my life undoubtedly i've been to the darkest places but i'm here i've got a tattoo i showed you this do shall pass to remind me in most difficult times and it got me it's got me through and medication's helped me I'm not on medication anymore I'm so grateful that I was on medication and for anyone that thinks well is medication just taking a plant putting a plaster on is it just a quick fix let me explain this if you're in a well and you're in a dark hole and you can look up and you can just see a glimmer of light but you can't climb out of that hole that what that light is almost torturing you that you know that you could be happy but you you can't get there and in a similar way for any batman fans that bane threw uh batman down the well and he had to build up his strength to climb out in some ways the medication what it does is gives you the energy and strength to then engage in therapy to to be able to do all the things that are important in each day from you know setting boundaries tackling on things like mindset issues thinking about your sleep thinking about all these different things to build up your strength to climb out that well and when you're out to that well you might be able to come off that medication so you know if anyone is struggling thinking oh gosh you know i i don't want to take that like is that failure what does that mean it is absolutely not and if that piece of medication is the missing if that medication is the missing piece of that jigsaw to allow you to build your life back together into that full picture again then please use that piece the stigma around kind of taking medication for mental health and actually the lack of recognition that people's brain chemistry is different and like there will be you know there will be someone who actually just lacks something in terms of the way their brain works and genuinely just needs something to support that in order to return i mean we'd we'd accept that in every other part of our bodies we might accept someone's naturally iron deficient we might accept someone's like all of these different things and actually to be able to we just kind of refuse to accept that when it comes to stigma and um it's bizarre i think like does anyone think that way if you take a statin for your cholesterol level you just take the statin you don't you just take it and you you crack on your blood pressure take a blood pressure medication you know and it's interesting because there's a lot in the press recently about um you know it's kind of classic uh press narrative of like all right there's research being done and we don't know you know how um uh how uh antidepressants work or it was more around the fact that they were saying the serotonin theory of it boosting serotonin we don't know that to be true and that was missold as antidepressants don't work and there's they're completely separate statements we don't know so much about the brain or how it works we don't have a clue about a lot of it we don't even know all the neurotransmitters we know some of them we don't know exactly how the antidepressants work but that's completely different to saying and i can say this with confidence that for many people it does work in fact antidepressants are as effective if not more effective than lots of other treatments we use for other parts of the body and other treatments we use that people take every day in fact you know its profile of effectiveness is very good even compared to things like statins right which a lot of people take so you know and i've had people message me i mean it saved my life i've had tens of thousands of people message me saying if it wasn't for that medication where would i be yeah so just so please don't let something stupid like stigma you know you mentioned um how badly that we've treated women and women's rights over the years you know one of the words that i really struggle with is that people use the word committed suicide you commit murder you commit arson you commit gvh you don't commit suicide but until 1961 you did it was a crime you were in we used to incarcerate people because they were so low they didn't want to be here anymore my dad is my dad was born in 1958 so my in my dad's lifetime it was still illegal you know it's criminal to to try and take your own life and families would beg their doctors not to put it on the death certificate for fear of shame you know and i know that sounds really negative but when people we say language matters it really does matter but i also think part of that is just the recognition that actually we have so far to go and it's actually such recent history and the very fact that people are still alive that would have lived in a time where it would have been illegal to even attempt suicide for example that is we almost need to recognize i think a lot of these things we have an assumption that we are at a good place with them because they're because they are legal whereas actually stigmas don't come from you know entirely from things that are legal or not it takes a lot of time to be able to shift out to keep going and keep keep working on i mean look at this right so i um i talked about how i was fat shamed at work a few years ago it's a whole separate story but um i talked about this experience on my social media and you know um it was dr alex admits to body image issues and then when i talked about medication dr alex admits to taking um to making antidepressants do you admit to take would that headline seem strange if said dr alex admits to taking blood pressure motion do you admit to something like that admitting implies like wrongdoing so even now there's so much language that's used around the topic that that creates that stigma i don't admit to it i've not done anything wrong it happened to me yeah yeah yeah no absolutely and so what does your work currently focus around what are your biggest kind of asks for the government what's your biggest focus in terms of what you're talking about so the last three years i've worked on getting early support hubs funded so i'm asking the government to fund 200 million pounds to allow me to put 190 support hubs across england these would then be ramped have been rolled out after that kind of initial rollout of those hubs and I know that that will help 500 ,000 young people a year so it's for under 25s really important because it helps a lot of university students every three days we lose a university student to suicide so university students also need a huge amount of help these hubs will help so much my second ask is that we create a legislative framework for workplaces around mental health you know um people go yeah well if we have mental health first aid is you're going to put more work on people's shoulders it's harder and teachers harder and people any line manager will say that the problem is coming to them already they just don't have the tools and the thing about mental health first aid or any training it's not about learning to fix people it's about recognizing and signposting in the right direction you know teachers are faced every day with children that are struggling but they don't have any training for it or any you know how hard is it it's hard enough looking after a child that's struggling especially when you don't have any training so two chaos fund the hubs and let's actually do something in the workplace that gives parity between mental health and physical health we'll be in a much better place and keep doing my school tours and making sure this message gets out there and that we don't stop talking about it yeah i mean i think that's incredibly powerful and thank you so much for coming on today to anyone you look you know if you're going through something right now you know this too shall pass and also wherever you are in that mental health spectrum even if you're feeling great just in the same ways you keep going to the gym to build it focus on your mental uh fitness build build your mental health and take pride in that like it is an investment and if you have a bit if you're a business owner if you're someone that works and you want to be really really successful honestly it's one of the best the best investments you'll ever make well thank you so much thank you thank you so much for having me thank you

40:17Thank you.