Every day 12 men take their own lives.
Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45.
More than cancer, heart attacks, car crashes, strokes, anything…suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45. Let that sink in.
We spent a lot of time talking about a pandemic didn’t we? We spent a lot of time sacrificing everything for a pandemic. Well, I would argue that we were focusing on the wrong pandemic.
Patrick Christys has issued an urgent plea about the mental health crisis in the UK.
Image: GB News
Public figures such as Prince William have spoken about the importance of mental health.
Jane Barlow
If Chris Whitty stood up every day and did a little slideshow presentation on male suicide, we’d realise there really is a proper pandemic out there.
And, ironically, our response to the Covid pandemic made this one worse.
An estimated eight million people in England with mental health problems cannot get specialist help because they are not considered sick enough to qualify
The official waiting list for NHS mental health care stands at 1.6 million people.
374,000 of those are under-18s. So, basically, children.
If someone cuts their head open, you can see it, you can see the injury. But with mental health you can’t see it, even if you do cut the victim’s head open.
Mental health issues can impact anyone, but it appears to disproportionately impact men in the UK.
I bang on a lot on this channel about people being a bit soft, the woke brigade seeing micro-aggressions in everything, people actively looking for unconscious bias, racism or sexism. But there is nothing soft about admitting that you need help.
There are loads of perfectly good reasons why you might at the moment – the cost of living crisis for example, worrying about how you’re going to put food on the table for your family or pay your rent…that’s enough to drive anyone to the brink.
Perhaps you lost your job during the pandemic and you feel like a failure.
Maybe you’re going through a messy divorce.
But actually, more often than not, there isn’t an obvious reason. To everybody else looking into your life from the outside, everything appears to be going well. You appear to have a wonderful life and there’s no reason at all that you should be struggling. And yet you are.
I want you to know that that’s ok. That, actually, that’s quite normal, even if we can’t explain it.
I’m convinced that scientists know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own brains.
That’s why I want to raise money for Mind, a mental health charity. You may be listening to this and thinking you can’t got on. To that, I’d say, We can’t go on like this. We can’t go on just blindly accepting 12 men a day killing themselves, we can’t go on with hundreds of thousands of children feeling like they need urgent help.
I have a just giving page live right now – justgiving.com/fundraising/challengchristys. We’ve set ourselves a target of £50,000 and thanks to your generous donations so far we’ve already reached almost £12,000.
I know times are tough, but please give whatever you can to justgiving.com/fundraising/challengechristys, even if it’s just a few quid.
Your donation could be the reason why someone continues to live. Your couple of quid could be the reason someone with a wife and kids continues to be a husband and a father. Your couple of pounds could literally save a life.
That link again, is justgiving.com/fundraising/challengechristys.
And, if you are feeling low, forget the numbers I’ve just said there about the amount of people who are struggling or the amount of people who take their own lives every day, just try to remember this number instead – 116 123.
That’s the number for the Samaritans. You are loved. Your life is worth something. Stay in the fight.