TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to The NewBridge Project: Dan Russell,  

Introduction to artED, The Thing, Dave Chawner and the ‘Joined up thinking’ talk programme: Grainne Sweeney

Breathing exercise and communal sigh: Helen Shaddock 

Conversation between Helen Shaddock and Dave Chawner

HELEN

Great, now for our chat. Dave, great. Thank you.

I first came across your work as a comedian through your TED Talk and YouTube videos and was immediately struck by your honesty. You say that one of your biggest aims with the book is to be honest, and describe that as being “bloody difficult.” Within the first minute of your TED talk you refer to your weak bladder, and, as that is something I have many problems with, I appreciate your willingness to discuss aspects of anorexia not usually heard.

DAVE

I have to say that is the most positive anyone’s ever been about bladder weakness. You know, I appreciate that.

HELEN

Well, I’ve got plenty of stories. And actually, one of my missions for artED is to get a toilet installed within the Job Center in Newcastle.

DAVE

Wow, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Anyway, so yeah, your honesty. You discuss your low sex-drive, Osteopenia (low bone mineral density) and also mention your family,  friends and an ex-girlfriend. When discussing your Dad, you say, “I’ve skimmed a lot of the details here because it’s my dad’s story, not mine to tell.” Dave, can you tell me how you decide what you are willing to share, and talk about how your friends and family have responded to your work, both stand-up comedy and your book.

DAVE

 Yeah, I think, I think in terms of it’s my story to tell. I’m very comfortable being honest about my stuff and but I get really uncomfortable when somebody else starts sharing somebody else’s story, and I think that’s quite difficult to sort of navigate. When I wrote the book, I said that I was going to anonymize, you know, I asked people if they would like to be anonymized, and only one person, very reasonably, said that they would but I think generally, I’ve found in in talking about mental health, I think the more honest you are, the more you kind of get back. I genuinely, I genuinely do believe that, like if you talk about things like bladder weakness, or you talk about eating distress or etc, that that chimes with people on such a sort of personal level that, obviously you get the odd bell end, and I think especially what you do as well, it’s very personal. Do you ever get nervous about sharing or over sharing?

HELEN

Yeah, yeah. And there’s times that maybe the day after I’ve posted something, I thought, Oh God, what. What was I thinking?

DAVE

Can you give us an example?

HELEN

Yeah, probably like when I’ve been too open about me wetting myself, that’s something that is just embarrassing. Or then you come across someone that says, Oh yeah, saw your diary yesterday, and you know that they know.

DAVE

You’re not the only person that does that. I’m a big believer that it’s okay. I don’t think you should be embarrassed about things that you can’t control. So that’s why I’ve always been, like, I didn’t choose having eating disorders, so that’s why I never really felt any sort of embarrassment.

HELEN

It’s about my experience, and it’s about trying to help people understand what it is to have that experience. I don’t want it to be a sob story. Don’t want to be a celebrity, you know. So it’s done through hopefully making it more understandable. You know, that’s, that’s my angle. I would say that the embarrassment is just me as a person, you know, being a person, and I’ve never really regretted anything. There’s things that I don’t put in, because that would be like yourself. I just don’t mention my family situation because I don’t want to speak on behalf of my family.

DAVE

There’s certain things that I won’t talk about. Like, for example, I won’t, I don’t really talk about sort of sex, mainly because I’m a prude. I think that’s a good thing. I think more people should be like, there’s a, this is a divergence, but there’s a movement of Free the nipple, like, this meant to be a feminist thing. I think put the nipple away. I think it should be the opposite of, like, men should cover their nipples up, not women should get theirs out. Like, let’s just put it all away. So I think that there are certain things like that that I feel uncomfortable about. There’s two times I’ve felt that the honesty has kind of bit me in the ass. And I think the first one was me being a bit meat headed and stupid if I realized, like, the book is structured in six parts, and in the first part of it, it talks about one of the sort of trigger points for the eating disorder kind of taking off was because I got dumped by a girl that I had sort of fallen quite heavily for, and I gave that to my sort of now partner, quite early on in the relationship. And I kind of realized, you know, giving, giving your partner a book to read about how you loved this girl back in the days, is probably a fucking idiotic thing to do. So I did regret that. And there’s, there’s quite a sort of, not even explicit, but there’s quite hardcore, kind of, well, not hardcore, but I talk very openly about drugs misuse, which I am still, I personally, I’m still a massive proponent for, but knowing that my mom had read about when I took MDMA was a little bit weird, and she asked about dosing. But no, it’s I think those are the only two times, because I genuinely, honestly believe that the more honest you are, the more people come back. And that’s why I think comedy is great. Because I think comedy, you know, there’s so many phrases, but comedy is tragically plus time. But you look at people like Felicity Waters and a whole show about bladder weakness, there are people. People that do whole shows about is it just me that thinks X, Y and Z, and if anything, I kind of I worry that I’m not honest enough. I genuinely do worry about that with certain, certain things to do with mental health.

HELEN

That’s intriguing.

DAVE

Yeah, I think it was, like, touching on things that we were talking about before. But like, I kind of have become a bit disenfranchised with the mental health sphere and the way that we’re going in the general direction of travel, it makes me worry. Yeah, yeah. And I would like to tackle that, but I think doing that is a very challenging thing to get right.

Yeah, and maybe, you know, maybe with time, you’ll figure out how you want to approach that, or maybe you’ll just stay clear of that.

DAVE

I think I’m a coward. I’d probably just avoid it, but I wish I was better at it. And I suppose my question to you would be, are there things that you wish that you could do more of, or what have you learned as you’ve gone through with your process,

HELEN

In relation to my artwork or in relation to recovery?

DAVE

I would say within your artwork,

HELEN

I guess being able to have more time would be, yeah, I’d like to be able to carry on without having the pressures of having to find funding. And so it’s not necessarily what I’d like to do more of, it’s more what I’d like to not do myself, funding applications. And I guess having that need to, need to make it financially viable. I feel really pleased that I have a multi disciplinary practice, and in that it allows me to dip into different you know, I can do some sculpture, I can do some painting, I can do some writing, and I don’t feel like confined within my practice. So I have a lot of freedom, but I would say my main constraints are time and money.

DAVE

I’m very jealous of that, because I just kind of write dick jokes. And I do think comedy does get a bad rep in terms of art, like no one ever sees it as an art which, and if they do, they’re generally pissed. But there’s no but you do see, you saw them at Edinburgh, like this isn’t comedy, it’s art. And what that actually generally tends to mean is that it’s actually, you know, it’s not funny and, and I do feel that, especially I felt very freed of it. In the book the need to try and be funny. But in in stand up shows, I feel very hemmed in by, yeah, you need, you need six laughs a minute right, right?

HELEN

Are you funded, just through your practice?

DAVE

Yeah

HELEN

With this project being funded by the Arts Council, and supported by the venues I have, like, a sense of responsibility and I don’t see that as being a bad thing. You know, actually, I want to get the most out of that money. I want to make the most impact that I can. But that all that also comes with, like, all of the reporting and suchlike.

Are you totally free from any kind of other pressure, funding, yeah, or anything.

DAVE

Yeah, I think I am, and I think that’s kind of a golden cage in and of itself, because I think that you still have to have. So yes, when I do the shows, it’s just tickets on the door. All the models that I do, there’s barely two in terms of stand up. There’s two kind of general models, you can buy a ticket before the show. Or one that I like to do is you can pay on donation at the end based on what you think it’s worth and how much you can afford. I always like to do the latter, because I think that makes quality more accessible. I also think you get a better performance. And I think it’s more sort of socialistic. But with that as well, there is a real demand for the product, and it is a product to be good enough for people to want to give money. So although I don’t have to do reporting and stuff like that, I very much feel that I have to provide the goods, which means that I don’t have that creativity to muck about as much as I would like. Okay, I was listening to a podcast on the train up here, and there’s a brilliant performer called Phil Ellis, who he’s been nominated for the Paris very, very funny, very inventive person, and he uses it in his shows. He did one show, it was an hour long, and a bear came in and a costume and started rapping halfway through, and he pretended like he hadn’t seen it, and just walked out. And I was like, That’s mental. And I could never, I never have the balls to kind of do that, because I’m like, I still need to do a kind of good enough show. So I think without having the sort of Arts Council requirements, I also kind of feel hemmed in, that I still need to sort of like, make people laugh and stuff. That’s why the book was great, because I that was one of the few things I enjoyed about the book, was I didn’t feel the need to make people laugh.

HELEN

The book is split into 6 sections, precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, relapse, action, maintenance, the stages that you went through and you tell the story of what was happening at each point. At the end of each section you give some tips to help at each of the stages.

I love the inclusion of drawings, diagrams, doodles, photographs, post-it-note style tips, stories, and music suggestions, a playlist for each section of the book. Songs to listen to while reading. Some pages are printed like they are on notebook lined paper in a more handwriting style font. The book is very funny, and I would like to know about your process of writing for stand-up and the process of writing the book.

DAVE

I know you said you said you wanted to ask about this. I mean, I hated writing the book, and I feel bad saying that, because, like, I know there’s a lot of people that would love to write a book, and I feel guilty almost because I never wanted to write a book, and it’s one of the most unrewarding things you can ever do in fucking life, especially as someone that likes that, like instant dopamine. Here I was just traveling around writing, as I know this is funny, and I really wanted the book. I wanted, I wanted the book to be pragmatic, and I also wanted to have a feel. So I think the problem that we’ve got with eating disorder and eating distress is that a lot of people talk about mental health in general and very perfectionist terms, in very ways, a very sort of concrete I knew then I was depressed, and I don’t think that’s the reality. I think that, like no one ever expected my dad, when he got diabetes, to turn up to the doctor and say, my blood sugar is a 3.1 what I need is an insulin boosting, you know, blah, blah, blah. But when you come to mental health, you’re expected to go. So I think that I have sustained low mood. I’m not getting enjoyment out there. What I want is Sertraline 50 milligrams a day and that’s madness, because when I was most depressed, I didn’t even realize so I wanted the book to have a gritty, kind of unthought out feel. And that’s why I thought it’d be really important to have, like, ripped pages in there and like handwritten stuff, and that’s why I did the soundtracks for each section. The book’s kind of section in six stages, because I found one of the most helpful things for me was there’s a brilliant psychiatric model called the trans theoretical model, and it means that change doesn’t happen in one jump, so it can be anything. So say you want to quit smoking. Firstly, you need to realize that you are a smoker, that you’re not just a social smoker. Then you need to put stuff into place. Then you need to maintain that. And the reason I love the trans theoretical model is one of the sections is relapse, and one of the things specifically that people don’t talk about a lot with eating disorders is you will fuck up. It’s unlike a lot of things, in the sense that if you drink, and I’m not saying it’s easy to give up drinking, absolutely not. Someone’s trying to at the moment, I know it’s hard, but you can just not drink. If you are taking drugs. You can just not take drugs however. You need to sustain a relationship with eating throughout your life, whether that’s binge eating disorder, restricted, ARFID whatever, and I find that quite difficult. So I think in eating disorders, specifically, relapse is really important.

HELEN

And you changed the order of the stages, didn’t you?

DAVE

I did.

HELEN

Which illustrated the fact that no one experience is the same for everyone.

DAVE

Well, I think kind of part of that as well is that it pissed me off that stories were always like fairies and unicorns at the ending, and it’s like, and then, then I’ll never have any challenges ever in my life. You’re like, yeah, you fucking will. And like, you also have, you’ve set yourself up to fail then, because the goal of good mental health isn’t to always be happy. It’s to within certain parameters, be able to cope. Yeah, yeah. And I think that word coping has really come out that again. I don’t want to take this off topic, but I’ve created a comedy course specifically aimed at people with mental health problems, ideally eating disorders to create a stand up comedy course to teach them stand up as a method of recovery, as a method of building, their communication, their connection with other people, their confidence. And I think that that is really important, that the goal of eating disorders isn’t to sustain weight. It isn’t to be able to drink a pumpkin spice latte. It is to find healthier, more sustainable methods of coping.

HELEN

A lot of people start unbeknown to them, eating distress through not being able to cope. And that just happens to be a mechanism to enable you to cope. That’s my experience, from what I understand, that’s your experience. And I feel as though maybe that’s something that isn’t quite understood as much as it should be. Is that, you know? Yeah, we know about those, like, social pressures, and people that do come from it, in terms of, like, oh, I want to look thin and all of that. But a lot of it is very, very on an unconscious level. Like, I had no idea that I was becoming anorexic. I just was coping.

DAVE

Why should you like? It’s the there is the frog in the boiling water argument. There’s an experiment. If you put a frog in a boiling water, and then you heat the pan, it heats so gradually the frog doesn’t realize that it’s actually boiling alive, which was done actually, I think it was by a French scientist. Anyway, point is that I think it can become your normality over time, which is why it frustrates me when people ask, when your eating disorder start, a logically weird thing to ask, but equally, by the same thing, people still ask, when did it end? When did you recover? When did you get over it? Yeah, and I think there’s a lot of a lot of people that don’t realize, in the same way that they have mental health issues. They don’t realize they’ve got an eating disorder, which I realize there’s a subset of mental issues. But a great example, I was going at the Edinburgh Fringe. Yeah, very good friend of mine used to live with him, and I remember once he came home, he was like, got some chips, and he was eating his fish and chip, and he was on his phone, it’s like, I’m gonna get pizza. I was like, Yeah, right. Like, it was like, you want one? I was like, now I’m all right. And then his pizza came, and as soon as it came, he started ordering a Chinese. He was like, you want a Chinese? And I was like, Is everything all right? And it was like, yeah. I mean, my feelings in it. And he would never, ever in a million years identify as having an eating disorder ever. But by the clinical definition, absolutely did. And I’ll never forget, Una used to say, when she used to do counselling, you could close your eyes, and if you took out the word anorexia, binge eating, whatever everyone was saying, the same thing that it was, it was comforting, yeah, it was a secret. It was an identity. It was something that was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There were so many commonalities, yeah, yeah.

HELEN

And, I mean, just talking about the fringe, when I visited you in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Fringe, I was startled by your full-on schedule involving early morning starts for radio interviews and press, to your performances throughout the day going into the evening followed by award ceremonies and such that may go on into the early hours. How do you cope? What do you do to ensure that you do not slip back into old habits? Has this lifestyle actually helped your recovery because you simply do not have time to exercise, for example?

DAVE

I ate shit this year because, because I wasn’t drinking. I ate awful and I didn’t have a I didn’t have my weighing scales with me. And I remember coming home and being, you know, I put on weight, and I was at the highest weight that I’ve been for a considerable amount of time, and I was like, wow, that is a feeling. And that was that was something that I kind of had to square with myself. And again, I think in terms of the honesty thing, I think I am, I think, I think I am very easy to sort of say, you know, like I wasn’t comfortable with, I’ve kind of made strokes. But, yeah, I think it was particularly this year, because I was doing like five shows a day, and just, it’s the stuff in between the performance, the easy bit, fucking flyers and stuff like that. But I think the good thing about the fringe is that’s not normal life, that’s not the real world. And I think everyone’s forget it’s not funny, but it was funny. We used to live on like grass market, which is like the center of town, and I don’t forget there was a girl crying her eyes out, and she’s obviously really distressed. And I was like, that. I just, I don’t want to make her uncomfortable, but I also can’t really walk past her. I just kind of went like, are you all right? She looked up and she got, like, really, like, blood shot eyes, and she went, Yes, the fringe in it. And that was the most Edinburgh thing I’ve ever heard, because it will, it does fuck with your mind and but you’ve got to bear in mind, it’s essentially four weeks. Yeah, yeah. Whereas life is continuous.

HELEN

So are the things that, like, other things that you put in place during those four weeks, or just regardless of the fringe, like, what are the things that you do in order? Because, let’s face it, like being in recovery or aiming to, yeah, stay on an even keel is, like, it’s flipping hard work. Like, what are the things that you have to do to make sure that that you don’t relapse?

DAVE

Well, I think, not to dodge your question, but I think the best thing that you can do is not to create yourself as the paradigmatic recovered person. I have seen so many people are like, I’m recovered now, and you’ve just, you’ve made it worse for yourself. So everyone’s gonna fuck up. And I think that’s more important. So I never try and pretend like I’ve got this golden key to the universe, because the truth of the matter is that I don’t. And the truth of the matter is I should have things that I put in place in Edinburgh, but I didn’t. And I think, I think that mental health in general would be a lot different if instead of looking at the bad, we focused on the good. And we were talking about schools workshops earlier on, of actually going into schools and saying, Look, one in four people has mental illness. But you know what? Four and four people have mental health? So what are the fun things that you do to keep mentally healthy. Is it PlayStation, great? Is it petting the dog? Absolutely brilliant. Is it making your podcast? Excellent. Is it artwork? incredible And I think if you led with that motivation and positivity, rather than it’s always people that have come to their lowest ebb and then tried to build back up, that fills people, I think, with fear, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, do you do you feel that pressure to be recovered?

HELEN

I think so. I’m often asked, What does recovery look like for you? I feel as though I don’t like the term recovered. I kind of actively, like, leave that away, because that does put pressure on me. I know and I realize that life changes, and there’s going to be ups and downs, and there’s going to be times when, like, you’re saying that you struggle more. And so I totally agree with you in that the term recovered feels too concrete, or it feels like I am putting too much of a pressure on myself. So I’m in recovery, whatever that means for me, and that might, you know, change as it you know, I have my goals. I’ll have my aims and that kind of thing and but I don’t feel as pressured then to be this perfect entity that has got everything sorted, because I don’t really feel that.

DAVE

I don’t think anyone does,

HELEN

No, exactly.

DAVE

I genuinely don’t think that people do. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of things I wish that I’d heard as a kid, and again, something we were talking about as we get older, maybe. And I think this might be perhaps a more male experience, and I understand why it did different from for women or female presenting people. But I love getting older. I think aging is fucking great, like and I age. Ageism is the last. It’s the last ism that you’re allowed to do, me and Una go on adults only holidays. And it’s not like keys in a bowl. It’s like, you can’t, like, it’s over 18 only, like, you would never be able to do you’ll never be able to do that with any other ism you never be like, black people only holiday Are you mental but like, with age, you are allowed to discriminate. You are allowed to say, Oh yeah, that presenter is a bit old. That person’s over there, whereas I think aging is so much better. And the reason I bring that up is I wish as a kid there were certain things that people were more honest about that, like, as you get older, no one has a handbook for life. We’re all mothering, muddling through whether that is parenting, whether that is finding out what stamp duty is, whether that is trying to sort of getting a promotion at work. And I think one of the things I quite like about mental health is that it is that gray area of people acknowledging that people don’t really grow up, they just get taller, dude.

HELEN

Oh, that hasn’t come for me.

DAVE

Me neither, but I feel like everyone has a like a peak age. And I think one of the one of the sustaining factors of my eating disorder was because I had such a lovely childhood. I was like, I want to stay there. I want to stop time. I want to stop time. And I’m always anxious about time. I’ve got a real thing about time and time growing up. And I had a lovely childhood. I was like, I don’t want to go to university. I want to leave these people. So it was amazing. And if people had sort of said to me, instead of going University, is going to be the best days of your life, you’re probably going to be around people who haven’t got a clue either. I think that’s much more honest, but also helpful.

HELEN

I had a real fear of growing up. Yeah, totally. I think part of it is being told about puberty. Oh yeah, if you want to share this scare the shit out of people, just tell them about puberty. Everything’s gonna change. I remember on my 13th birthday getting a card from my mum’s best friend, making a big deal about being a stroppy teenager now. And she meant it as a joke, but I was so scared, like, I’m going to turn into this monster. I think that that did have an impact on me. I was like, right? I’m gonna try and prevent me from growing up, prevent me from developing into a woman, and therefore, subconsciously, probably that had an impact on my eating?

DAVE

I remember there was a guy called I used to be obsessed with when I was a kid. Professor, Robert Winston, he’s now, like a proper transphobe now, but yeah, he’s gone a bit mad, but I suppose he’s not relevant anymore. But he did a documentary about puberty, and it sounded genuinely. He did it like he narrated it on a roller coaster, going like your emotions are all over the place. You don’t know what you’re saying. And I’m like, fucking hell, this sounds mad. Like, how is this allowed to happen? And I do think that the sexual component of an eating disorder of is not talked about. And I was terrified of my masculinity, I was certainly terrified of my sex drive, and I found subconsciously that if you starve your body, you start your brain, and it starved out those kind of chemicals. And so I think puberty is a big factor with that.

HELEN

I mean, I seriously had a terrifying experience. And my parents are absolutely great. There’s only a few things that I would change about my upbringing, and this being one of them. My introduction to puberty was when one night I was in my in my room getting ready to go to bed. My Mum came in my room with this brown paper bag. And she handed it to me saying “before you go to bed, Helen, I’ve got this to give to you, and it’s from your gran. Open it when I’m out of the room and just put it in your top drawer. And, yeah, okay, good night.“

DAVE

It’s like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale

HELEN

It was the Osborne’s guide to growing up, right? So that was my sex education via my Gran, via my Mum.

DAVE

Can you remember what was in the book?

HELEN

Yeah, you know, growing pubic hair, starting to need to wear deodorant, and pictures of what happened to your hips. I have yeah nightmares. It’s so vivid. I can almost hear the rustle of that brown paper bag. I mean, come on, like, Now, give me some sweets in a sweet shot in a brown paper bag. I’m like, no, no.

DAVE

Have you ever talked to your Mum about that?

HELEN

Yeah

DAVE

What did she say?

HELEN

I’m sorry.

DAVE

Have you got any brothers or sisters? Did they? Did she do the same with that?

HELEN

Yes, a sister. Oh, I don’t know. Never asked that.

DAVE

That’s a good Christmas Day topic. When you get your sausages wrapped in bacon? Well, let’s talk about another sausage wrapped in… I just think, I think that’s really interesting, because this is a real area. It’s kind of ironic that I say I never really like sort of talk about sex, and that’s one area that I have sort of steer clear of. We’re talking about it.

HELEN

Likewise, I never have but I strongly think that that deep down fear of growing up had an impact on me. My eating.

DAVE

Well, I got in trouble. I’ve got in trouble before with this, with acts that are gay, and I’ve said, like, when did you realize you were gay? And they took that to be really offensive, but like, I didn’t. It took me years to realize I was straight. Because, I don’t know, like, Yeah, I think I’m sorry, but, but, like, it was one of those things. And I remember as a kid always thinking, like, do I do? I fancy blokes and, like, when I was like, I must have been like, 16, and Pirates of the Caribbean came out. And I defy anyone to say that Captain Jack Sparrow is not a good looking man. I mean, I now, now morally dubious, but it is all of those kind of urges, and I think that’s why kind of comedy and humor is a beautiful deflection for saying something seriously. If you can have a laugh at the end, then you get off scot free. Look at Ricky Gervais. I mean, he’s made a career of it, but it is one of those things, and that’s why I think, especially with eating disorders, there’s a lot of funny stuff that gets overlooked. And would you say you were more serious when you were not well?

HELEN

I’m not sure that’s for me to answer, or whether actually someone else would have a better perspective of when I wasn’t well. My brain wasn’t working properly, so I’m not sure that I could answer. I’m not sure that I would have had the awareness. I’m a lot more aware now of myself and my because my brain’s working better, you know, yeah, when I wasn’t well, I don’t think I had the same grip on reality that I do now.

DAVE

Were you trying to hide from reality?

HELEN

Probably. I mean, again, that’s something that I don’t really know, because it wasn’t conscious. But, I reckon having thought about it now, I kind of reckon that I was trying to avoid growing up. Reckon that I was trying to avoid the nasty situations that life put me in. So probably, you know, would have quite liked to have not been in that place, that dark time. Yeah, does that answer?

DAVE

It does. Because I think I always tried to avoid reality, and something that I found really hard to write about was using alcohol while restricting as well, because that’s, again, something that’s quite common, but understandably people get it is a difficult thing to understand, because there’s so many calories in drinks, like you’re restricting it you’re drinking, and I know you don’t drink, but for me, it was perhaps another way of escaping reality.

HELEN

Yeah, it petrifies me the thought, I mean, I’d be such a lightweight that I’d be, you know, having one sip of a drink would probably really affect me. I don’t drink because of the medication that I’m on, and I’m scared of what would happen to me. Basically, it’s that control thing, you. Yeah, yeah, but I can fully appreciate, I mean, most people get through a tricky, tricky situation with drink and there’s plenty of times when I wish that that I had the ability to have a drink and manage that and just have the nice, relaxed sensation that people tend to get. You know, yeah, how are you finding not drinking? What was the reason for you?

DAVE

I think I’ve always used like, I think I’ve always used booze to kind of like, medicate, and I think it was when I was, like, going through the eating disorder, I did what a lot of people did, of like, head to sort of white spirits and no mixer and stuff like that. And I was used to sort of joke that it was my sort of tax haven. I knew that it I knew that it had calories, but it relieved the anxiety, It relieved the pressure. It relieved so much.

HELEN

And like the cost benefit analysis,

DAVE

Yeah, I’m now kind of realizing that actually probably what I quite liked was the sugar here that my body kind of craved so much it’s taken me years to get to a point where I’m not drinking, especially working in a nighttime industry, and especially with booze, ironically, being so expensive now that you just don’t feel you’re getting your money’s worth if you get, like, a Diet Coke, but if it’s like, you know, you know it’s seven quid a pint, you’re like, yeah, get me three, mate. You’re not paying me enough anyway.

HELEN

I don’t think I’d be able to survive. Actually, it saves me £1000s. So I actually, I realise that not drinking and not eating out at restaurants is probably the way that I manage to fund my practice.

That’s a barrier to recovery is I can’t afford it. Yeah.

DAVE

I mean, there’s something I don’t know if that’s positive or not, but yeah, I I do think alcohol is one thing that’s not spoken about as much, and drugs. It worries me how many young people are taking drugs at the moment, like it’s it’s genuinely rife, and some really bad shit out there, but I realize I sound like my dad, so yeah, I think, how am I finding not drinking? I’ve actually got over it being so challenging, but weirdly, I think I’m going through the same identity crisis that I went through when I stopped being anorexic. So it’s like, I’m no longer anorexic, and now I’m kind of like, I’m no longer the drinker, yeah, and I think it’s kind of compounded, like, as I get older, it’s like, Is my identity just going to be the negation of anything else? Like, there’s Dave, he’s not anorexic, he’s not a drinker, he’s never been fun. I think a lot of the things, there’s certain themes that always comes back to and I think identity is certainly one of them.

HELEN

How do you navigate that? I am conscious that it can be easy to be pigeon-holed as the comic that discusses anorexia and realise that later gigs have focused on mental health more broadly. Do you feel pigeon-holed into discussing anorexia? Did that hold you back in recovery, or did it help spur on your recovery?

DAVE

It’s really interesting, because I feel like I’ve gone full circle. Because when I did the TED talk, it was six days before I went into therapy for the first time, and that was actually the most ill that I’d ever been. And I was very ill that day. I wasn’t a well man. So I don’t, I don’t like watching that video. And then the TED Talk went well, and then sort of stuff started coming out. And then, and I’ve talked about this before, but, and it did genuinely happen, a woman came up to me at the front saying, I don’t think you’re really anorexic. I think you’re a white, middle class man who has so much unchecked privilege you need to create something in order to feel special. And that was like, whoa. And that kind of spurred me on. People kept on saying, “Oh, you don’t look anorexic”, and stuff like that. So that area was difficult, and I think that was a kind of sustaining factor for quite a while, but then I started coming out of it. And if I’m entirely honest, it’s not something that I can either really cogitate that well, but I became very, very, very disenfranchised with the mental health sphere, with the direction of travel that people were using their diagnosis to just whine. It was always negative. It was never positive. It was always personal stories. It was never tips, it was never pragmatic things. This is what you could do. It was just, oh, the NICE guidelines are still using that, or oh, there’s certain things in practice that I don’t like that I’m going to build my identity around whatever it was. I think the turning point, I find this funny, there was someone who, of course, will remain nameless, but wrote a book about mental health, And someone had posted about their suicidal ideation on Twitter in quite beautiful, honest detail, and said person used that post to put a link to their book about mental health underneath it. And I was like, you fucking what? And said, person, you know, whatever. I just thought it was so tone deaf. It was funny. And I kept on seeing this sort of thing time and time and time again. I really stepped away from mental health, and it made me feel kind of sort of existential, kind of act, because I was like, I always set out to do comedy about mental health, and I think that’s why I’m so pumped about, like, comedy for coping. And what I’m pumped about is this show that I’m writing. I genuinely believe that having a laugh, getting together is good for mental health, and I think people are motivated by good, not by fear, and I think we need to stop using fear. We need to stop using negativity, and actually start leading by example and saying, This is good mental health, rather than this is bad mental health. So to answer the question succinctly, it did become a rod for my own back. But actually, I think I’ve been very privileged and very lucky, and I haven’t always acknowledged, or even realized how privileged I am. And I kind of want to use that now to kind of go, You know what? Let’s talk about mental health. And I realize everyone’s got their own chip, but let’s talk about good mental health, and here’s how you can get here.

HELEN

Can you tell me a bit about the comedy group that you do? The reason why I wanted to start artED was that I want to do something positive. I’d love to go into schools. I’d love to go into hospitals, and do journaling workshops and like, celebrate that. This is how youcreativity in a positive way. And I really like to hear more about how you’re using comedy.

DAVE

I’ve seen this so many times, of it is basically using the carrot, not the stick. And I think a lot of people really want to talk about mental health, but they just don’t know how. And it always boiled my piss when people say, just talk, because I don’t think that suicide is the biggest killer of blokes under the age of 49 because they don’t know how to talk. Great example of this, I did a gig last week which was hell on toast, but it was 42 squaddies in the front row, and they were coked up. They were acting out. And there were three and fifty other people in the room, but the three made it all about them, and they were so alpha. I said, Well, I do a lot of stuff about mental health. And one of them went, well, “we don’t want to say anything, but one of the lads actually, you know, he ended his life when we were out there, and it’s really affected a lot of the lads”. And I told the sergeant about comedy for coping. And he was like, I think you’d be really receptive to that. And it’s, it’s builders, it’s squaddies, it’s bin workers. Those are the people that I really want to reach. And with all due respect, I don’t think doing Zumba classes or yoga or, you know, I don’t think that’s going to reach the industries that have the highest suicide rate. And one of the things I love about comedy is that it’s an absolute normalizer. Whether you are middle class, upper class, working class, we can all laugh at the same thing. And I’ve always made the argument that you actually can laugh before you can talk. So I would make the argument that comedy is more universal than language, like we could go to China or India or America, anywhere that they don’t speak English, and you could play them Mr. B, and they would all still laugh. They would all find that funny, even though we don’t have a shared language. So the course is structured with each week. It’s six weeks, it’s all online, and it’s each week has a different theme. And we were lucky enough to do get a grant to do some qualitative research, and now we’re putting out a podcast and some films around it. But I think the best example I always give on that is there was a guy who was trans on the course, and I would never normally raise that, but this is a brilliant example of how being vulnerable in comedy can actually raise you up. We were doing this course, and there had been something about trans stuff in the news, and had all been very heated, and there was one week where I said, Can you tell, can you tell an anecdote that you want to reclaim, that you would like to take from the depths, take from your shame, well, and kind of admonish. So this man was born in the body of a woman, and I didn’t realize that, apparently there are certain things that you can do when you’re swimming, certain prosthetics that you can pop in your you know, so the bumps in the right places. And he told this story about how he’d been swimming when he was 18, and he dived in the water, and everyone that was in the pool just kind of like went silent. He looked around, and his penis was floating behind. The beautiful thing about that was, he said, I’ve never told anyone that in my life. And he was that he was the king of the group. Everyone, everyone wanted to connect with him. Everyone loved him, and I thought that’s a really horrible, really ostracizing, embarrassing story, but if you can tell it in a way that gets a laugh, it brings people closer to you, rather than pushing you away. Yeah, and I think that a lot of group therapy badly uses the eating disorder as the thing that binds you. Yeah, and if you’re constantly saying that your eating disorder isn’t your identity, how do you think it’s going to feel if I’ve done group therapy and like, how was your eating disorder this week? It’s like, well, this isn’t getting rid of it, this is entrenching it, if anything. So if you can add an extra element onto that where we’re all talking about comedy, and then yeah, sometimes there might be a funny story if this happened in treatment, or this is something my mom said, that’s beautiful, because that’s a shared commonality. I wholeheartedly agree that focusing on like that positive thing was so much more beneficial, so much more enjoyable as well then.

It’s amazing to me how many green rooms I’ve been in. And actually, lockdown was the worst. In one week I had three people come up to me and two sort of TV names. One of them was a god of mine. Sort of said, Yeah, about eating disorders. I’m really struggling at the moment. And one of them is a very sort of alpha male. I think if more people were honest, I think more people would realize the perception of eating disorders is actually much different to the reality.

HELEN

So if money was no object then, and you could reinvent the support for eating disorders. What would what would you do?

DAVE

I’d just buy a house in Brighton and quit. No, of course not. I think what we’re trying to do at the moment, I’m really, I’m really keen that the course has to be free at the point of entry has to be free for service users. We are looking at getting it on social prescribing. We’ve already done that in NHS, Wales, and we funded two courses to do it there, which was really good. I’m doing it now, actually, with NHS managers, which is a really weird thing. I think ultimately what I would like to do is to expand it. And the one thing that I’m absolutely clear about is it is not a replacement for therapy. What it is is a realization that, look, waiting lists ain’t going to go down. Things aren’t going to get easier in mental health treatment. So I think it’s short sighted and wrong to just keep on complaining about, oh, there needs to be more money, etc. Because I think we’re all getting to a point where I realized, as much as we love the NHS, I found out there’s one NHS, trust that will remain nameless, that is losing over 600,000 pounds a day a day, and I think things unfortunately might get worse, okay, but what I think you really need to do is help prop people up when they are on waiting lists. So if waiting list for two years, give them an intervention so that when they get into that counseling chair, they have ways of articulating themselves. They have means and methods. So if money was no object, and if I could have it in the world, it would be social prescribing for people who have been on a waiting list for six months or more, not as a replacement to therapy, but almost as a foot in the door to go. Here’s how you can start to visualize your emotions to how you can break routines and how you can build that confidence by talking through what are essentially metaphysical problems.

HELEN

And give that person some hope, absolutely. It takes so much courage in the first place to admit that you need help and seek help, and then to get to that place where you knock on the door, and then they go, yeah, see you in six years!

DAVE

I know I’m biased, but it works. We’ve done one group that has been funded that we’ve sort of looked at, and in that one of the participants has gone on and now does stand up in her own time. She became friends with another guy that did the course. She lives in Brighton and he lives in Manchester, so they go and visit each other. I got an email the other day that they had met up, I think in Birmingham. They’d all happened to be in Birmingham. So they met up and sent me a photo, and they’ve created this community. And the idea, again, long term with comedy for coping would be people that have done it then go on to teach it, so that it’s a self sustaining machine, that, you know, they’re trained by people that have done it, so that people understand peer support in a different way.

HELEN

Oh, seems like soon you’re gonna have your first Comedy for Coping marriage!

DAVE

I would love that.

Well, me and Una actually met at an eating disorder conference. So I always kind of joked that I’m not really a boyfriend, more of a case study.

HELEN

Let’s open it up and let these wonderful people (the audience) have a voice.

QUESTION 1

Well, it was just what you’re saying about puberty, which seemed to almost come as a surprise to both of you, that that came up in relation to eating distress as a trigger, I guess. And it just made me think about the current issues with PVC blockers as well, and like the fact that they are used all the time for kids who are trans to, like, stop them from having the wrong puberty. It’s seen as dangerous to prevent them from having the right kind of puberty. What are your thoughts?

DAVE

I’ve never really thought about that, that sort of moment, the tipping point. But I want to be absolutely clear that I know fuck all about this. But I also think puberty is an important part and my understanding, which is incredibly limited, is, don’t go on puberty block as like, an absolute. Can you come off them?

AUDIENCE

Yes, it just pauses, it just pauses. I guess you couldn’t probably take them forever and just remain.

DAVE

I think that’d be fucking great. There’s probably a reason we don’t do that. But that’s interesting, God, isn’t it mad. But then again, this is what worries me about science,that we’re gonna get to areas that are really uncomfortable. And that’s right, that’s another thing of I think one of the things that mental health has done really badly is uncomfortable conversations. I think any conversation, I think, I think debate is absolutely key when it is well mannered, polite and open minded 100% and it really worries me that a lot of conversations that are absolutely necessary and that could be nipped in the bud are avoided for fear of becoming inflammatory. So I think that’s a really interesting thing. And if anyone knows about puberty blockers, I’ve genuinely be quite interested in stuff like that.

HELEN

Yeah, that’s fascinating. I’ve never thought about that.  The thing that I would say was most important would be, rather than blocking it, would be talking about what the problem with it is. For someone who’s got eating problems it’s, it’s not about going through the puberty, it’s about what the problem with going through it, you know, like you should go through. It’s that kind of like exposure therapy, I guess. Don’t avoid the problem. Go through the problem. If that, if that’s not to do with trans rights and all of it, you know, I think we’re dealing with something different when it comes to eating this distress. But again, I say that from a very unexpert position and just based on, I wouldn’t want to make life decisions like that wrongly.

DAVE

I think it really hits on something, but I really don’t think, and again, I don’t need to be triggering or glorifying or anything like that, but people have always said to me, why do people get eating disorders? And I think a more interesting question is, why do some people not get eating disorders? Because everyone has a relationship with food. Be that healthy? Be that unhealthy, be that fraught. Why? Why do more people not have that? Or do more people are we all on a spectrum of disordered eating? So I defy anyone to have not sat down and watched a movie and realized that you being a pack of hot dogs and feel like shit or something like that. I don’t think that’s a unique experience at all, but I find it interesting of like, why have you? Why is this not seemingly more of a problem for you? I think that’s kind of interesting to me.

QUESTION 2

How do you protect yourselves from exposing of your own self. I feel I’m quite good at talking. Talking quite openly about mental health and experience with eating disorders. And sometimes that means people latch onto me and share, and I find it very difficult to not absorb their distress. And I wonder, yeah, if you guys have experienced that, or do you manage to keep it separate in a way?

DAVE

I think one of the things I learned really early on is to always, if you’re gonna talk about something like this. It’s horrible, and this goes against the thing I was saying about honesty. But I learned very in early iterations of the show to talk about the anorexia in the past. Because if you say I have anorexia, people are like, fucking out. But if you say I had anorexia, people are like, okay, crack on. But in terms of guarding against, not even guarding against empathy. I find that really difficult. That was one of the things that caused me to relapse, because people always tell me their BMI or their lowest weight, or I met so many people who had lost daughters and sons, and I felt like a fraud completely because I hadn’t died from this. And I think that was quite challenging. And there’s an answer that I want to give, and then there’s a truthful answer. And I think the answer that I want to give is like, you can only look after yourself. You can’t look after other people. You know, that’s why they say fit your oxygen mask before helping others when you’re on a plane. But I think the true answer is that life is messy, and I don’t think you can ever really fully protect against that. There’s always going to be someone or something that just gut punches you, I suppose, being aware of that. What do you think?

HELEN

I haven’t come across many people seeking support from me. If I’m totally honest, I find it the other way, in that some of the people that you most expect to be courteous to you, or be mindful of the fact that you might struggle, have actually caused the most distress for me. So like when I was in hospital in 2022 for a kidney problem. I had a member of staff, you know, come up to take my blood, and then say to me,” Whoa, you’re skinny, aren’t you?” And you know the way that’s coming from a medical professional. You don’t expect that. And you’re there because you’re ill, and I’ve been most affected by those circumstances. I can give some more examples, but I don’t want to, because it’s not very helpful. But in terms of people coming to me that, you know, people have shared, and I’m very conscious that I have to set boundaries and I’ll make that known, and I’ll make that known in a kind as way as possible, for as both you know. So, okay, maybe you know, just to let you know, I might not be able to help you, but here’s some support that you could get or whatever. I never close the door on someone. And I think I’m also learning a lot more about the situations that I need to avoid for myself. So I find Christmas is a hell time for me, and if I could have headphones on to anyone who says things like, “oh, I shouldn’t eat that” or, “Oh, well, I did an extra 20 minutes at the gym today so I can have this extra grape”. If I could eradicate that from my ears, that would be very helpful, because on certain days when I might be feeling a bit more sensitive. Let’s say they aren’t helpful. So in in some respects, I do, yeah, I avoid certain situations. You won’t see me at staff parties by the alcohol you. At Christmas time, I have a period of time prior to going to my family in which I prepare myself those kind of, those kind of potentially challenging situations. I find have been more problematic to me than other people coming to me to seek support.

DAVE

And I also think just quickly leading on for that, I think you can kind of insulate yourself from that by actually not holding yourself up to the Oracle of all sort of eating disorders, like, you know, if you’ve been a house fire before, that doesn’t make you Fireman Sam. It doesn’t mean you know somebody else’s experience. You are not professional. So take pressure off your own shoulders. And I also think something with that, that I know sounds very uncaring and very blunt and a bit hard nosed, but I am a huge believer that nobody ever chooses to have a mental health problem, but you do choose to do something about it, and as horrible and awkward as it is, I think that you can try and support and help other people, but only that one person is responsible for their mental health and trying to help and create scaffolding around them so that they can, you know, flourish is brilliant, but also realizing that, yeah, unfortunately, this is something no one else can do for them.

HELEN

I’ve found one concept that, whether it be related to autism or not, has just been revolutionary in my in my life. It’s that of spoons and running out of spoons.  I’ll have text messages with friends and say, sorry out of spoons, and it just says it, and I don’t have to give any other explanation. People get it. And I found that having that kind of understanding of language, which I think is an excellent way, like teaching kids in schools to have that shared language. It’s a friendly way of just communicating.

DAVE

Why is it spoon? Was it Navalny cutlery?

HELEN

Because the person that invented it was using teaspoons. I think they must have been at a cafe or something.

QUESTION 3

Hello. I was wondering whether you ever have any concerns or maybe even resentment about the fact that your career is essentially connected to your mental difficulties. That creates this kind of weird thing where you can’t really escape it, I guess, great.

DAVE

I mean, it’s a great question. I think the honest answer is no. I think I’ve been very privileged and very, very lucky. I think throughout my life, I think actually, my friends have always been very good at understanding mentality, even before it was a thing. I think, if anything, I feel guilty that for the aforementioned reasons, I haven’t stuck the mental health course, and I kind of regret that, and that’s why I’m trying to move back into it. The only time that it has been difficult is that sometimes I used to, but I don’t as much anymore. More because of the media landscape sort of changing. I used to get, you know, very, very privileged to like, you know, asked to be on different TV outlets and stuff like that. And I think understandably, some people have said, Oh, are you trying to milk this in order to further your career? And I understand why people could think that, and I think, I think that was one of the reasons that kind of moved away, because I didn’t want people to think that’s what I was doing. But I kind of think that was exactly the wrong decision. And if anything I would, I would die happy, man, if it would be like Dave, he was the mental health guy, like I would, I would be happy with that pigeonhole for the record.

QUESTION 4

Then, did your eating disorder make you more or less funny?

DAVE

I don’t think I’ve ever been funny. I have no dignity to lose. It’s interesting because it’s changed me. One of the things that is really uncomfortable is if you watch the TED Talk and is it made me camp.

HELEN

Your laugh has totally changed.

DAVE

It was very calm. I had such a genuine break with that kind of, because I kind of went through this sort of second puberty and stuff. And yeah, if anything, it’s I’ve had to kind of completely restructure the sort of person that I am, but my humor is like the things that I find funny has always been the same, but the way that I tried to portray that is completely different. And I found that’s what I find really difficult. But, yeah, that’s a really great question. I miss being camp.

QUESTION 5

So I want to come back to something about the Comedy for Coping, but just about the spoons analogy. I love that analogy, but I think that it really needs to be taught in schools.

I was so interested about the comedy for Coping and how you said you’d done it with NHS staff managers. I just wondered, do you have any concerns that say you’ve got conversations started with people on your course while they’re waiting for treatment, that might catch NHS staff off guard if they suddenly come and start using that way of expressing their emotions or their feelings and their experiences. It would be awful if you opened that door for them to feel comfortable talking about something and then these staff were almost like, well, this bit weird, not taking this seriously enough. That’s kind of what my initial concern was. And is there something there about training staff to recognize that sometimes people will use other forms of communication, including humor.

DAVE

I’m absolutely clear on this, the kind of nub of it is using humour responsibly and sensibly, and the healthcare staff not misinterpreting that as someone not taking it seriously. In the course, week five of the course is all about using humor responsibly. So I don’t know how kind of this has been a huge thing in comedy. Over the past 10 years, it’s become a lot more talked about, but thinking about who the punchline of the joke is, and thinking about things such as punching up and punching down. Basically, punching up is being critical of those in power. Punching down is, you know, laughing at people with disabilities, etc. And I actually want to go a bit further. I would love to do one with things like lawyers, because I genuinely think humor is a brilliant way of conflict resolution. Some of the best managers, CEOs and people that I’ve ever worked with actually have used humor in such a careful way that you realize you’re actually dancing to the beat of their drum, but because they’ve done it in such a way that you’ve laughed with them, and you can only laugh with someone when you’ve connected with them on some level, and if you can connect with someone, that’s a way of persuading them. So to answer your question, it’s really carefully thought. Out to get across that there are certain situations it is appropriate and it is not appropriate to use humor. And even in those circumstances where it is appropriate, there are different ways that you can do it. And there’s a lot of really interesting literature about this, of even things that maladaptive, ways of self deprecating humor, is that a good thing, or is actually that bad thing? Loads of different stuff there. But within the course for staff, I think it’s made very clear, well, I hope it’s made very clear that there are times when you can use this like I used to do. I used to do palliative care workshops so doctors when they’re training, I was very lucky enough to teach them for their OSCEs. So OSCEs are like Doctor exams and stuff. And one of them was breaking the news that I was a 26 year old boy, and I’ve gone inoperable bowel cancer, and there was a very specific way that you could kind of use human sensibly, carefully, if the person was right, to try and soften that blow. So I don’t think it is a silver bullet. I think there are absolute limitations, but I really do think it is a massively overlooked resource.

AUDIENCE

Yeah, because we we’ve seen a lot of value in looking at creative methods, and one of the things that we’ve come across is trying to make sure it’s not misinterpreted as US trivializing something. It’s just another form of communication

DAVE

That’s why I think written and broadcast communication are always really tricky for comedy, interpersonal aspects you should be able to gage, and if you can’t, there are certain ways of checking in, but specifically written, and that’s why the book was so hard to write, is you don’t have that relationship where you can kind of go, sorry, have I? Have I gone too far there? And that’s why that’s really difficult. And how that relates to health professionals working with people who’ve been on the course and so on. And how do they know how to respond to that comedy approach, but not just overstep it. One of the techniques that we teach in the course is joking around something rather than joking about it. So using humor in order to enrich your understanding. So in sort of eating disorders, let’s say it’s like anorexic, you can punch down and you can use jokes of like, you know, my mate was anorexic, bad news for her, but great news for me, double lunch or stuff like that. The joke comes at the expense because you’re basically nicking someone’s food, right? But then there’s joking around. So an example that I’ve used in a TED Talk and stuff as well is talking about behaviors. So for example, I was obsessed with exercise when I was a teenager. I was living at home. I was always exercising. I was always doing push ups, sit ups, squats in my bedroom. And it was then that my mom and dad realized something was wrong, and it was when I was writing the show that I said to my mom, why did you never say anything to me about the anorexia, about the exercising? And my mom said, Well, in our defense, when your teenage son keeps on running up to his bedroom, I know you can hear a rhythmical banging followed by and that’s, that’s actually you’re laughing at the behavior, not the cause. So there’s a specific way of writing that, of like getting further out, so you’re actually talking about behaviors.

QUESTION 6

You might not have, but maybe, if not, maybe it’s just more generally a question about TV and film representation. I recently watched the latest Heartstopper series, and

I don’t want to spoil it, but it has a representation of disordered eating, of anorexia, I believe, specifically. Watching it as somebody without that experience, it seemed like a really good, sensitive one. And I just wondered if you’d seen it.

HELEN

I have not seen it, but I will make a point of seeing it. There was one show that I watched recently, and it was about someone who’d just come out of therapy at a hospital. And I actually talked to someone else who had recovered from anorexia, and she said that she had advised them on the portrayal, and that actually she’d advised them of certain things to change, and they hadn’t. They hadn’t taken up her advice in general. I thought that they portrayed it very well in terms of the family dynamics. I thought that it showed the family the problems that were that were caused by the illness. I thought that aspect of it was very well thought through, but not necessarily the behavior of the individual.

DAVE

This is one of the things that makes me so skeptical about the mental health sphere of like so many TV shows like that, would just hire someone, they’ve written the script, they’ve rehearsed the lines, but Oh, fuck, we’ve got to bring someone in. Like, I know someone who they advised on The Crown for the Princess Diana thing. And she’s like that’s fucking awful, but they’re like, we’ve written it now. Go have your lunch and fuck off. And there was no, there was no even intent to change things. And it’s like, when you get Mental Health First Aiders of like, look, it’s a tick box. Yeah, they’re not actually intending to do anything. But I think it’s not eating disorders. But I watched Baby Reindeer, and even though I’ve never understood stalking and whatever, I thought that was a really beautiful way of portraying that there’s no kind of good guy or bad guy. There was a really complex psychological history throughout and I think that’s what mental health needs, in general, more the nuance, and that was fucking real.

QUESTION 7

Could I just ask? Could you say a bit more about your opinion on mental health first aid? I guess it’s importamt for us at Newbridge, because we get social prescriptions and do a lot of social activity. We have a lot of social space, and often we’re told that maybe Mental Health First Aid is training that our staff might need, but I’ve always heard terrible things about it. What other scaffold can you look to?

DAVE

So I’m really biased, because I run a training course for a brilliant charity called Chasing the stigma, and they run the hub of hope, which is the UK’s biggest mental health database, which is an app or a website that uses your specific devices geo location to show all of the different resources that are around, and it’ll tell you who they are, where they are, then you can contact them directly via the app. That is a resource that’s not going anywhere. But the training that they set up was costs, I think it’s three and a half grand to do the three day course for mental health first aid. And I know a lot of people. I know one of the trainers that was kind of like, Yeah, I’ve been doing it for 10 years now, and that’s, that’s just my experience. I’m sure it’s incredible. I don’t but I have to say that. But I think what is better is to instead of charging three grand for one person, because what happens when they go on holiday? What happens when they’re ill? What happens when they leave you’ve just essentially played for a hatchback That’s fucked up? I think it’s better to train every body. And also a lot of the skills can be very sort of rudimentary. But personally, I have no affiliation, but my experience in Mental Health First Aid has not been brilliant. And there’s, I’ve heard a lot of stories of,

I don’t know how much I should say, but it being pushed by NHS England, with certain stakeholders in NHS, England, making quite a good salary from said course.

QUESTION 8

Helen, would you like to say a little bit about what is the future of artED?

HELEN

Yes, I’d urge you all to have a look at the website, and that is very much like a starting point. So now I’m going to build on that. The Toolbox section will be vast. Will be expanded. The diaries will continue, and I’m going to be working now on something called artEDition, which currently is a kind of coming soon bit of the website. This is the bit now where I’ll be curating material from within what I’ve done and the artED library that exists, but also asking other people to contribute as well. We’ll have call outs from other artists or practitioners. I’m basically hoping to then form a community and publish digital zines. The first theme, which I’ll be like doing a call out about soon, is around recovery. So watch out for that. And yeah, just hoping that then that will start to build a kind of more of a community, less about just me sharing my stuff, but so it becomes a two way thing.

Thanks

Book sales and informal chat

Ends