A former rugby player wants to end the ‘man up’ culture and replace it with a ‘speak up’ generation by giving young people a platform where they can seek help when dark clouds descend.
Richard Lucas wants to make it easier for people to seek mental health and wellbeing support in their schools and workplaces
‘Rugby is a very aggressive sport, it’s man-on-man, but we’re all friends off the pitch,’ Richard said. ‘When you lose a couple of young lads it has a big impact on everybody and it became incredibly personal for me. Richard, 47, identified a gap between the available mental health and wellbeing support and the time it took to access the help, especially in schools, sports clubs and workplaces.
Launched on Wednesday, the £5 million programme comes at a time when suicide among teenagers has increased by nearly 50% in the past decade, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. ‘In quite a few cases of suicide, which were predominantly men, but also women, the people around them, their support networks, their friends and family, they all said they didn’t expect it to be them,’ he said.
Experts including Dr Sam Norton of King’s College London, the Papyrus mental health charity, the local Mind service and NHSx, the health service’s tech and data wing, have helped develop the programme.