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Thank you very much. MAN one text from Williamson County, Limerick about Racheal. Can I just highlight the local political circus that's associated with this issue every year? It's a case of who can come up with the most noise to get attention. A sitting TD calling for the Army to aid the civil power to move on groups of kids and heavy nuisance traffic is quite simply embarrassing. Last week we had a sitting junior minister asking for the body to take effective action at house parties in town, even though the powers that his government has given the Garthe gives them no enforcement powers to deal with it.

In the here and now, you couldn't write this stuff and the traction it gets is ridiculous. Gartley trying their best with the limited powers they have recovered in terms of actual criminal figures in the area. It's massively overpoliced. They have policed the state for 100 years with various communities. And this clown, this is the TRD, once the army to come in the empty vessel makes the loudest sound, says William in County Limerick.

Now we're joined by Alastair Campbell, writer, communicator, consultant strategist and ambassador of Time to Change Mental Health. Alastair, good morning and a happy New Year to you.

Hi, how are you? I'm very well looking out at Sunshine today, even though I know it's bitterly cold.

You have written a 6000 word article, which I've read overnight on a platform called Celebrate at what is celebrate.

Well, celebrate. I'm glad you read that part. Thanks for that. I was just telling my Instagram followers, you always do proper research. Unlike a lot of interviews I could mention, celebrate is a new app and I say people can check it out on my blog as well. Alastair Campbell dot org. It's basically a cross between a kind of long form news and comment site and the book club. So I can put the article on that. I've written about mental health and then people can form celebrate groups of up to five people.

Obviously on lockdown is difficult, but this can happen and these are happening all over the world. And I got a message last night that the first one on the back of that piece has happened, I think, in Denmark. So basically people read it and then they say, OK, rather than just read it, we then get together and we talk about it. And then I, as the writer is the author of it, I then set questions for that kind of discussion and so forth.

So it's a way of getting the discussion going about mental health.

Now, you wrote the piece, which you called Time to Stop Whispering. And it's very interesting because it relates to the experience that you have routinely when you might give a talk on mental health and you'll have a few questions from the audience afterwards and then it's all over.

But then but then people come up and they whisper. And the reason that they whisper is they don't want to be heard saying what they're telling me, which is usually they're telling me about their own mental health problem. And I describe in the piece about somebody who actually works for the National Health Services and the whisperers, and she's a nurse. And she told me that she felt if she if she confessed to her employer that she was bipolar, that she felt that would be held against her.

And she and I said, well, that surely in the National Health Service, if there's one place that's going to understand is, you know, I guarantee I would not get my next promotion if I did that. Now, I'd love to think that was wrong, but I fear that she may she may have a point. And part of what I do on the mental health campaigning side is I want to get to a place where that kind of stuff doesn't happen, where people know more, think that they're going to get that hold against them than they would if they had, you know, asthma or diabetes or any other medical condition.

But here's the rub that this woman, who's a single mother of two daughters and nine and six, so she calls her nine year old because she is so crippled with her bipolar that she cannot go into work. So she says call the ward and tell the ward that I can't go in because my younger daughter is sick and I've got to stay at home. And then she has to tell the younger daughter, you can't go to school today, because if you do go to school today, I've got to drop you off.

And I might be seen by other mothers. And therefore, clearly, I'm not sick. I mean, it's an appalling situation. It is appalling.

And what the worst thing about it and I'm not criticizing her at all, by the way, because, you know, she explained why she felt she had to do that. But the worst thing about it is that that is then, if you like, raising the next generation to think that it's right not to tell the truth about being mentally ill. And, you know, she explained to me that when she's and I get this because I have my two ends of the scale, as it were, when she's kind of on the manic end of the scale, she thinks she's Florence Nightingale.

She flies into work and she can look after everything. She's a great nurse. When she's on the depressive end of it. She just she can't get out of bed and she has to draw her children into that kind of, you know, that little circle of of untruth. And it's horrible. But, you know. Do you know what? I bet you you will get a response this morning from people who will say I've got similar experiences or no similar experience, because that is what stigma does.

That is why we're going to break it down.

Now, you also refer to many of those who live on the streets because of their mental health issues. And you compare it to physical health. I mean, if somebody falls down in front of you with a heart attack or breaks a leg or whatever, you immediately rush over what help you could to help them. But if you see someone who is on the side of the street because they are literally paralyzed by their mental health problem, we just walk past.

Yeah. And we all do it. I mean, I do it, you know, we all do it. You might stop sometimes, you know, you might see somebody and you think, well, I can, you know, give me a bit of money or, you know, light a cigarette or whatever it might be. You might stop and have a chat with my son, Calame. He goes out. There's a lot of work with people homeless and living on the streets.

And, you know, I've been out with him and it's, you know, it's heartbreaking. And the thing is, you know, when the concrete things that happen, first of all, our government here in the UK, because it was beginning to affect, if you like, middle class people there were worrying about all these people on the streets. They found places, put them into hotels, into boarding houses, into hostels. And now we're back with it and they're back again.

And it's true, we you know, if we see somebody fall off the pavement and they they've broken ankle, uncle. Ninety 99 percent of us, we stop and we say, oh, my God, can we help? What can I do? And is there anybody who's a nurse or a doctor we call an ambulance or whatever? Well, we're walking past the mental equivalent of that every single day in every single town and city in the UK and in Ireland.

And it is heartbreaking.

Now, the employers can have a role to play in terms of being understanding and open about some of the ailments that their employees suffer from, be it physical or mental health problem. And you found a redemption in a surprising place in the banking sector? I have.

And it's interesting. And funnily enough, I'm doing a I've actually been doing some work with the Bank of Ireland and I'm actually doing a talk for Bank of Ireland staff on on Monday. And they have been and they're not the only bank, by the way, I'll come up to. I think the banks have moved in this, but the Bank of Ireland are actually doing a thing for the whole of their staff where they're basically saying they're going to put mental health and wellbeing right at the heart of everything they do.

And they've got this power down, you know, actually encouraging people to take breaks, to take time off, to think about their health and their fitness and their wellbeing. And, you know, it was great. I did an event with them a while back and it was honestly it was fantastic to hear a big employer in that sector, you know, and I'm pretty good at something. I whether something is real or not, I really sense that this was it was coming from the top and it was real.

So I'm very, very pleased to be part of that. But I say in in the celebrate piece that I've worked with quite a few of the banks over here in the UK and also in France. And I think that what happened was that the crash, the financial crash, I think that led to most of the banks losing people to suicide, literally, in some cases literally jumping off buildings. And I just think it made people kind of wake up of it.

So I've noticed that the banks in the financial sector are, you know. Yeah. Taking a leadership role. And, you know, I don't know enough about me the way the Irish government is handling this. But certainly the British government, I feel, is not remotely on top of the mental health agenda. And therefore, we're going to have to do a lot for ourselves as individuals. But businesses business can play a massive, massive role in the.

And I think it's fantastic that the Bank of Ireland applying that leadership role now, you tell of your own experience with with two employers and you were working for a paper called the Today Paper MD 80s. You'd left The Daily Mirror. And the other employer you mentioned is Tony Blair, not your employer, but your boss, shall we say, and how their attitudes actually were understanding, but also life saving for you.

They were the first one I called Richard Stott. He'd been my old boss at the mirror, very angry that I'd left warn me that I wasn't up to the job that I was being offered. I was being flattered into an overpromoted I was in my 20s. I was being offered a pretty senior executive position. I went off, I had a breakdown, ended up in hospital, and he was one of the first people to find me. And the reason wasn't to say I told you so.

It was to offer me my old job back. And that was his way of saying, I told you so. But actually, if you come back here, I'm not going to define you by it. And I wrote I write in the piece also about my brother Donald, who writes a lot. He had schizophrenia and he is dead now. But he had a he held down the same job for 27 years with Glasgow University because they didn't define him as a schizophrenic.

They defined him as an employee who had schizophrenia. And then with Tony Blair, he knew about a breakdown. He knew about my problem. He knew that I still got depression. And his basic attitude was he actually said, well, I'm not bothered if you're not bothered. And I said, well, what? I'm bothered. And he said, I'm still not bothered. And that was just a way of saying, you know, I'm not I'm not defining you by it.

And that's that's, I think, what we have to do. That nurse that we talked about, the whisperer, she feels defined by her mental illness because of what she feels would be the attitude of her employer. Now, she may be wrong. I love to think she was wrong. And I said to myself, every experience I've had with employer, I've been lucky. It's been good. And she actually said there and it's a fair point.

She said, listen, it's OK for you. You probably got a bit of money in the bank, well established. You've got a platform. You know, I'm a nurse. I'm on a pretty small, low salary. I can't afford not to work.

And, you know, it's a fair point.

Now, you talk about your brother Donald and how he literally lost two decades of his life. Your father died at 82. Daniel died at 62. Been taking the prescribed medication most of the time for schizophrenia, and that the severity of that medication literally shortened his life. Absolutely.

Yeah. And I can remember when he was first diagnosed. 40 odd years ago now, and I can remember we knew nothing about schizophrenia, I remember looking it up and reading everything I could find and going down to the library and reading all these books and research journals and all that stuff. And I can remember reading something that said that because of the nature of the antipsychotic medication, the side effects and the rest and the impact upon the rest of the body are such that it can take up to 20 years of somebody's life.

And, you know, I remember that. I'm thinking, wow, but, you know, when it happens to you and Donald didn't, as it were, die of schizophrenia, he died because of respiratory failure.

That may have happened anyway. It may have happened anyway. You know, he smoked in his youth and all that stuff. But but as you say, my dad, who also had complaints and I do as well, but he died in 82 and all died at 62. And, you know, I don't think there's any other illness in the world that we would say if you knew that the medication was taking 20 years of your life, it'd be OK.

You know, I've I never go anywhere without my asthma inhaler. If we knew that that took 20 years of my life, I think you'd guarantee because there's enough people in positions of power in the world who've got asthma that would not be allowed. We do something about it.

Now, you make comparisons with cancer. That's not too many decades ago, a diagnosis of cancer was once again whispered about and people didn't know how to address it. That's all changed with the help of lots of therapeutics as well. But also the attitudes have changed. And you believe that we should go there with mental health, that all the stigma should be dispatched? Absolutely.

And, you know, I recall in that piece where my mum, when when I was about seven or eight and our neighbour got cancer and she said, I can remember it vividly. And I thought, isn't it weird at the time? She said, you mustn't tell anybody. Now, I'm not criticizing my mum last person in the world.

I would criticize, but she was reflecting what was the kind of reality of the day, which is that you didn't talk about cancer. You called it the big C. And you went like that. Well, that's what we do now with mental health. And I would argue that cancer treatment and cancer services and the determination of governments and researchers and science to do more, I think that is a direct consequence of getting rid of the stigma and the taboo. And that's why we've got to do the same with mental health.

And then people would realize, look, we all got mental health, we're not all mentally ill, but we've all got mental health. And, you know, if we're ill when we're physically ill, nobody thinks anything. That nurse don't think anything about phoning her ward and saying, I can't come in today. I've got a chest infection. I can't come in today. I've had a I've had a really bad asthma attack. I can't come in today, you know, physical illness.

We can deal with it. But for some reason, we're still trapped in this stigma and taboo. We've got to break it down.

Some of the tax coming in. Allaster is wonderful and so correct. My biggest mistake was discussing my mental health issues. Everyone's attitudes changed towards me and my academic career ended and has never recovered as if I had a plague. It was not OK to not be OK. Another one from Brendan. My wife has suffered with mental health and agitated depression for years, and the stigma around mental health is still very much there. My wife's anxiety is crippling for her and is worsened by her fear of people knowing she lives with a mental illness.

People need to realise that mental health is a serious illness and can lead to physical illness. Our country and more big public service employees need to come out and educate the public about mental health, education and how mental health affects people needs to be openly discussed. That's from Brendan. Now, Alistar, you've traveled the world and you've come across a couple of ideas in places where they have pitiful resources compared to your country or mine at Zimbabwe, for instance, where they have, what is it, one psychiatrist for every million and a half people.

And yeah.

And I would add, Peter, that is what I love about talking to you. You always want to talk about stuff that's kind of matters. I thought we were going to talk about Trump and Brexit, by the way, and I'm glad we're doing this. The the thing in Zimbabwe is called the friendship bench. And as you say, they've got a very, very, very, very poor health system. The government that for years has been just racked by Mugabe, corruption and all the rest of it.

And what the health minister there did was they devised this thing called the friendship bench. And they train of people, mainly women, mainly with widows, mainly quite elderly women. They train them in very, very basic counselling and also a little bit of social prescription. They know what's happening in the area and they know and they just sit on these benches. They sit on these benches like a park bench or a bench outside a school or a bench outside a factory or whatever, and then known as frontbenches.

And they sit there and people can just go and talk to them. And and often, you know, I find when I go out with the sun on these, we talk about the people are living on the streets, the so-called often what people want as much as that is. It's just somebody to talk to and so actually having that system and I just think, you know, OK, we're an advanced economy. We've got you know, we keep talking about having a health service, the envy of the world at the moment anyway.

And, you know, I just think simple ideas like that sometimes could could absolutely make the difference. And for a lot of people, you know, a lot of this is is about addressing things that hopefully will never require medical attention. And that's why I think that what the you know, companies like the Bank of Ireland are doing, saying to their staff is OK, not to be OK. And, you know, we're going to put in place the systems and the support and structures to help you.

Hopefully that kind of attitude will stop people from getting ill in the first place. And I do think we've got to move to a much more preventive attitude to mental health and mental illness.

Now, you also write about doing a documentary for the BBC where you were going to investigate all the possible cures and treatments and therapies for depression.

And, you know, the producers hoping Eureka Allaster has found the cure, that you didn't find the cure, but you found a jam jar.

I did. I did. And you know what? As we've been talking the whole time, a bit of this in my head.

So there I'm doing an Instagram live while we're on. By the way, you're getting lots of love and people saying this guy's a great interview. That is Majumder. And I don't know whether Aimer and your colleagues can you can maybe put the interview together with the judge later and you could put this online. So that's Majumder and basically down at the bottom of the Damjan. This came from a woman in Canada and she said, Janine Austin and the bottom of the jungle, you've got your genes.

That's the sediment. And then the Janja itself fills up with your life. And we spend all our time trying to undo all that stuff that's going on in there. Whereas actually what we should be thinking of doing is how can we grow the jungle so we'll put more life into it. And so I've got you know, I think we've talked before about why I think we talked before about my my my book Living Better.

And I've written about the job done. And I've actually drawn it in there. What I can what's in my jungle, which is my relationships, my work, both paid and unpaid, meaningful activity. Then it's the sort of fundamental sleep, diet, exercise, and it's things that matter to me personally. Burnley Football Club, bagpipes, scenery, you know, Elvis Presley, whatever it might be. And then it's curiosity and creativity. And writing for me is incredibly important.

If I'm not feeling well, I'll spend all day writing if I have to, and I'll feel better at the end of it. So all of that stuff and and basically and I got a fantastic I was really shocked the other day. I got a primary school headteacher said he'd read the book and he wrote to me and said, we're actually where we get the kids back physically in the class. The first thing we're going to do, we're all going to sit down and we're going to we're going to devise our own jam jars.

And and I've had employers telling me the same thing. So, you know, I think that's that's a great yeah. I feel good when I get things like that.

Now, you mentioned your book Living Better How I Learned to Survive Depression is its title.

Now, I don't want to cause you a setback, but you did mention Donald Trump, how it could cause you not to feel as well as you're feeling just at the moment.

But what is your reaction to the last days of Trump?

Well, what happened the other day was was kind of horrific on so many levels and but I think it just reminds you how fragile democracy is. Let's just imagine that Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell had not done what they'd done. Let's imagine they'd encouraged it. Let's imagine that more people got in, more people being killed. Let's imagine that Joe Biden hadn't come out and kind of captured the moment that the way that he did. So it looks like the guardrails of American democracy have stood up to this.

But we've seen in plenty of other countries where they don't. And I do really worry about some of the I'm not saying is as bad as Trump, but I think he's got a lot of the same the same qualities. And I thought watching Trump's latest thing, you know, where he seems to be a bit more emollient is perfectly obvious to me. What he's doing is suddenly worried. He suddenly worried that he's going to get nicked. He's worried about the 25th Amendment, that the cabinet will come together and say, right, he's out and he's and he's worried about, you know, he's pushed it too far.

But I really, really hope I mean, I'm all in favor of healing and reconciliation, all that. I really, really hope that those people who are at the forefront of it wound up by him and his wretched sons. I really hope that they get, you know, done. I hope they get punished.

Yeah, it may be a race against time as he rushes to pardon his offspring and his acolytes before he's dumped from the presidency.

You can't. You can't you can't pardon them for state breaches of state law. And there have been plenty of those. I mean, you know, I think you could argue that what he did in terms of that speech outside the White House, I think you could argue that was a crime in and under state law in Washington. So I think there'll be lots of ways that people want to pursue it. But, God, it was so good to see Biden.

And I mean, you know, I know he's 78 and all that, but it's just it's just a reminder that politics at his best is decent people getting to the top and trying to do their best. And I think Joe Biden, you just see the contrast. He's a decent person. Alastair Campbell, a pleasure talking to you this morning. Thank you very much for joining us on this program early in 2021. And I wish you all the best for the coming year.

Thank you very.

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