World Mental Health Day Special
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To mark World Mental Health Day, This Can Happen has teamed up with our charity partners Mental Health UK and Beyond to bring a great podcast.We were delighted to chat with Jonny Benjamin and Louisa Rose from Beyond and Katie Legg from Mental Health UK. We cover a lot but focused on the responsibility of the workplace to their young people and the need for those young people to find their voice at work so that change can happen. We also discussed how we are all managing our own mental health.
Presenter & Guests
Zoe Sinclair
Co-Founder
This Can Happen
Zoe is one of the founders of This Can Happen. She is also the founder of Employees Matter, the largest provider of employee engagement seminars and webinars in the UK.
Jonny Benjamin
Founder
Beyond
Jonny Benjamin MBE and Neil Laybourn give talks and present on the topic of mental health to groups and organizations all around the UK and internationally.
The pair are award-winning mental health campaigners – their journey together began in 2008 when Neil talked Jonny out of taking his own life by jumping from the edge of Waterloo Bridge in London. Jonny had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression and was extremely unwell.
Neil’s interaction saved his life but the two were soon separated when the police intervened and took Jonny away to be sectioned. 6 years later, in 2014, Jonny launched a campaign on Twitter to find and thank the man who had stopped him taking his own life - #FindMike - it became a global news campaign that reached over 300 million people around the world and was successful in reuniting the 2 strangers within a matter of weeks from the campaign being launched.
What followed was an emotional meeting and the beginning of a journey where both men united to campaign around the issues of both mental health and suicide, which is now the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK.
The story of their journey was made into a TV documentary, The Stranger on the Bridge, which aired on Channel 4 in 2015 and had a meaningful impact on millions of viewers.
The documentary has won a number of awards and is currently being aired internationally.
After a private meeting with Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge in March 2016, the pair were invited by the Royal Foundation to represent the ‘Heads Together’ charity in running for the 2017 London Marathon.
Katie Legg
Director - Strategy and Partnerships
Mental Health UK
Katie has been working with organisations to help them grow and provide excellent customer service. Since joining Mental Health UK in 2017 Katie has been focussing specifically on engaging workplaces with mental health both through advising on organisation-wide strategies and charitable and awareness campaigns for employees and customers to engage with directly. Partners have included Lloyds Banking Group, PureGym and ISG.
Louisa Rose
CEO
Beyond
Louisa Rose is CEO of Beyond and the founder of Now and Beyond, the UK’s first mental health and wellbeing festival for schools. Louisa previously worked as a social media consultant during the last decade and is particularly interested in reinforcing healthy social media habits for young people. Louisa is diagnosed with depression, anxiety, Tourette’s and OCD and publicly reflects on her personal mental health journey. Louisa is married and a mother of two young boys.
