When I limped across the finish line of my first marathon, everything hurt. It wasn’t a complete surprise because my training had been non-existent for the previous two weeks as I had been struggling with my mental health. I’d found out that we had to leave our rented flat and I had the stress of finding somewhere new to live. As a result my trainers lay untouched in the hallway until I laced them up on race day.
But as I crossed the finish line, I still managed a smile as not only had I raised nearly £2300 for Mind, but I’d also raised awareness for mental health and the importance of talking to someone who understands.
Alongside my job as operations analyst at Satago, I also coach rowing on the weekends. When I sent round the link to my fundraising page, rowers of all ages began to come up to me to talk about mental health. Some thanked me for speaking out about my story and others came to talk to me about their own struggles.
For me it’s so important to know that the person you’re talking to really understands what you’re going through; I’ve pictured my own death enough times to empathise with someone who is struggling with mental health.
I know how it feels to open up to someone who doesn’t know what to say. When I was 16, I confided in a friend that life didn’t seem worth living. They didn’t know what to say to me, so it was brushed under the carpet and I didn’t speak to anyone about it again until four years later.
It was only when I was at university that I spoke to a mental health professional. I had been struggling to keep up with my university work and I had to show reasons why. I got some basic counselling, and I took a gap year, where I also spoke to an NHS therapist.
I wasn’t self-harming or having suicidal intentions, but I was struggling on a day-to-day basis. On some days I would wake up and sit on my bed and just cry. My GP prescribed me anti-depressants, but I’d grown up in a family that looked down on modern medication; they thought thinking positively and pulling yourself out of it was the best thing to do.
I looked on the Mind website to find out about medication, but I didn’t take anything until I was 26 and taking professional exams. The pressure was on and my anxiety was through the roof. My GP suggested I try medication, so this time I did. The difference it made was amazing. Even the smallest dose improved my anxiety. Finally I could walk down the street and not jump at every loud car noise. The improvement in my quality of life was indescribable and my only regret was I didn’t do it sooner.
I’m hoping to do another fundraising event for Mind because it’s so important to keep the conversations going. Mental health issues are real 365 days a year – it’s not just something to be talked about on an awareness day and it goes away. As part of my fundraising package Mind sent me a badge and it’s something I like to wear. Most people don’t notice it, but for those that do, it’s a great way of starting a conversation.
I’m very open about my mental health journey and I like that my fundraising events let people know they can talk to me whenever they need to. It doesn’t take long for someone to make the wrong decision, so I want to be there as someone who really understands how they’re feeling.
Liam was initially my brother Daniel’s friend, but when I was 18 we started hanging out too. We’d always go to the pub for a pint and to play pool or darts. Liam was the joker of the group and always had people in stitches. He’d come out with the funniest stories which were usually 95% true and he’d add the other 5% for effect. He was the kind of person who was always laughing, and he had a really distinct high-pitched laugh. No one had anything bad to say about him. He’d do anything for you, and he was always the person who could make you feel better.
Before Liam’s death we had a real lads’ mentality around mental health but that’s changed now. We’re much better at talking if we’re feeling down.
Liam never really opened up about how he was feeling, but looking back there were times when he’d not be around for a while. We just put it down to Liam being Liam but with hindsight it was probably a sign he wasn’t feeling great.
When I was younger I struggled myself with depression and anxiety – although I didn’t recognise that’s what it was at the time. I went to see my GP and it’s much more manageable now.
If you’re struggling with your mental health, it’s so important to ask for help, whether it’s from your GP, Mind or your friends. You never know when that better day is coming. It’s a long battle but the good news that could turn things around could come tomorrow.
Talking is a massive help, which is why the services Mind offers is so important. I signed up for the Great North Run to raise money for Mind in Liam’s memory.
I didn’t want to tell everyone what I was doing until I’d done some training and knew I could actually do it. I set up a Just Giving page, promoted it on my social media and told my friends about it.
I kept reminding everyone about my fundraising every couple of weeks and updated them with my training. The actual run itself was much harder than I expected but more rewarding too. It was a blistering hot day and the atmosphere was amazing. There were 60,000 on the course and people lined the streets cheering, handing out sweets and water. I finished it in just over two hours and raised nearly £1300.
If Liam was around, I know he’d have taken the mickey out of me for doing the run but he’d have been really proud too.
I’ve always used cycling to manage my mental health, but it wasn’t until I met my husband Stevie, that I started tandem cycling. It’s great because it levels out our abilities. Stevie is a faster cyclist than me and this way he’s not always waiting for me to catch up.
Tandem cycling is all about teamwork and it can be quite challenging to cycle long distances together.
My husband Stevie and I have just completed a world circumnavigation by tandem bicycle and set a new Guinness World Record as the fastest around the world tandem record. We managed it in 179 days 12 hours and 25 minutes. It was definitely an intense challenge. We were so focused on breaking the 180 days we didn’t have time to stop and enjoy the Canadian Rockies or breathtakingly beautiful New Zealand scenery. It was very much a case of get up early, ride hard and the eat and prepare for the next day. Riding long distances is not just about physical endurance, you have to be in a good place mentally too.
We raised over £12,000 for various charities including £3771 for Mind. It’s so important to look after your mental health as well as your physical health. The veterinary industry in which I work has a particularly high case of suicide rates and poor mental health. I’ve been signed off work with stress myself. It’s a very demanding industry with long hours and whilst it can be very rewarding it is a tough profession to be in.
Raising awareness of mental health problems is so important. Mind has a great website and helplines, so it’s a really good place to signpost people to.
I have struggled with ‘post-adventure blues’ which is the comedown after a big fundraising event like this. We’ve had to ease ourselves back into everyday life by spending time taking walks and seeing friends and family. I like to spend time outside every day to manage my mental health – whether that’s a walk, run or even a gentle cycle believe it or not!
We haven’t got another fundraising challenge planned as is this one has taken a lot out of us, but I would recommend others give tandem riding a go. It’s really great in terms of teamwork and you get a lot of attention wherever you go.
Fundraising for Mind is much more than just raising money – although every little bit helps. It’s about raising awareness of mental health and watching out for people. There’s so much to be done and it’s important to spread the message that help is out there.
Playing computer games for Mind was a way of giving back.
When Andrew Yates’s wife Olivia, 29, was struggling with her mental health, the Mind Infoline was the first phone call they made. Here Andrew, 29, from Hampshire explains how Mind helped them both and why he decided to dedicate a 15-hour gaming marathon to fundraising for Mind.
While some people might find the idea of playing 15 hours of computer games a dream way to spend their day, for me it was a way to give back to Mind for the support my wife and I received from the charity last year.
I suffer with anxiety and my wife, Olivia, has depression, but last year she started to feel suicidal.
We had no idea what to do, so we called the Mind Infoline where we spoke through our problems.
They were amazing. They kept us calm and took the time to listen to us. I felt they really cared. They signposted us to the NHS and also to resources on the Mind website, which they said I was also welcome to use, which was a great relief.
We also called them a few more times while we waited for the NHS appointments to come through. I don’t know what we’d have done if we hadn’t called the Infoline. Without Mind we might not be here now.
So last year when Olivia saw the Stream for Mind fundraiser advertised on Facebook, we knew we had to take part. There were a few options you could choose including Stream five hours for the one in five children with a mental health problem who wait for over six months to see a mental health specialist. You could Stream 15 hours for the 1 in 15 people who attempt suicide over the course of their lifetime. Or Stream 23 hours to show your commitment to fighting for mental health in 2023.
We chose to stream for 15 hours as that was closest to our situation because Olivia had struggled with suicidal thoughts. We decided to do it all in one day despite the fact we could have split our challenge over weeks or months.
I love to play computer games and I use them to relax and when I’m playing I find it helps my anxiety. I tend to play Nintendo games such as Zelda and Pokémon, and only for around three hours at a time. I use Twitch, a computer game streaming platform which is a bit like You Tube where you can play computer games and talk to other people.
To start our challenge I set up a fundraising page and kept it updated with a timetable of which games we would play and when. We tried to keep it interesting for everyone who was supporting us. It also helped us not to get too bored either – it might sound like fun but 15 hours is a long time to stream computer games. We took plenty of short breaks – 10 to 15 minutes every few hours – but I was still on screen for 15 hours and because it’s live there’s a lot of talking too. My friend Josh, who lives nearby, and Olivia were supporting me and taking turns to play alongside me. Josh and I wore silly wigs – I had a long pink one that my sister-in-law gave me and Josh had a blue one. At one point we ordered a Chinese takeaway and ate that live on Twitch too.
We raised £462.50 for Mind but it was also important to raise the profile of the charity.
For anyone unsure about contacting Mind, I say do it. It can be scary and feel anxiety-inducing to reach out and talk, but Mind really do care and really do help.
When I first started fundraising for Mind, I would post a few funny photos on Instagram and Facebook with some captions. They would be quite silly pictures such as me dressed as the Mona Lisa or Freddie Mercury. I found that by being funny, I would get people’s attention.
I’d write a comical caption and provide a link to my donations page – people were very generous. I decided to fundraise every year around November time and soon I was creating spoof videos and mini sketches as well as photos. It really began to snowball: the first year I raised £300, the second year I raised £900 and the third year it was £2000.
My wife Nav really helped me out by brainstorming ideas and making sure everything looked good. It’s become a real joint effort between us.
I was drawn to Mind as I know what good work they do, but also because of my own mental health. I’ve only recently been diagnosed with OCD and anxiety but when I was younger there were always rumblings of low mood and ebbs and flows in my mental health. I’ve started talking therapy which has really helped me.
It’s so important to raise awareness of mental health but more than that, I feel it’s necessary to increase the understanding of what it means to have a mental health issue. People need to have a meaningful understanding of what it is like to have a lived experience of mental health, such as OCD, depression or anxiety.
I think what Mind does is great. Not only does it support people with their mental health, but it also lobbies for bigger structural change around mental health legislation. As my fundraising has grown over the years, I’ve made sure that, as well my fundraising page, I include a link to the Mind website where there are plenty of resources to help people.
I’ve also started creating short videos with my family and friends talking about their own mental health, whether that is depression, anxiety, cultural expectations around mental health or coping with mental health while facing cancer. I have had people come up to me and talk to me about their mental health through my fundraising.
Over the 10 years I’ve been fundraising I’ve raised over £50,000 for Mind. I’ve taken a break last year and this year, ironically to focus on my own mental health, but I very much hope to do some more in the future. It’s so important that we create an understanding of mental health as well as an awareness.
The football tournaments came about as I realised the increasing mental health issues among my friends. We’d just left university and started our new jobs, and as a result, were really struggling on how to prioritise our time. We were desperate to do well at work, exercise and keep fit, and still have time to socialise, but we were struggling to fit it all in.
Personally I was feeling my anxiety increase and as I talked to my friends about it, lots of them said they felt the same.
I wanted a way to overcome that tight feeling in my chest that I was experiencing way too often.
I’d started playing five-a-side football with my friends every Tuesday and I realised it was a great way to tackle my mental health: I got to exercise, play competitive sport and spend time with my friends every week. It made sense to me that if I started fundraising, then this was the way to go.
In October 2022 I organised the first tournament which I called the FAB World Cup Series – FAB stands for ‘find a balance’. We had 16 teams enter and while I set up a main Just Giving page, they all created links, so they had their own pages to help with fundraising. Every player had to pay an entry fee of £24 to cover the cost of the Powerleague venue in Shoreditch, London, who kindly gave me a charity discount. I also secured the free services of Max Lightfoot who took care of all the social media, videography and photography. He also mentored me through the event whenever it felt like it was getting too much.
It was a big undertaking: we had 112 players at the first event and over 150 spectators who paid a £3 entry fee and for every drink they bought at the bar, 50p went to Mind. As a result we raised over £10,000.
It was such a success that I arranged a bigger second tournament in June 2023 with 24 teams. This one had over 300 people come and watch. I think everyone wanted a fun day out and an opportunity to hang out with friends. I read once that to be happy you need to have something to look forward to, and for lots of people this event was it, whether they were playing or supporting.
In total we’ve raised over £23,000 for Mind, which is incredible. I couldn’t have done it without the support from family and friends, but a part of me still can’t believe I did it. I think it’s so important to get people into the mindset of raising money for charity from an early age. Sometimes people feel they must do something incredibly impressive to raise money such as climb a mountain or run a marathon and that can be such a barrier to fundraising. I wanted to champion the people who want to play five-a-side football and raise money and awareness at the same time.
I was only 19 when my mum took her own life in October 2020. She was 59 and it seemingly came out of nowhere. She was so confident and independent; she was the last person you’d expect to die that way.
I signed up for the London Marathon quite soon after she died. I knew I wanted to raise money for Mind as they help people who are in my mum’s position, but I couldn’t have imagined how much fundraising helped me personally. Training for the marathon gave me a reason to get up in the morning, change my clothes and shower, when all I wanted to do was stay in my bed crying. Looking after your body physically also helps with your mental health. Being accepted to run the marathon was the best thing that could have happened to me. Nothing was going to bring my mum back, but this was putting a positive spin on it.
As well as setting up a fundraising page for people to donate to, I put on a cake sale which raised £1000 and approached local companies to get prizes for a raffle that raised another £400. My cousin made a reel of my marathon photos and videos after I’d run the event and that made even more people donate. I hadn’t realised it, but most people donate on the day or after you’ve completed your challenge. Some people even come back and donate a little bit extra. I raised £17,000 in total.
Eighteen months later, in June 2023, I did the Three Peaks Challenge and raised over £5,000. I didn’t want to keep just asking people for money, so I tried to get creative in my fundraising. We got some football scratch cards where you pick a team and scratch off the result. We sold them for £5 each and gave £250 to the winner and kept £250 for the charity, but the winner kindly donated some money from their winnings back too. We also did a Eurovision sweepstake charging £10 per country. I think as you continue to fundraise you have to find little ways to make it interesting and for people who are donating to interact or even get something back.
Fundraising for Mind has done so much for me. I’ve met so many people and made such good friends. I still meet up with my fellow marathon runners to go running together or out for dinner with the people I climbed the Three Peaks with. The great thing is that I get to speak to people who really understand what I’ve been through as they’ve lost someone through suicide. I’ve also met people who have struggled with their own mental health, and they help me see the other side of things and understand what my mum was going through.
Fundraising for Mind means that I’ve found a whole new community; it’s such a safe space and everyone is really nice. It’s so much more than just raising money.
We’ve all been affected by mental health in our lives. For me it was circumstantial. I was suffering with endometriosis, an incredibly painful gynaecological condition and, at 30, I had an operation to ease my pain. But the surgery didn’t go as planned and I was left in chronic pain. I was very depressed afterwards. I stayed at home and didn’t even get out of bed. It was a friend who told me I need to ask for help.
I finally told my GP who referred me to Mind. They called me and arranged some counselling that really helped me.
In the African community, especially where I’m from in Uganda, it’s very hard to speak up about mental health as there is still such a stigma around it. People often prefer to suffer in silence than to seek help. Also, because religion is such a big factor in African communities, people will often be told to pray to help them get over a crisis, but prayer alone is not enough.
I try to talk about mental health issues a lot and raise awareness. I work in mental health, so a lot of my colleagues know about it but outside of work, I think there is still a lot to be done. We’ve still got such a long way to go when it comes to talking about mental health, especially in African communities.
Whenever Mind has a campaign, I set up a Just Giving fundraising page and I share the link with family and friends. I’ve raised around £100 but I’m hoping to do an event – a walk or a run – so I can raise more money.
I still use Mind now and the website has great resources. I’m always trying to educate myself on mental health and the different pathways. When I struggled with my mental health, I was worried I would be sectioned, and I know many other people also feel this way. But now I know there are many other ways to get support. It’s important to seek help if you are in crisis, regardless of what society thinks.
I’d been with Chris for 12 years since we were 18. He’d always been the class clown and a bit of joker, but it all changed when Covid hit.
Our son Ted was born in January 2020 and the lockdown started a couple of months later. It meant we had to cope on our own with a newborn, and our family and friends couldn’t meet him.
Chris was always outgoing and loved to socialise. He was still working in his job as a pensions administrator, but now he was doing it at home with a new baby under the same roof. I know he really missed seeing his friends despite them setting up regular Friday gaming nights.
The change in Chris was slowly getting more noticeable. He was making fewer jokes and seemed more fragile and sensitive as time went on.
It wasn’t until 2022 that Chris said he was going to see the GP to talk about how he was feeling and maybe get some medication. I said I didn’t mind who he spoke to, as long as it was someone – it didn’t have to be me.
I went onto the Mind website to try to find some resources for him and I was spending more time with him, trying to support him but I think by then it was too late – his mind was made up.
Chris took his own life in November 2022 when he was just 29 years old.
I think Chris was a classic stereotype and masked his feelings. He would maybe tell his friends he wasn’t feeling great that day, but he’d never go more in-depth than that.
Since his death I’ve been using Mind’s Suicide Bereavement team and I meet with a counsellor once a fortnight, which really helps me. I also get a lot of support from family and friends. Chris and I had a large friendship group and they’ve all been really affected by his death.
We’ve all been determined to get something positive out of Chris’s death, so we’ve started to fundraise for Mind. We’ve done everything from running 100k in one day to the Great North Run to cycling from Leeds to Newcastle. We’ve also got a big football tournament set up in December and I’ve got a Mind charity place for the Great North Run again. So far we’ve raised over £14,000. We promote our Just Giving pages on Facebook and Instagram and we made some TikTok videos. We also reached out to our employers for donations and used our professional connections on LinkedIn.
Mental health is still underfunded so it’s more important than ever to raise money for charities like Mind, which can only do so much with the amount of money they have.
Since Chris’s death I’ve been added onto his boys WhatsApp group. They regularly do mental health updates and check up on each other. They’re now really open about things such as if they’ve been speaking to a counsellor or are taking anti-depressants, and they share links for things that have helped them. Some of them have been struggling with mental health for years but haven’t felt as though they could speak about it, while for others it’s a reaction to Chris’s death. I’m so happy they are supporting each other. It can feel so lonely when you’re struggling with your mental health – like you’re the only one – so it’s good to realise you’re not alone.
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