 Mae'r hyn yn ysgrifennig iawn i gael eich ddweud mewn niadau'r cyffredinol sy'n gwybodol i'r ffordd a gael gyda'r eu gwybodol i'r bod yn ymhyfyddol i'r hyn. Rwy'n dechrau'n cymryd i'r ddaeth. Rwy'n dechrau'n gwybodol i'r ddaeth. Mae phobl am yr ysgol ffyrdd ffyrdd o'r ddweud i'r ddweud. ddiwedd. Mae'n ddisgylchedd yw fawr iawn, a mae'n rheud i ddweud. Felly mae'n gweithio gweithio'n ystafell o'ch gallu hynny. Felly mae'n gweithio'r ysbydd yma, ysbyddio'n cyfrannu, mae'n gweithio'r Ysbydd Smyrwyr, ac mae'n ei gweithio'r Ysbydd Pryddiant Gwyrddolion Fyrofyniadau. Mae'n ddiddordeb arall, mae'n gweithio'r ysbydd gweithio'r Ysbydd Gwyrddolion, is Gael, Gael Sainsbury, a Gael is works in the bishops conference in England Wales on this project that's been running for some years now. We might say a little word about that later on. I'm very pleased to welcome here to St Mary's today Professor Baroness Sheila Hollins. Some of you I'm sure in the room will have met Sheila or listened to her or read some of the things that she's written in the past. Baroness Sheila addressed the flame conference, the big gathering of young people. I think it was at Wembley Stadium last year, 10,000 young people there and she was given 10 minutes to talk to young people about mental health. She's recently been given an honorary doctorate at the Australian Catholic University where she spoke on the theme of mercy and compassion, fitting very much with this jubilee of mercy that we're just finishing now that Pope Francis asked us to have for this past year. By training she's both a psychiatrist and a GP and currently serves as a cross-bencher in the House of Lords. Baroness Sheila is also a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Miners, so works in Rome in that connection and mentioned to me just before she had a cup of coffee this morning that at her last visit to Rome she pressed the lift button, the doors opened and outstepped Pope Francis. Sheila thank you so much for giving up your morning. Sheila has a family birthday today and so there's a family gathering this afternoon so it's exceptionally generous of you to be with us this morning and I know we'll learn a great deal from the thoughts you're going to share with us. Baroness Sheila, thank you. Thank you very much Bishop Richard and thank you very much for coming out on this horrible wet November day. Attentiveness of the heart, I was thinking about that and how appropriate it is today. Particularly perhaps because of recent kind of elections and referenda and so on and the way in which a lot of, we're bombarded with a lot of ideas and images of life and relationships which are really not, don't feel very Christian and I think attentiveness of the heart to me means. We're really talking about love, we're not talking about hatred and you know just not getting on with each other and not liking each other like a respect and I really wish that. Yes so basically I think attentiveness of the heart is being aware of love and you know we talk in the church about parents being the first teachers of their children. Actually to me the most important thing that parents have to teach their children is love and how you learn love is by being loved and that's really what I'm going to talk about today, that's the essence of my talk. So the year of mercy, mercy, compassion and empathy, there are three words which have very similar meanings, not necessarily the same. Now I'm going to have to turn around and look at the slides every time aren't I? So Shakespeare and the Merchant of Venice, the quality of mercy is not strained, now this to me is really important if you reflect on it, what does it mean, what does it mean that it's not strained? I just wonder whether I could persuade you to talk to a person next to you and just ask, see if you have the same understanding of that word and then I'll come back and tell you what I think it means. So the quality of mercy is not strained, what do you think he meant? Okay well great, I'm not going to have time to ask you if we have more time than I would, but to me there's something about mercy, the mutuality of mercy. Mercy is not something that I do to you. There's a two-way element to it, if my mercy consists of me dropping some money in a hat as I walk past a homeless person looking the other way, that's really to me not mercy. There's a sort of mutuality about it and that's what I want to kind of unpick a little bit. The NHS introduced something called the six Cs, care, competence, commitment, courage, compassion and communication. This has come about because of various inquiries which have taken place in the National Health Service which have suggested that perhaps nursing staff and other health staff aren't as compassionate, aren't showing as much compassion as perhaps we patients, the public, and I would suggest the staff might need in order to be able to do their job properly. These are some of the things that were found to be lacking and I think compassion and communication are particularly key. So one of the questions is why is there a lack of compassion in human services, not just in health services but human services. Services such as services which provide care for older people or services which provide care and support for younger people or disabled people. I don't know whether you recognise any of the images on this slide. They're taken from a film. It's a film that was shown on panorama about four years ago. Do you remember the panorama film about Winterborne View Hospital in Bristol? Wasn't that one of the most shocking things you ever saw? An undercover reporter with a camera went and worked as a carer at Winterborne View Hospital and these are some of the images that he found. So we see people with severe learning disabilities who have been admitted there because their behaviour was difficult for their families to care for them and support them at home. Admitted to this hospital and subjected to the most awful torture and abuse by people who were called carers, people who were called nurses and this went on. He was only there for a few days and all of these things were seen in the time that he was there. You can see in this picture over here, somebody under a chair, somebody sitting on the chair, they were stamping on this person's hands, pinned down. And there was another one of a woman put outside on a cold day and being hosed down with cold water because she had wet herself. A number of images like that, quite terrible, it caused quite a shock. It's been really, really difficult to change that picture because in fact there are 150 hospitals where people have been sent away from home, not welcome in their own local communities, not supported adequately in their own local communities, sent away often 200 miles away from home, distance away from home, in a locked environment, detained under a sexual and mental health act. And where I visited one hospital as chair of a Care Quality Commission review, the hospital has subsequently been closed. Not abuse, we didn't see abuse to this degree but we saw a lack of compassion, a lack of care. We saw practices that you would be shocked by. This has been video, so I won't tell you some of the examples of what we saw. How do we redress it? One of the things for me is that if you're going to help people to care, they need to feel cared for themselves. You can't care for other people if you feel that you are working in a culture where there is a lack of care and compassion. So that's an incredibly important first part. We need a culture which is a culture of kind of love and care. But also it's quite possible that people become quite burnt out. We take our own histories, our own stories to work with us. We don't share all of our own experience, our own hurts, our own past difficulties. But on the other hand, we need to be aware of what we are taking. And we need to expect people to be able to provide us with the respect to be able to manage and the support and the supervision and the mentoring to be able to do a difficult job. Some of these jobs are quite stressful. So what we know is that staff reporting high levels of stress engage in fewer positive interactions with their patients. Now, I'm telling you all of this because I'm going to come back to young people or come to young people in a minute. But I want to talk a little bit about mental health and what it means. So a long time ago, 1946, the World Health Organization first defined health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. It's actually 70 years ago. And in some ways, it's something that the NHS and perhaps our society has forgotten. When people talk about health, they usually talk about diabetes or heart disease or they might talk about stroke or arthritis. But it's very rare for people to actually, when you ask people to name an illness for them to mention depression or anxiety. And one of the reasons for that, of course, is that depression and anxiety have different kinds of components to them. They can be seen as an illness, but of course they're also social and spiritual components to them. What I would argue is that nothing is just physical or just mental and nothing is just mind or just spirit. That we are different, but there's a myth going round at the moment, which is that we're all autonomous human beings. In fact, we are social. If we want to build mental health or mental wealth for people, for our children, for our wider family, for our friends, we're talking about building resilience. There are a number of components to resilience and that's what I want to come on to, because I think resilience is the same really as mental wealth. So what we know now is that one in four of us will struggle with our social, emotional and mental well-being. And that's a very high number of us, but we tend not to let people know that we're struggling. And it's all of us. It's not just one part of society. Everybody in every part of society, or people from all sections of society and of all ages, are going to at some point struggle in some way. So it's not to do with how well educated you are. I've worked most of my life as a psychiatrist. I worked with adults with learning disabilities and autism. And it was often felt or thought by doctors and nurses and others that this group of people didn't have the same range of emotions as other people. That somehow they weren't going to get depressed, or if they did, that there was nothing you could do about it, because, well, they would, wouldn't they? So, unfortunately, people with learning disabilities probably experience more depression, that includes young people. And one of the reasons for that is because they are likely to be less in control, able to make fewer choices about their lives, they're probably less resilient than other young people and adults. However, we're all vulnerable. And to some extent, it depends on that resilience and the relationships that we've made, the sort of helping relationships that we've managed to create and surround ourselves with. Now, this is what I spoke to, to flame about. So building resilience with grace. And here's an acrostic which spells grace. And I'm just going to go through each of these points one by one, because this is fundamentally what helps us to build resilience. There is some research behind this. There was a huge project, research project, called the Foresight Project. And this was an international project which looked to see what things would help people to keep mentally well. And I've put it into these five ways of describing those research findings, because it's an easy way to remember them. So the first one, G, giving something, giving time, something you made a helping hand. Actually, everybody can give something. Sometimes people assume that there are some people in society who don't have anything to give. And it reminds me of a child that I once knew who died very young. She had very severe cerebral palsy. She never spoke. She was dependent on her parents, her caregivers for everything. She couldn't hold it in her head. She couldn't feed herself. But she could smile. And when she died, 500 people came to her funeral, because she had given so much through that smile, that response to other people. And that's something really to think about. What is it that each person has to give? What is it that we value and can value? Well, it's fine to give. And some of us are really good at giving and really like giving. And this is where the mutuality of mercy comes into me. We've also got to be able to receive. And that sometimes takes quite a bit of doing. If you like being in control, you like being on the giving side, you might find it quite hard to receive. So the being loved is actually very hard for some people. And it may be partly to do with some difficulties that happened after their birth. It may be that mum had a post-atrial depression. Maybe there were some difficulties in a relationship. Maybe some other kind of thing happened around that time. Maybe a child was born after a stillbirth. Some of those attachment difficulties that can happen after birth might mean that it's a bit harder to be loved. It's not the one that goes back to think about why. It's just that it highlights the importance of that loving relationship right from the very start. So being loved, learning to love yourself. Jack Dominion always used to say, the first thing you have to learn to do is to love yourself because if you don't love yourself, who else is going to love you? Then you can learn to love others. Then A, being active. All of us in some kind of way can be on the move, can be active. It's really quite important. Years and years ago when I was the first of a psychiatric trainee, we used to go out into Richmond Park and take our depressed patients for a walk. As we search now to show that it works, it's really, really important to get up and get out and about. Then C for create. It doesn't matter whether it's music, art, learning something, just going out and enjoying nature. It really doesn't matter. If you walk to the station in the morning and there's an opportunity to walk through the park rather than along the road, it might take five minutes longer, but it will do you a world of good. That going out and noticing could be your moment for engaging with something created for that day. Engaging. Engaging with life, engaging with people in the real world. What I said to the young people at Flame was, how many of you spend probably more time on your iPhone, your smartphone, your computer? You can't hug a computer. Okay, there might be metaphorical hugs that come through your Facebook friends. But actually, we all somehow, and it may have to be from a distance, but we all need to be in a relationship with somebody. There needs to be somebody that we can have even a metaphorical hug a day with. That engagement really matters. Of course that's one of the big challenges for our society today is the loneliness that so many people have experienced. There's a marvellous campaign on at the moment, Time to Talk, Time to Change. Time to Change is being led by organisations like Mind and Rethink Mental Illness. A lot of it is about trying to get people to talk about mental health, to talk about the things that really matter. So what do we need to talk about? Well, these are some of them. Grief, relationship problems, stress. People are better at saying, oh, I'm feeling really stressed today, but sometimes aren't quite so good at thinking about where it's come from, how it might relate to things that have happened in the past. We're not very good at understanding how something traumatic that's happened in our lives can have long-lasting consequences for our mental health. I'm not very good at necessarily going and seeking help for that. Sometimes it's a good idea to go and talk to somebody. Now, it might be a friend, but it may be that your friends can't, for their own reasons, can't really listen. If you're struggling with something and you're going to talk to somebody and their eyes glaze over or they change the subject, you're not going to go and talk to them again, are you? And I've noticed as a psychiatrist that when people came to talk to me, patients with learning disabilities, for example, that they'd be very nervous about telling me certain things, maybe because they've tried telling in the past and people have looked so shocked at what they said that they thought that it wasn't okay to say it. So the sort of thing I'm thinking about and it's connected to the work I do for Pope Francis, advising on abuse of children and vulnerable adults, it's to do with the fact that most of us don't actually want to know that somebody has been sexually abused, for example. We actually don't want to know. And our faces tell it. My face gives a hint that this is too shocking, too painful, not something I really want to know that nobody's going to tell me, right? So that being willing to hear is something that even doctors and nurses aren't very good at. There's some things people don't want to know. And it's one of the reasons why some issues remain hidden, right? Because nobody is brave enough and you don't think there's anybody that can actually bear what you want to tell them. And that's pretty hard to know you're carrying that burden all on your own because you think that nobody's going to be able to cope with what you've got to say and what you've got to share. Now imagine if you're carrying that around for years. And I bet quite a lot of people who've been carrying around and experienced like that for a very, very long time unable to share it, trying to forget it, and then one day suddenly something happens which brings it back to the surface and a catastrophic breakdown happens and somebody is suddenly really depressed and needing really important help and yet somehow there's a gap between that knowledge of what happened maybe to a child and 40, 30 years later it's actually really destabilising that person's mental health and it's quite hard to make that connection and yet the making of that connection and the facing up to what happened all those years ago can be the solution to helping somebody move forward again. So then not being able to listen is kind of quite difficult. That's one example, death and dying of course and all sorts of things which we need to talk about. I'm struck that there aren't many, many here today and I just really want to say to you guys who've come this is fantastic, all right? It's really important that you're here because actually men find it harder to talk about things and they may find it, many men may find it harder to listen as well. Now you people, you men are probably different you're some of the ones who are willing to come and think about some of these issues but there are lots of guys who aren't and so helping men to share is also quite important but there's probably a slightly different dynamic involved in it. So why don't we talk? Well one of the reasons we don't talk is because people talk about stigma. I get regular emails from somebody who strongly believes that the word stigma is unhelpful maybe shunned and excluded is better but if you feel different in some way or you've had an experience that you think is different to the experience of your friends then it's better to keep quiet or that's what people think and of course if there's anything to any kind of discriminatory attitude it can lead to fear. A disabled man I know living next door to a woman who objected to the fact that he sometimes would go to bed a little bit late and she would hear him climbing upstairs in the next door house and he's a little clumsy and so she wrote down every night that she thought that her sleep had been disturbed and the time he'd gone to bed and then made a complaint about him and complained to the residents association that she shouldn't have to live next door to somebody like that. This was a private street. Somebody like that should be in a home. Now that's discriminatory but it's led to that man being afraid being afraid of the neighbour and that's not helpful. There was a private members bill in parliament to end discrimination for people with mental illness. I don't know whether you know but up until three or four years ago if you as a member of parliament had a serious mental illness then you lost your seat. You were not eligible to be a member of parliament if you had a serious mental illness and so consequently MPs would keep their mental illness as very silent and when the health and social care bill was being introduced in 2011 I decided to start a campaign to try to get mental illness and mental health onto the agenda because it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the bill and nobody thought about mental health or mental illness. Four members of parliament stood up bravely and spoke about their own mental illness. Phenomenal. It has so helped to get attitudes changed so we had a mental health discrimination bill which was passed which took away four discriminations in public office which were present around mental illness and we ended up having mental health and mental illness included in the health and social care act and if I do nothing else in parliament I'm really pleased that I was part of trying to change that because I think it's important. We have something called parity of esteem now. So we understand that mental and physical health are connected but we don't just want to medicalise mental distress because that's another way of distancing ourselves from it and I think more doctors are now recognising the importance of spiritual health and spiritual wellbeing as well. What increases the risk of mental illness? These are some of the things you would expect physical illness, unemployment, stress, relationship problems, trauma but also exclusion from society and that takes us back to a kind of winter-warm view. There's a man who had been in a long-stay hospital and the hospital was closed and I met a now retired psychiatrist who had been a trainee of mine and she said to me, she said, all those years ago used to go on about biopsychosocial and we could take the bio and the psycho but we didn't like the social. We thought it was very wishy-washy but she said you were right and she said that man over there this was at a club for people with learning disabilities he was in a locked ward and I thought this man when we're closing the hospital he will never be able to live in the community because of the things he did he was always damaging his property he was always doing unspeakable things in his room he now lives in a flat of his own and he's perfectly happy and he doesn't need very much support and she said I asked him one day what happened, what changed why are you okay now and he said I didn't like being locked up very simple he was excluded from society now he's a valued member of society and at the end of the talk that I was giving to that club I was presented with a painting done by this man so the wishy-washy social, in biopsychosocial really matters we have a lot of legal requirements in this country which are aimed at including people and this of course includes religion so we need to remember that I'm going to move on a little bit if we think about the issues in our society that we don't talk about I mean it always used to be said if you go to a dinner party you mustn't talk about was it sex money and politics on those are things you're not supposed to talk about are you certainly not supposed to talk about death and dying and disability is not great either but I think there are some secrets which we don't talk about very much one of them, sexuality is one which I think we really struggle in our catholic schools to really get right and I think it's partly because of the word sex I go back and say that it's to me we should be teaching love and relationships yes of course it's the biology of sex but the love and relationships sexuality falls so clearly within that death and dying we don't talk about and that's why we've got so much trouble at the moment around people trying to make sense of calls for assisted dying in euthanasia and disability independence are really important issues which are going to affect all of us in our lifetime within our family and in fact at some point in ourselves these are part of the whole history of growing older from childhood to older age and they're part of our whole story and we need to have the end of our story in our minds at the beginning of our story so we are building for our futures and that's part of what resilience is about sometimes we just don't notice or perhaps we do notice but we try not to notice I'd suggest that it's very important to notice what's happening to people somebody who maybe is not really enjoying their food or they're wearing dark clothes or not attending to their appearance or maybe in this case where there's a young woman who's drawing a picture and it's a black and miserable picture not wanting to get up in the morning many many things so I've talked a little bit about protecting our mental health building that emotional resilience friendship and family all of these things that we've been through but I also think there's something about knowing the truth and in some of our communities and families we try to hide things which are unpalatable you know secrets can sometimes be more harmful or damaging than knowing the truth even young children will often have a fantasy of a truth which is much worse than the secret that's been kept from them okay so somehow that building emotional resilience is by not is about trying to find a way to let children ask questions and answer their questions honestly and getting that sort of pattern of truthfulness in relationship from younger childhood through the teenage years into adult life and that honesty is what actually gives people much more confidence and strength than being left in a kind of cloud of unknowing so mental wealth is about relationships it's about having space and support to reflect somebody teacher of mine pointed out that empathy I'm no Greek scholar but the empathy means putting yourself in someone else's shoes there was an exhibition in parliament recently and it was an exhibition by a charity called Empathy in Action which was actually literally encouraging you to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and they had about 20 pairs of shoes boxers and they had an audio recording which you could listen to while you were wearing that person's shoes quite an interesting idea but what I would say is that it's very difficult to put yourself in somebody else's shoes because you're putting yourself in their shoes you aren't actually that person and it's quite a jump to try to imagine well if it was me in that situation if it's if I was my friend who's struggling at the moment then that's what I would do but I'm not my friend my friend has had different life experiences I don't know all of my friend's life experiences I don't know what's in my friend's heart what's really worrying my friend and so there's a sort of kind of a you know you can't really experience that I struggle with this when I first started working as a child psychiatrist and with young people and a mother came to see me with her child who had a severe disability and one of my colleagues told her that she didn't know why she was struggling so much with this one disabled child didn't she know that I had got four children one of whom was severely disabled now that was the most unhelpful thing to say she was trying to compare my experience but my life and my experience is different for all sorts of reasons I won't go into them but it's completely different so empathy is kind of quite a difficult thing and in that way I think Pope Francis has done us a huge favour on mercy and how he's managed to preach every day a different sermon on mercy for a whole year I do not know they are remarkable the things that he's said about it absolutely remarkable well okay so empathy is difficult but being listened to helps and so learning those skills of listening is really important therapy helps well it will help some people it's not something to be afraid of it might not work for you it might be that you don't find a therapist who somehow is able to listen to you or enables you to feel listened to medication sometimes helps but it really isn't normally the first thing that you need to do getting a tablet to try and help sort things out maybe an excuse for not facing up to some of the issues and some of the truths that you could do with help to face up to on the other hand if you've got a serious mental illness it really isn't enough just to go to church and hope that a few prayers are going to sort you out you've got a serious mental illness you probably need professional help and that's really really important for us in our churches to remember I'm going to give the last word here to Pope Francis because Pope Francis said listening means paying attention wanting to understand to value to respect and to ponder what the other person says knowing how to listen is an immense grace there's that word grace again it's a gift which we need to ask for and then make every effort to practice I think what he's saying is listening is a skill that we need to learn I think it comes from being listened to having an experience of being listened to I think it's connected to love but it's also something we have to practice and there are lots of ways in which we can practice it if you think about engaged encounter or marriage encounter those have a very sensual component to them which is about learning to listen there are lots of exercises lots of opportunities for learning to listen but listening I think is a fundamental part and that's actually what a mother does when she has an infant the infant may not be able to speak but she's listening she's listening with her eyes she's listening she's listening to the response of the infant and that's fundamentally what a mother has to learn to do which is why supporting young mums is one of the most important things that we can do in our societies it's young mums who are actually going to create the emotionally intelligent and resilient young people of the future and it's one of those and that listening is something which we now know young people listening to each other and some of the peer support groups that are set up now for young people are so much more powerful than many of the other kind of interventions that might take place in which young people aren't themselves in control of their lives maybe that's enough I'm sure there will be some questions that I know I feel sorry for you now so it has to respond to my ramblings thank you my actual name my Christian name is Paul the same as my fathers when I got to the age and became tired of being called Little Paul or Paul Jr and getting to the height of about six foot three and being called Little Paul at family parties family gatherings it tends to get a little wearing so that's where the name Jr has come from so just a bit of a brief intro into myself I am a secondary school teacher formerly a lecturer of philosophy and theology at Portsmouth College I was once a student at St Mary's University Peter and I used to have long discussions in the field of psychosis especially the intricate relationship between that and religion you may be wondering what makes me fit to stand at this podium I have questioned myself that for the last few months I can only speak from personal experiences I don't claim to have a wealth of experience in the field unlike some of the esteemed peers here today no need to talk on a personable and hopefully engaging level so as a bit of a brief intro I'd just like to look at the following quote so experience is the hardest kind of teacher it gives you the first test and the lesson afterward something extremely relatable to myself I came from a family an Irish Catholic family do come from an Irish Catholic family growing up I saw large parts of my family torn apart by alcoholism I saw schizophrenia go unnoticed and undiagnosed for three, four years I have seen many labels of psychosis being displayed within my family growing up all of these things ignored excuses given until one day an extremely premature moment of maturity I suppose I began to question these titles I began to question these labels that were given to certain members of my family and really having that upbringing it's really nurtured me and I don't say those things in a way to say get any empathy sympathy or anything like that and in actual fact it's really made me tougher as a person and it's really made me fascinated in the field of mental illness and mental health as a secondary school teacher and for those of you that attend my workshop I strongly recommend you do it's going to be a joyous ride we will discuss ways in which mental health as a whole can be raised within the classroom how mindfulness can be promoted and we spoke Baroness spoke briefly about the use of phones and the increasing reliance upon technology and although there are many benefits of technology lest we forget that students using phones we just see them face down in their phone however that phone could be telling them all sorts of things their friends can be on there passing on quite nasty quite volatile messages and they can become extremely distressed by this I've noticed in my short time in secondary education that students a large part of their mental health is affected by the use of technology so something to be very wary something to be aware of so Baroness spoke about compassion and it's something that I will try and use it's a virtue that I feel that I have and it's a tool that can be used within the classroom again relating it to the classroom being a teacher only in the last couple of weeks I've had numerous safeguarding issues some of which I've used compassion as a major component to tackle these issues head on a couple of weeks ago and obviously because we're being filmed I've obviously changed certain aspects of the scenario names what have you a couple of weeks ago I was invited and very fortunate enough to be invited along to a Year 7 residential trip my mentor group which I love they're a great bunch very mixed bunch we took them to Dorset abseiling crab fishing at night which I do not recommend with 30 students all around 11 or 12 it was quite distressing for me bit is enjoyable nonetheless so first night we'd been there this was 14 hours including a 4 hour coach journey from Swindon to Dorset we got to the Year 7 camp when I say camp it was more like a hostel so to speak so I was sharing a dorm with a colleague of mine and at 11 o'clock that night a fire alarm went off so we marched down to the playground with 180 students knocking on their doors getting them to the playground then on the playground half an hour lining up in late October conditions quite chilly brought them back into the dorms got ourselves settled back down again very tiring days you can imagine already so it helped us one that morning we had a knock on the door open the door to a Year 7 student open the door to him said are you okay he'd been crying a lot that day quite distressed he hadn't slept at all so we offered some explanations offered some reassurance it's just a few hours you've got to get through just a few more hours remember that half past two in the morning another knock at the door same student half past three another knock on the door the same student so this happened throughout the night when it got to half past four in the morning I sat there with him for about an hour and a half as he was sort of crying his eyes out and I recognised that he had an interest in British politics very unusual for a Year 7 student and from what I've witnessed politics is not something you'd necessarily associate with students' interest between Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 but I recognised that from a previous lesson that I'd had with him and we sat there on the stairs together for an hour and a half no sleep nothing and we spoke about the last 100 years of British politics we spoke about Brexit now this child had been diagnosed with quite severe anxiety issues this wasn't one of his strategies this wasn't an action plan that was in place by any stretch of the imagination however in that moment of time it was enough to provide some sense of reassurance the repetitive nature of recalling and recounting different prime ministers throughout the last 100 years seemed to work as an effective strategy he went back to bed and he slept soundly for the rest of the night just a bit of a insight into virtues that we all have playing on perhaps interests and using compassion as a tool we all have it as a virtue and although even if you've experienced the night without any sleep you can still be there you can still find it so empathy and again fitting yourself into somebody else's shoes and again in a year 9 class and year 9s for anyone that is in this room or you have any experience of education you will find that year 9 students are the most closed off the most aggravated the most contentious the most time spiteful students that you have but they do have a loving and they do have a caring heart when in preparation for this I kind of got some views on students with regards to mental health and mental illness and they shared their views on it I made it anonymous and one of the girls came up to me at the end of the lesson and she said sir in a few weeks time you can do it subtly bring up depression within a lesson so I didn't ask any question I didn't probe I just simply said I will and in every other lesson I will try to eradicate existing sort of taboos surrounding mental illness in particular I don't want titles branded around like crazy or insane which some year 9 students will rely on as a key part of their terminology to describe somebody perhaps when they raise ideas that they don't agree with so it's about getting rid of those existing taboos wherever we can in society in these year 9 lessons when I got some work back from them and when they'd spent 5 minutes just writing their impressions of mental health and giving a bit of an insight into their view of it it was very wide ranging some of them seem to have quite a clear insight into what mental health consisted of what their views on it were some of them weren't going into too much detail about them but perhaps they needed to their minds need to be just crafted and perhaps cultivated and perhaps guided into the direction that we want them to be in now on Monday I am being observed as part of a whole school review on the operation for off step as part of our lesson plans we have to promote British values we have to promote literacy and numeracy which believe me, in a religious studies lesson can be quite difficult at times to get in numeracy but it is possible however there is nothing on there that says we should be promoting mindfulness in every other lesson and I've adapted a symbol for mindfulness to which it's kind of an evolution of the surfer symbol that you might have seen like that for me and my students in mindfulness if they are misguided or perhaps they aren't demonstrating mindfulness I will simply give them a symbol an upside down M and say is that mindfulness are you demonstrating mindfulness right now, that's my teacher voice right there ok so mercy and mindfulness so mindfulness and again this can be promoted in all aspects of life and leading to what the Baroness said earlier about is it mercy if you walk past somebody in the street and they actually throw change into their bucket without actually looking at them in the same way if a student walks into my classroom looking upset or they look like they haven't slept or they look in some sort of distress me saying are you ok and then they say yeah I'm fine and then I walk off and turn my back on them that is not just demonstrating mercy or mindfulness in fact I should keep an eye on them and I do have an open door policy and although at some point I do have students from year 10 11, 12, 13 7, 8 all of the years lining up at my door at lunchtime to come and speak to me I can rest easy thinking that I am playing a part in this school I am trying to promote mindfulness so I did warn you I do ramble on so we will come to the conclusion of this so in my naivety when I was going around my school and asking varying teachers what their experience is of promoting good mental health and mindfulness and mercy within the classroom was I didn't stop to think how these teachers might personally have been affected by perhaps mental illness or that they might have personal views on mental health themselves so the very first teacher that I spoke to I said I am doing this talk in a few weeks do you have any perspectives experiences, views on it and she turned around and said I have got an absolute full catalogue of it my mother suffered from depression for four years and it is ongoing and she was actually received medication after four years and she said that she was experiencing this during her PGCE which greatly affected the teacher that was put in front of the class there are countless examples that I could use of teachers who are currently experiencing who are experiencing family that may have mental illness and they come in the next day and they have to stand in front of 30 students and they have to be the centre of positivity they have to promote a positive aura in front of the class students prey on weakness if you go in and your head is down and you start mumbling in front of the class that lesson will not go well so it is just about recognising that so just going back to the symbols here and I will touch upon this very briefly so these are social networking sites dating sites what have you and it got me thinking to the way in which we sometimes subliminally categorise friends so we can say old school friends old university friends work friends they are all put in categories these networking sites these websites behind me you can meet people from all walks of life randomised which got me thinking that perhaps a scheme could be set up in school and I know some schools are working on them to get teachers to talk so getting teachers to talk this is a pilot scheme which I am trying to promote in the school in which I work in trying to get teachers to just spend one hour a week and I have said that I am happy to chair it teachers to sit around for one hour a week from all different departments believe it or not I don't tend to talk to people from the P.E department or the art department because they are about half a mile over the other side of the school they are just meeting up once a week promoting mindfulness just discussing anything discussing what films have come out recently discussing a favourite music just creating more of a communal sense within a school teachers can be their own wolves they go off into their different departments and for that whole day they will just talk to students and it's about having a support network it's about having a support system within schools which if this goes any way to helping a teacher be a better teacher and being able to stand in front of the school positivity and feel that they are not alone then that can only be a good thing so I just like to end with that there I will go into this in a bit more detail in the workshop and things like that for any of you that are interested and again, apologies for my rambling nature but it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and I hope you enjoy the rest of the day thank you