Since forming in 2022, Notts based charity Tough to Talk has already been making positive waves in workplaces and male-centric communities. With his own personal mental health struggles giving him first hand knowledge of the struggles some men have with talking, founder Steve Whittle tells us about their successes so far and strategy for the future.
In early 2022, Steve Whittle underwent a mental health crisis that drove him to the edge of despair. Two months later however he saw a light at the end of the tunnel; a sense of ‘purpose’ as he describes it.
“When the crisis team arrived on my suicide attempt, they told me ‘You’re not alone’ and I didn’t believe it at first because no men in my life had said they felt the same way as me,” says Steve. “But after I researched and realised that they did, my purpose then became to serve the men around me and make sure they know that they can take action and find solutions to their own crises.”
Steve is now the face of Hucknall based charity Tough to Talk, which he founded in March 2022. Since then, he has chaired the company, working tirelessly to raise awareness around men’s mental health and, most importantly, to ‘break the silence’ around male suicide.
Steve’s beliefs about mental health are central to the charity’s mission. There is undoubtedly an enormous amount of mental health discourse today in all manner of spaces, from workplaces to education. But when it comes to men’s mental health specifically, Steve is convinced that conversations around the issue are confused and not always framed correctly, particularly in workplaces mostly occupied by men.
“Men are brought up to be strong, stoic and a provider. We worry therefore that if we speak about our mental health in the workplace, the boss might pass us on a promotion, not give us the next project, or our colleagues might go after our job,” says Steve. “Companies often have good mental health systems in place, but men won’t approach or use them because of how they feel. Most HR teams are also women, putting out amazing resources for their staff, but men don’t feed back to them. So, it’s a marketing problem: the wrong things are being said to the wrong people. We’re trying to get the right people talking to men in a language that they understand.”
Their overarching aim is to foster that sense of community, clarity and mutual support which male-centric communities today are so often deprived of
2017 research on UK employees carried out by Mind confirmed that men are twice as likely to have mental health problems due to their job, compared to factors outside of work. That same year, the Men's Health Forum found 191,000 men per year were reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety worsened by work. Beyond this, suicide continues to be a tragic, recurring social problem among men in the UK, with the Office for National Statistics finding in 2020 that men still comprise three quarters of registered suicide deaths.
Tough to Talk addresses these issues from many different angles. Their website is regularly updated, with a blog containing a variety of writing on male suicide, from personal stories to concise analysis, while their YouTube channel puts these same stories in emotive video form. The charity’s #manup journals also provide insights, practical tools and tips for opening up mental health discussions within male spaces.
Mainly, however, the charity strikes at the heart of these issues by partnering with many different male-centric workplaces across the UK. In understanding that mental health issues often manifest somewhere inside of the work-life balance, Tough to Talk have partnered with everyone from construction and manufacturing companies, to Football Associations in and around Nottingham.
“We’ve only been going fourteen months but we have lots of evidence that what we’re doing is working,” says Steve. “We start off with intervention: how do we communicate better with men struggling with suicidal thoughts? Then, how do we engage with men before they have those thoughts? I often see 3000 word long communications going out in companies which people won’t read in detail, and aren’t direct and solution-driven enough. If they were, then they’d be more engaging for men.”
Close engagement with men on a one to one basis is a central part of the charity’s strategy. Steve emphasises that this principle appears in many of their approaches to spreading mental health awareness in the spaces that the charity has partnered with.
“We’re working on a peer-to-peer journal with young men, where they work through and write about their issues with a leader figure, in their space, whom they respect. We trialled it with a college near us and the results were off the charts in terms of success. One young man was bullied and wouldn’t eat in front of other people. After doing the journal for three months, with a college leader, he recovered from that problem and became much happier.”
Still a relatively young charity, Tough to Talk has big ambitions for the future. They are soon to introduce an extremely detailed, surveying strategy that accurately measures how aware and communicative employees in a certain company are about mental wellness. However, whichever strategies they introduce and whichever partnerships they make, Steve describes their overarching aim: to foster a sense of community, clarity and mutual support, which male-centric communities today are so often deprived of.
“We need to create tough-talking men who are masculine and strong, but can be vulnerable, talk about these things with their peers and feel supported by their community,” says Steve. “With the right messaging, from the right people, it will force a change in culture.”
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