Why Boys Don’t Ask For Help And How Schools Can Change That

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Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of Let's Talk About, and I'm delighted to be joined by Claire.
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Claire, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
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It's fascinating your background.
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I'm just going to explain to the reader, to the listeners, sorry, how I found you.
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So I was on LinkedIn going through my normal sort of messages and seeing what people were commenting on.
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And somebody who I used to work with, he had commented on your post and I started to read in it.
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And your your first headline said, Every suicide I attended as a police officer was male.
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And I was like, okay, this is interesting.
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Let's have a look at this.
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It talked a little bit more about your role as a police officer.
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It talked about those standout moments, you know, the first suicide you attended, being 21 and telling a family their loved one had died, talking to a young man standing on the edge, and then sadly being medically retired with PTSD in 2016.
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And then it said that it says that you you kind of that faded into the background until 2023 when two men you knew died, both under the age of 50.
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And you are now working really hard to get into young boys and help them around you're working for the NHS, helping them get mental health support teams, helping them in the schools, there's some projects you're doing.
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So I'm gonna be quiet now and let you explain all of it because I think that you're really gonna be able to help our listeners with those difficult, challenging conversations around suicide.
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And we know the stats around men and boys is high.
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So over to you, Claire.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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Tell us a little bit about yourself.
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Thanks, Nicky, and thanks for having me on.
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So, yeah, my background, I joined Essex Police at 20, very young, very naive, definitely had rose-tinted glasses on, and that that phrase was used often by my seniors.
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I completed 18 years service, and during that time, one of my main responsibilities, as it is with all police officers, is to attend and support people that are in mental health crisis.
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And often that crisis is at a suicide or attempted suicide stage.
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Like I said, I I remember vividly the very first suicide, death by suicide that I attended, and that image is imprinted very much within my within my memory.
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I was 21 at the time, so like I say, very young.
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But the process began whereby I thought I was slowly becoming desensitized to these kinds of incidents and scenarios, and you look at everybody else around you, and everybody else is getting on with it, so we're like, oh, okay, this is this is quite normal.
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I again of a very similar age, 21, was called to support a gentleman who was concerned about his son, had gone missing.
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He'd located his car, and at the same time, over the radio, we had a confirmed report that we had had a male jump in front of a train, literally within yards from where we were with the father, and had to break the news to him, which was absolutely devastating.
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He couldn't face telling his wife and daughter, so we accompanied him back uh to his home address and had to break the news to his wife and daughter.
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Again, that's one of the things that has stayed with me.
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And I think, like you, Nicky, having you know worked the job of a police officer, is those moments where we know what we're about to tell someone is going to change their life forever, and that the words that we're going to deliver is yeah, it's it's gonna change the trajectory of their life and it will never be the same again.
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But you carry on, and I attempted attended multiple deaths by suicides, and like I say, every single one was male, but it wasn't really something I was aware of at the time, if I was honest.
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I I did go to attend quite a lot of females that were in crisis and were at risk of attempting suicide, but the death by suicide were all male.
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As I mentioned on the LinkedIn post, I attended an incident with a young male who was about 24, 25, very similar age to me at the time, and he was standing on a very narrow ledge of the top of a multi-story car park.
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And I spent four hours trying to talk him down.
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He was in very much like a trance-like state.
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I know now as a trainee clinical psychologist that he was in a disassociative state, but at the time it for me it felt like he was kind of in a trance-like state.
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He would hold his arms out to his side like this.
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He was faced backwards and he would count down from 10.
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At any moment, he could have slipped.
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It definitely wasn't a cry for help.
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He really was desperately wanting to end his life and to end the pain.
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His relationship with his girlfriend had broken down, and he just couldn't see an alternative, he couldn't see a way out.
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And we spoke with him for a really long time, but the hook to kind of almost bring him out of that trance-like state was we started to talk about the stereophonics, which is a band from the 90s, and they're still current now, but for the younger listeners, they were quite cool and trendy back in the day.
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And we started to talk about stereophonics and the music and different albums and songs, and it was almost like the lights went back on in his eyes.
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He he was back in the room, and then without notice, he he climbed down, and we accompanied him to have a mental health assessment, and he was supported after that.
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So these incidents came very, very frequently.
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It was part and parcel of being a police officer at the age of 27.
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So seven years into the job, I was promoted to sergeant.
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So the frequency reduced slightly.
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Always worked in response.
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And those cases and those incidents continued.
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So when I was medically retired in 2016, I was formally diagnosed with PTSD as a result of my traumas and lived experiences as a police officer.
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And quite a few of those traumas did directly relate to the deaths by suicide that I had attended.
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So the decision was made for me to be medically retired.
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It came with very mixed emotions.
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There was relief in one respect, but in another, I really didn't know who I was other than a police officer.
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I, you know, I joined at 20, I started the application process at 19, I chose not to go to uni.
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I wanted to join the police instead.
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And I I really didn't know who I was, which is actually quite a common thread, isn't it?
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Of like when when officers come to retire, it's there we don't know who we are anymore and like what our identity is.
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So on a whim, I signed up to do a degree with the open university.
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I hadn't gone at 18, I had a place, I deferred, I was just pretty much done with studying, and I wanted to be out in the big wide world.
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So I was medically retired in 2016, and then I started the degree with the open university two years later.
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I graduated in 2023, so that took me five years to complete, and then I went straight into the NHS as an assistant psychologist, where I worked for two years, and I worked in both CAM services, so children and adolescent mental health services.
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So the first was a mental health support team, which was working with children and young people in mainstream schools, so within the South of Essex, so primary schools, secondary schools, and colleges.
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And I was instantly struck by the disparity between the number of males and females that were being referred into the service.
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So every month we would kind of go through the data and how the referrals were looking, and we'd have female referrals up here on a nice bar chart, male referrals down here.
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So that was an incident.
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Oh, okay, that that seems strange, you know.
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We we know that boys and girls experience mental health difficulties at the same rate.
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What's that actually?
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Why are we not getting these referrals come through?
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Suicide had faded into the background for me until late 2023, when two men that I knew tragically and unexpectedly took their lives and died by suicide.
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One in particular was the partner of a very, very close friend of mine, and she she used happy for me to talk about her experiences, and everything came flooding back, and it kind of hit me in the face, and I was like, Whoa we're right back here again.
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The difference was I wasn't supporting my close friend in the capacity as a police officer, it wasn't a professional relationship, it was very much a personal relationship, and I could feel and absorb her enduring pain that you know the tragic death of her partner had left behind.
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And these were were within weeks of each other, and then a few weeks after that, somebody local in my area also died by suicide in the woods very close to me.
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So that along with the un you know, the recognition of the disparity between boys and girls referrals, I kind of it was a bit of a light bulb moment, and I thought to myself, right, we have an opportunity to make some changes here in a mental health capacity and within services.
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So we know that suicide is the leading cause of death in men under the age of 50.
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In fact, I think some recent stats, I think it's now under the age of 54, but don't quote me on that, but I I think it has raised to 54 actually.
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So I put a proposal forward to conduct a quality improvement project within my service, which was a mental health support team within an NHS trust, to increase referrals for boys and to bring about health equity and improve mental health outcomes for boys and adolescent boys in particular.
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So in one particular school within Essex, in the south of Essex, 96% of all referrals were for girls, so just four percent were for boys.
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So it was agreed that that would be where I would conduct my quality improvement project, and I started that in January 2023.
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The approach that I took was very much a collaborative co-production methodology.
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So as an assistant psychologist, I was able to recruit boys who were students between years eight and 10.
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And I had around 11 boys that regularly attended.
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So we met once a month and we spoke about the barriers of accessing mental health support, what would need to change to improve self self-help seeking behaviors, and how the boys could be better supported in school with regards to having mental a mental health difficulty.
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So a couple of things came out of that participation group, and they were stigmas around masculinity, boys being seen as weak, a fear of peers finding out that they were accessing support, the process by which they could access support.
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So there was, for example, in this particular school, there was a well-being hub which was glass.
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So if you went in there to reach out for support, you were seen by everybody else that was walking through the corridor at that time.
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We spoke about intergenerational expectations around men and boys, and we spoke a lot about challenging behavior.
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So prior to joining the NHS, I worked for almost six years in an alternative education provision, working predominantly with adolescent boys.
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And each and every boy was experiencing enduring mental health difficulties, and all have experienced trauma.
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Now they presented these mental health difficulties in a way that was unmanageable for mainstream school.
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So they presented through their difficulties through challenging behaviour.
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So that for me was really key in kind of unpicking okay, well, where are we with schools and how schools support boys?
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So within this particular school, I disseminated an electronic mental health questionnaire which I devised, which addressed help-seeking behaviours, but also I wanted to look at mental health literacy.
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So what boys understood to be a mental health difficulty, because there are so many that the boys just aren't aware.
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For example, difficulty getting to sleep.
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But you know, boys and quite possibly girls, adolescent girls, won't realise that actually it's a sign of anxiety, isn't it?
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Difficulty getting to sleep and ruminating and all of those different things.
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So the mental health questionnaire was designed to highlight the signs and symptoms of mental health difficulty, whilst also obtaining that data to look at the rate at which those difficulties were experienced by boys and girls within this particular school.
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It also looked with regards to the help-seeking behaviours, their willingness to seek out and accept mental health support, also looked at challenging behaviour as well.
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So the findings from the questionnaire, I found that I was able to conclude within this particular school.
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Obviously, I can't generalize these findings across wider school populations, but within this particular school, the findings looking at and evaluating, boys were more likely to present mental health difficulties through challenging behaviour compared to girls.
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Boys were more likely, believe it or not, to accept mental health support compared with girls, which I was really surprised about.
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However, they were less likely to seek it out.
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So if it was offered, if it was highlighted and offered, we can do a referral for you, boys are more likely to accept that help and for that referral to be made and for them to see a clinician within school for some early intervention support.
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In relation to accepting help, I also explored whether the gender of the practitioner was a factor.
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And I made the assumption, my hypothesis was yes, it was.
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And as a result, at the end, oh, I also did some parent carer.
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I did a parent carer evening forum whereby all parents and carers were invited, and it was specifically around supporting boys with mental health.
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And that went really well, actually.
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They uh we had about 60 attend, which apparently for for an evening, and parent participation was deemed a success, so that was great.
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By the November, I had with working collaboratively with the school, with the mental health team, the leads within the school and the boys, and the Support of Health Watch SE collectively we were able to increase referrals from 4% to 35.
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So it was fantastic.
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So I mean, I I can't do the maths on how many times we'd increase that, but it it worked.
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So I kind of I I had that in mind.
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I was like, right, okay, we we could have something here, uh, but we need to move forward.
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I need to move forward.
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Holding the the the voice of the boys very much in the forefront of everything that I did.
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I'm also the mother of uh a boy as well.
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I mean, he's 20 now, but when I started doing this work, he was still very much an adolescent.
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So that was that.
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I'm now completing a doctorate, University of Essex, and as part of our training, we are given the opportunity to complete a piece of research, so a thesis.
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I went in very clear about what I wanted, would like to do, and I have been supported to do that.
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So my thesis is now around using co-production with something that we call PAR, which is participatory action research.
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So working again, working collaboratively with boys within a school to develop interventions which will improve mental health literacy, so for that to help them understand what the signs and symptoms of mental health difficulty are, and to improve help-seeking behaviours.
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And that's where we are now.
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If you haven't fallen asleep by now, listening to all that Claire, I feel like I want to give you a massive round of applause, to be honest, because what that's absolutely incredible.
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And thank you so much for sharing your journey around your own PTSD and then what you've stepped into in your second second career of what you're doing around now, boys.
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And I just have a couple of questions that I'd just like to go through for it.
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And now I work with a lot of schools and leaderships around managing conflict and having difficult conversations.
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So for any of the schools I've worked with, if you're listening to this, we will give you details of how to contact Claire at the end of this.
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And for any parents listening as well, I know there'll be definitely parents listening because you know those adolescent years are very challenging for any parent and and also for adolescents, because I don't know about you, but when I went through my adolescent stage, I was very confused and very mixed up and very angry a lot of the time, and definitely gave my mum a tough time.
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I'm sure she'd tell you that.
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Let me just take you back.
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See, so for those people that are not in the schooling environment, you mentioned the you started with years eight to ten.
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Can you just give me an age range, a rough age range of what that actually is?
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Yeah, so years eight to ten would be from the age of 12 up to 15.
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Okay, great.
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Yeah, the reason so year seven, I think there's this there was some reluctance about some of the year sevens engaging in the participation group, which was understandable.
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And there you're 11 to 12 year olds.
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Your year eights are 12 to 13 year olds.
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The time of year that I did it, it was kind of around springtime.
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It it just wouldn't have been appropriate for the year 11, 12, and 13 boys because of their GCSEs and their A levels.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Great, thank you for that.
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Uh, because I find that fascinating that at this young age already they are worrying about masculinity.
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We know that when you go into teenage world, it's very much about your peers and that you're fitting in with your peers, and that's incredibly important at that stage.
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So that thing about the glass, you know, the well-being hub straight away.
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Glass is fascinating, and that they're already, and you talked about intergenerational around what we are teaching our kids, what they are growing up with, and then we can add on to that that the next layer of social media where they're also being told what it what they should be as absolutely, yeah.
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Which is which is extremely topical, isn't it?
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It is at the moment, yeah.
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It is at the moment with the Louis Thoreau documentary, Inside the Manosphere.
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It's you know, we we're just fighting this battle, aren't we?
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And this wave of this ideology around masculinity, which I believe is toxic.
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I I'm quite happy to call it toxic masculinity.
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I'm very clear that I mass masculinity should be embraced.
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I don't want to emasculate boys and men, but it's that toxic masculinity, and I think it's really important to differentiate between the two because I have had I have had some comments and some feedback saying like around this masculinity, and I've had to kind of explain no, I'm not talking about masculinity, I'm talking about masculinity that actually is has quite a detrimental effect, it's toxic, it's it's it creates barriers, it creates stigmas, and that's the masculinity that we need to address.
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Yeah, thanks for the clarity on that, Claire.
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Also, the other thing that I found very interesting is that they, if you say to them there's help available, then they're quite they're more willing to go, great, I'll have that help.
00:29:17.359 --> 00:29:23.119
So that I you see, I don't think I or let me reframe that.
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I think when I look at those people that I've spoken to who are suicidal, or those people who have got to the stage where they're making those life and death decisions, that I I'm just trying to think of the time when somebody had said to them, actually, there's this help available, and what the difference would have would have been.
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And I find that really interesting.
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That that just that one simple sentence of there's some help available.
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Yeah.
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And that was what yeah, one of my recommendations that I made and concluded at the end of my project was for a self-referral process that is accessible via a QR code, for example, with posters on the back of every boy's toilet, all the doors.
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And for girls as well, you know, it is important for girls, and and I don't want to discredit the girls, but the disparities with the boys, and that's what what why I'm focusing on the boys.
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So a QR code where they could discreetly scan it, open it up, complete a self-referral form, which would then go to the mental health lead within the school, who would then reach out to that that boy, and then make an assessment and decide whether a referral would be appropriate.
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One thing that she did note was at the point in which boys came to their attention that they were in need of mental health support, they no longer met the threshold for the mental health support team, which provides preventative and early intervention support, because by the time they came to the note came to the attention of the mental health leads within the school, they had to go directly to camps.
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They were risky, they were already self-harming, they were already experiencing suicidal ideation.
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And that was a really interesting kind of observation that we made together.
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That we we need to we need to be working as a mental health service, we need to be working with teachers, educators, school staff to teach and present how boys present mental health difficulties differently to girls.
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They present in a very different way.
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It can be very aggressive, it can be very angry, the behavior is very challenging, it could be bullying.
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There's all these different presentations that actually we need to look beyond the boy that's deemed problematic and unpick those layers and think, okay, well, what's actually going on for this boy?
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Is that because there'll always be more to that, and I think that and that's something that's really important.
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So the overarching theme for my theses is to reduce the emergence of suicidal ideation, and everything that I do comes under that umbrella because I think if we can co-create interventions that can be universally rolled out across all schools within the UK, we do stand a chance of changing the trajectory and these statistics for future generations of boys.
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It's hard.
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We're to to change the you know, stereotyp uh ideologies, the stigmas and barriers with men in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s is difficult.
00:33:42.960 --> 00:33:51.519
It's easier if we do that whilst they're in early adolescence and continue to build on that.
00:33:51.519 --> 00:33:55.599
I spoke to my builder, we had a builder in a couple of years ago.
00:33:55.599 --> 00:34:02.240
It was actually in 2023, funnily enough, that autumn, the same time.
00:34:02.240 --> 00:34:16.159
He was 23 years old, he went to a local school, and five boys he went to school with had all died by suicide since leaving school.
00:34:16.159 --> 00:34:23.599
So between the ages of 16 and 23, he had uh lost five friends to suicide.
00:34:23.599 --> 00:34:26.400
And it just takes your breath away.
00:34:26.400 --> 00:34:29.920
And you're like, okay, this is in my local area.
00:34:29.920 --> 00:34:33.280
This I'm not reading about this in some far away place.
00:34:33.280 --> 00:34:34.559
This is happening local.
00:34:34.880 --> 00:34:36.800
Yeah, and and that is a thing, isn't it?
00:34:36.800 --> 00:34:42.880
During this conversation, there will be people who have died by suicide.
00:34:42.880 --> 00:34:44.480
Yeah, absolutely.
00:34:44.480 --> 00:34:47.679
That's the reality of it, and and I think that is such an important thing.
00:34:47.679 --> 00:35:00.000
It is here, it's right now, and it it feels and sounds like Claire that you you've got something there with those young boys doing your work, and it's it's incredible.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:05.280
And thank you so much for coming on to today's podcast and sharing that.
00:35:05.280 --> 00:35:15.840
And yeah, for anybody who's listening who's in education, I urge you to get in contact with Claire and so that we can help reduce that statistic.
00:35:15.840 --> 00:35:23.360
That is a crazy statistic when you're looking at around how many young men are dying from suicide.
00:35:23.360 --> 00:35:25.280
Claire, where can we find you?
00:35:25.280 --> 00:35:28.480
Where can people listening to this podcast find you?
00:35:29.199 --> 00:35:34.960
You can find me via the University of Essex website.
00:35:34.960 --> 00:35:36.639
Just put my name in.
00:35:36.639 --> 00:35:41.840
You can find me on LinkedIn, Claire Dunn, trainee clinical psychologist.
00:35:41.840 --> 00:35:45.199
Yeah, either of those.
00:35:45.199 --> 00:35:47.280
Drop me a DM.
00:35:47.280 --> 00:35:53.840
The my thesis work is currently in the preliminary stages, the proposal stages.
00:35:53.840 --> 00:36:02.320
I'm doing the systematic review, so I'm looking at what research is already there, and this is a huge gap.
00:36:02.320 --> 00:36:17.280
We do not have gender-specific interventions in the UK designed for adolescent boys to prevent the emergence of suicidal ideation, and that's what I want to change, and I think we can.
00:36:17.840 --> 00:36:24.400
I I think you definitely can, Claire, with your enthusiasm and drive and determination to do this.
00:36:24.400 --> 00:36:26.639
I look forward to following your journey.
00:36:26.639 --> 00:36:28.079
And thank you, Mikir.
00:36:28.079 --> 00:36:30.400
And once again, thank you so much for being here.
00:36:30.400 --> 00:36:33.199
Uh, reach out to Claire if she can help you at all.
00:36:33.199 --> 00:36:47.360
If you've listened to this podcast today and things have caused you to think about different aspects, there are help lines always at the end of the podcast, or you can reach out and we're happy to chat.
00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:49.280
So thank you very much, Claire.
00:36:49.280 --> 00:36:50.719
Thanks, Nicky.
00:36:50.719 --> 00:37:04.000
If you have in any way been affected by today's podcast episode, there are numbers at the end of the transcript which you can contact.
00:37:04.000 --> 00:37:06.960
We'd like to thank you all for listening.
00:37:06.960 --> 00:37:15.599
And if you'd like to join our Facebook group, there is also a link to that in the notes that go with this podcast.
00:37:15.599 --> 00:37:17.199
Have a great day.