Adam Humphries reports why we should be speaking up all the Time, Not just aome of the time.
Now I came across this whilst at work, and also it is something that has been mentioned quite a bit, both on the news as well as via TV documentaries. This is also something that I, for one, have been an avid supporter of since I first came across it.
The organization in question is called Speak Up or Freedom to Speak Up and is all to do with encouraging people to speak up about whatever issue is troubling them, be it at work, education, social lives, or in their own homes.
Now though I openly admit that even though I don’t fully know whether this is part of the whole Mental Health campaign groups but either way this sort of thing should become a full-time part of our everyday lives.
As someone who openly speaks out regularly about issues surrounding mental health, disability, and well-being and has been dealing with issues to do with Anxiety I am only too happy to see this sort of thing come into being.
For many, many, many years now starting from the individual level going all the way up to a society type-level a great many of us have suffered in silence as a result of one problem or another. Or several which we are either too proud of or too ashamed to admit to ourselves or others.
In fact, according to some statistics, between April 2020 all the way to March of this year 20,388 cases were brought up as a result of the Freedom to Speak Up Guardians. Even I signed a supporter-type pledge when I first began working for the NHS, and though I have yet to do anything with it, it is something I fully intend to get involved with.
Now the statistical numbers which I have just mentioned were an increase as compared to the last academic year of 2019/2020, an increase of 26%. This was due to the Speak Up Guardians receiving somewhere between 16,000-17,000 in that year alone. On the whole that alone is somewhat rather surprising in that both the number of before in the previous academic year and this one as well.
But at least it showed that more people had begun talking. In the past, I openly admit that I have rarely spoken out, and this was for a number of reasons, first and foremost because I just didn’t want to bother with the hassle of having to tell people what it was I was going through. My other reasons were that I just wanted to forget about the problems and hope that they would just resolve themselves quickly and quietly.
As I discovered, much to my own dismay, this wasn’t the best strategy as my own mental state gradually became more and more affected, to the point where I ended up telling my own family what was going on. Now although telling them didn’t have much of an effect on whatever the situation was that I was going through the I at least I was more at ease mentally that they knew what was going on and that I had someone to talk to.
And I was one of those people that grew up with that ever-infamous saying “a problem shared is a problem halved”
And since then, I have been using that same saying ever since and its wonders.
Adam Humphries is the music editor and WhatsOn Columnist.
