I’m bereaved by suicide. My own mental health has not always been everything I want it to be and I’ve known 8 people that have chosen to end their life. I also volunteer for a mental health charity, helping them to the set the national objectives for suicide prevention by sitting on their “lived experience” panel.
I doubt that anyone will envy these qualifications but they do at least give me the insight to ask some relevant questions.
After my father and mother died in quick succession, my mother having taken her own life, I decided that I wanted to do something positive and this took the form of raising money through a wine label I created called Our Fathers. By no means a runaway success, I have been quietly donating money to various causes but, in particular, to suicide prevention in the UK.
I also spend a lot of time in Australia and had wanted to do the same there and, to those ends, approached mental health charities to give money to. Having been turned down 2 years ago, I’ve just tried again and received the same response. My offers to support have been universally refused on the basis that “they cannot support the irresponsible use of alcohol” through to “alcohol is a depressant and therefore they cannot have any association with it”
Sadly, after numerous attempts across different organisations, I have now had to concede that I cannot even give money away to most mental health charities.
Given that we face a mental health epidemic and that resources are more thinly stretched than ever before, why are they refusing my money? Why is a legitimate industry being excluded from helping its own?
I’m no apologist for the evils of alcohol abuse, seek no direct association or promotion and fully acknowledge the downside of alcohol abuse. However, mental health is an illness and it is not solely caused by alcohol – alcohol is often a way of dealing with it or a symptom of it. There are many people who work in the wine industry who have mental illness, and they would have mental illness if they worked in another industry. But, because they work in the wine industry they are both denied the support of their peers and the opportunity to help others.
Do the mental health charities in Australia that have denied my support also deny support from the food industry, from partisan media outlets, from social media outlets that allow online bullying or from govt bodies that have systematically neglected mental health?
So, for all those people that I have known and lost in the wine industry, I’m sorry that when it comes to supporting those like you, those in the know have decided that alcohol is the egg and mental health is the chicken.
Our Fathers 