Within this documentary Roman Kemp explores the mental health and suicide crisis affecting young men in the UK. The documentary takes a closer look at the urgent issue of young men’s mental health and why an increasing number of them are taking their own lives and the reason why so many never seem to seek help. Roman Kemp explores what can be done to encourage more people to seek help, what preventative action we need to be taking, and the lasting impact suicide has on the loved ones left behind.
Although this documentary is more focused on male suicide, it does bring attention to the rise in mental health issues that are arising within young people. More and more children and teenagers seem to be struggling with poor mental health and suicidal thoughts, with children as young as 11 calling up suicide crisis lines for help.
While three quarters of all suicides are committed by men, these individuals seem to be more resistant to seeking help and often appear happy and content to friends and family up until the point that they commit suicide. This highlights that more needs to be done in getting people, especially men to start opening up to others about their feelings, and feeling comfortable enough to seek help when required. 1 in 5 people in the UK will have suicidal thoughts at some point in there life and more needs to be done to help these people from acting on those feelings.
One of the most important things I learnt from this documentary is how important communication and opening up about feelings are. Talking to someone about how you truly feel can help you to rationalise how you are feeling and can even help you to find the right support needed to start to feel more content. Keeping things bottled up and hidden only leads to more negative feelings such as isolation and loneliness and can result in feeling suicidal. This documentary explores the lives of three men of killed themselves during the pandemic, during which many people were alone and isolated due to the lockdowns and social distancing laws in place. This again highlights that fact that now more than ever we need to make sure that we are checking in on our friends and communicating so people do not feel as if they are along.
What I have learnt
All this is very helpful in terms of research for my mental health animations as it suggests just some points that will be good to communicate to children such as normalising talking about our feelings with others. From this documentary it is clear that a lot of these men that sadly died did not open up about their feelings to anyone and instead kept their emotions to themselves. This was obviously very detrimental to their mental wellbeing, and so normalising talking about feelings within my mental health animations will hopefully help children to open up more when they are feeling down and know to seek help when they need it.
Bibliography
Roman Kemp: Our Silent Emergency (2021) [Television]. BBC Three. 16 March 2021, 21:00.