3. She said she worked in learning and development
I’m invited to speak at a major law firm.
Hello again.
Yesterday I told you about an associate lawyer who got in touch with me after one of my talks in a law firm.
I have received a lot of those messages (lucky me). But I didn’t leave hospital with any plan to deliver this kind of talk. Far from it. For months and months, I thought I was utterly worthless.
This is the third of four emails on this topic.
Read the first | second.
I felt more vulnerable outside hospital than in, and took all the help I could get:
I called Samaritans a lot.
A friend of mine, the psychotherapist Philippa Perry, suggested I join a community-based group set up by someone she knew. “It will be like your group therapy sessions in hospital, but cheaper,” Philippa said.
I’ve known Philippa since 2012, when we both published books and went on a book tour together:
I’m on the left, Philippa’s in yellow.
So anyway, I went along to a meeting of the group Philippa recommended, called Talk for Health. I was part of a new intake. And at the first meeting, the hosts asked for a volunteer to stand up and talk about themselves.
I’ve done a lot of facilitating, and knew from past experience that it would be a disaster if someone got up and said something pointless, because the first to speak sets the tone for everything that follows.
Desperate for this to be useful, I stood up myself. I said I had recently left psychiatric hospital, considered myself utterly worthless and was plagued by suicidal thoughts.
I could see that I had the attention of my audience.
During a coffee break, one of the other attendees came up to me. She said I was “incredibly brave”, and that I had something very important to say. She hoped I would be able to share it with others.
Her name was Jo Gubbay. She said she ran learning and development at Slaughter and May, which I knew already is a huge commercial law firm, because many years ago I worked as a legal journalist.
I found out later that Jo came to Talk for Health because her daughter, an aspiring psychologist, had told her about the group’s incredible outcomes on a low budget. Sceptical, Jo wanted to see for herself.
But in that coffee break I didn’t know why Jo was there. I just thought she was deluded or else “being nice”, because I knew better: I was worthless, and nobody could possibly want to hear anything I had to say.
Map of my brain: all neural pathways led to a black hole.
Months later, Jo invited me to Slaughter and May, to meet her colleague Gabriella Foley. It hadn’t particularly occurred to me till I got there, though it’s obvious to me now, that like any other professional services organisation the firm had an obligation to look after its people. Without a programme of support, those people might end up in psychiatric hospital – or worse.
Really, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
I told them my story, and showed lots of drawings – including some that were dark, very dark. Gabby and Jo made it feel very easy to share them, at a time when I still felt very vulnerable. And they asked me to do an hour-long lunchtime presentation, with pictures, to members of the firm.
Jo came up with a title that might draw a reasonable number of attendees: “From High Flyer To Rock Bottom.”
At the time, I found it hard to consider that I had ever been any kind of High Flyer. But people are sometimes impressed that I’ve published seven books in 16 languages, spoken to audiences of up to 5,000 people on four continents, was for years an editor and writer on the Financial Times and Sunday Times and so on, blah blah, whatever.
The plan, as Jo and Gabby explained it, was simple: to open up a conversation about mental health.
That was the plan.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what happened.
John-Paul Flintoff
PS. If you are looking for a speaker to do something similar, download this guide and make contact – before I get fully booked.