As I write this it’s Valentine’s Day. The sun has decided to make a rare February appearance as I sit at my desk inhaling the exquisite scent of a bouquet of pink lilies (my favourite flower) enthusiastically proffered by my fiancé this morning. This is my last Valentine’s as a “single” woman - this time next year I will be a “Mrs”. I have every reason to feel very happy (and a tiny bit smug).

Yet this date will forever be tinged with sadness, because it was on Valentine’s Day last year that my Self-Esteem Team colleague Nadia Mendoza’s friend James Mabbett took his own life. And 9 February marked the one year anniversary of the death of Edward Mallen, another young man whose life was ended far too soon.

I first met Edward’s father, Steve Mallen, last year at Parliament. I quickly identified him as amongst the most tenacious people I’d ever met in my life. Usually, when I tell people what I do for a living they go a little gooey-eyed and tell me my work is amazing (not that I’d want this to stop, you understand. You can never hear that too often). Steve, conversely, grilled me about the experts I consult with to produce my lesson plans, how I means test the effectiveness of my programme and who I am ultimately answerable to. He made it very clear that if I was going to become his ally in the battle to improve mental health provision for young people, he was going to hold me up to the very highest standards. I admired that about him.

Although I have (fortunately) never experienced losing someone close to me to suicide, I recognised a lot of myself in Steve. After I first recovered from my eating disorder, I wanted the system changed and I wanted it done yesterday. I was compelled to action each day by a sense that everything was fundamentally unfair, that lives were being wasted unnecessarily and that I had to make all the right people listen. I lived (and still do) with a constant sense of frustration that nothing happens fast enough. I immediately recognised the same spirit in Steve. He had harnessed his personal pain into a desire to change the world for the better.

Steve told me that Edward had an unconditional offer for Cambridge and had been a promising young musician. It reminded me of the moment I truly admitted to myself I had a mental illness and found myself thinking, rather illogically, “How has this happened to me? I got three As in my A levels!”

I don’t know why certain minute details of a person’s life story seem significant, but for some reason the thing that stayed with me was when Steve told me that the last thing Edward did before he died was to hand in his maths homework. Of course, it reminds us that depression doesn’t always prevent those who suffer from it from functioning, but it also seemed to me key to understanding the kind of person Edward was.

Inspirational campaign

Over the weeks and months that followed Steve and I kept crossing paths. I saw him talk to some of the most important politicians and union leaders in the sector with the same no-nonsense passion he had demonstrated to me that very first time we met. Through the charity he founded, the MindEd Trust, Steve has somehow managed to persuade every key player in the mental health sphere, including Luciana Berger (shadow minister for mental health), Alistair Burt (minister for care and support), Norman Lamb (Liberal Democrat spokesperson for health) and… erm… me, to attend a conference he is holding in Cambridge on 18 March. There, he assures me, we will find ways to work together towards a revolution in the way we think about and deal with young people’s mental health.

I pride myself on being able to recognise a person or an organisation who aren’t driven by their own business or political needs, but by a genuine desire to make things better, more efficient and more just for the currently disadvantaged. As someone who values authenticity (as anyone who has tried to blind me with PR talk or deliberately impenetrable jargon can attest), I have a radar for these people and I make it my business to ensure I hear their voices the loudest in the melee of conflicting ideologies and agendas that is the education and mental health world.

Steve is one such man and as such I wanted to use this column, the closest to the anniversary of Edward’s death, to introduce him to any TES readers who might not yet have heard of MindEd Trust. I asked Steve what his vision was for the future of schools. This was his reply:

“With the thresholds for treatment in the NHS rapidly rising and waiting lists reaching preposterous proportions as a hopelessly under-resourced system falters under escalating demand, the education community is being placed in an intolerable position. Too many teachers and too many schools are being called upon to provide psychotherapy by default. This is totally unacceptable and requires urgent, cross-party reform. At the same time, with 75 per cent of psychosis pre-dating higher education, schools do have a vital role to play in mental health literacy and early intervention. There is now very strong evidence of the effectiveness of multi-faceted, embedded prevention programmes in schools. The blinkered obsession with grades and league tables must be revised to place equal emphasis on wellbeing, resilience and successful life skills. This can only be accomplished by a whole-school approach which embraces all stakeholders, including teachers.”

Hear, hear.

Natasha Devon is the Department for Education’s mental health champion. She tweets at @natashadevonMBE

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