JCIP #348 - Nick Isles

In episode 348 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with Nick Isles. 

Nick is the Director of the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys (CPMRB).

The Centre was established in May 2025 and is a research organisation and charity dedicated to understanding and addressing issues that uniquely affect men and boys in the UK.

Their vision is a world where men and boys of all backgrounds can thrive in their families and communities, and one where the sexes can rise together by supporting each other.

CPRMB focus on seven key policy areas as their focus: Health (suicide, mental and physical); Education, Fatherhood and Family, Economy, Employment and Skills, Criminal Justice, and the Portrayal of Men in Media and Culture. 

In this episode we do a deep dive into the work of the Centre and how Nick came to be its Director, the work they do across these seven areas, their impact, where they aim to sit within the men’s space and the wider conversation around men's mental health. 

For Nick’s mental health journey, we discuss his upbringing and how it shaped his early attitude towards mental health, fatherhood as he is the father of five daughters, 4 of which are biological and he is the stepfather of one as well. 

We also discuss what turned him towards the space of men’s mental health and how this helps fuel his mission at CPRMB now and going forward.

As always, #itsokaytovent

You can find out more about CPRMB's work here: https://www.menandboys.org.uk/.

You can follow CPRMB on social media below: 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cprmenandboys/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hi Venters, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checking In Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a Natsa and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. My special guest for this episode is Nick Isles. Nick is the director of the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys, or CPMRB. The centre was established in May 2025, and it is a research organization and charity dedicated to understanding and addressing issues that uniquely affect men and boys in the UK. Their vision is a world where men and boys of all backgrounds thrive in their families and communities, and one where the sexes can rise together by supporting each other. CPRMB focuses on seven key policy areas health, i.e. suicide, mental and physical, education, fatherhood and family, economy, employment and skills, criminal justice, and the portrayal of men in media and culture. In this episode, we do a deep dive into the work of the centre and how Nick came to be its director, the work they do across these seven focus areas, their impact, and where they aim to sit within the men's space and the wider conversation around men's mental health. For Nick's mental health journey, we discuss his upbringing and how it shaped his early attitude towards mental health, fatherhood as he is the father of five daughters, four of which are biological, and he is also the stepfather of one as well. We also discuss what turned him towards the space of men's mental health and how this helps fuel his mission at CPRMB now and going forward. So this is how my conversation with Nick Hiles went. Nick, welcome to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you so much for letting me check in with you, mate. You are doing so much amazing work in the men's space right now. And as I said to you off air, I only get men on this podcast who are fighting the good fight in the right way and matching words with action. And you are a great example of that. So, first of all, how are you on this Sunday morning? I've I'm very well actually.

SPEAKER_04 2:43

Had an invigorating dog walk, first thing. So uh, even though the weather's absolutely foul. So I'm feeling pretty good. Very good.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Excellent. Once again, from myself at Venn and the podcast, thank you for all the work you're doing. And without further ado, are you ready to start the show and talk all about it? Yeah, love to. Love to. Let's talk about the reason I'm checking in with you today first, Nick, which is your role as director of the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys. Not an easy mouthful, I must say. So I'm not going to call it CPR and B or the Centre from now on on this podcast. It's because it doesn't easily roll off the tongue. Just tell me about its origins, its mission, and how you came to be involved in it.

SPEAKER_04 3:21

Yeah, where do we start? So we start back in sort of 2023, I suppose. And a good ex-colleague of mine and friend of mine called Richard Reeves had written a book called Of Boys and Men. And I had read the book and was following what he was doing. And he'd set up the American Institute for Boys and Men as a non-aligned, non-zero sum organisation that was all about understanding, gaining better understanding of why so many men and boys were in trouble in different ways. So I called him and I said, Look, I was just leaving a previous job and I was looking at the next thing I was going to do, and I said, I think we need something like this in the UK. Don't ask, don't get. Yeah, exactly. I said, I'll help you set it up. If you're up for that. And Richard said, Absolutely. And then a few months went by and I was thinking about how we could do this. I pretty much knew the model was the AIBM model, so I thought that was going to work here as well. And then I met Mark Brooks, who has had a long history. Another great man in this space. Fantastic guy. And there was my co-conspirator. So we then we then got together. One word. Yeah. We then got together and said, right, you know, we said to Richard, let's go. And we set about recruiting a board, and I tapped up some of my contacts. Mark had one or two as well. So we between us got a stellar board actually together, which was fantastic, with huge support from Richard, who was going to chair it. And having done that, we managed to get some seed funding to get going early last year, and we launched in May with Wes Streeting as our keynote speaker, who, of course, was working on the first men and boys' health strategy, which is fantastic, men's health strategy coming through. So I think really it was all credit to the work Richard was doing in the US that really was the genesis for a UK version. I would really stress, and this is really important to us, that we are very boring and very dull. We're all about evidence. Wait a sell it, Nick. No, no, we're all about quite deliberately because we want to tell the truth about what's going on with evidence. And you can only do that if you actually understand and research and do proper research into actually what's going on. And I'm sure we'll get into what those things might be later on. That was really the premise. So we were non-aligned, you know, we're not associated with any political party. We've straight away applied for charitable status, and that came through in September, which is wonderful. And we are now gearing up to become a proper organisation in the sense that we're recruiting, we're recruiting for an events and communications officer and for research manager. And we've got an office just off Smith Square in London, if for those listeners who understand the geography of uh London, which is very handy for getting to Parliament and all of the things that you'd expect a think tank to do. So it's been great. And it coincided the launch with the wave of interests triggered by programmes like adolescence. Think about adolescence, we can come on to that, but it did extend the permission space to talk about the issues to do with men and boys. Not necessarily in a great way to begin with, absolutely not, but it was important, I think, nonetheless, to get the political class engaging with well, actually, what is going on? And we were able to come into that space and move quite quickly into developing a sort of programme of work and most importantly, a narrative that's positive about men and boys that says they're not just trouble, that they're in trouble, that this is no good for anyone if we've got too many men and boys failing. You can't then have women and girls flourishing, and vice versa. So that was really the genesis of the CPR and B. We were going to be called the Institute for Men and Boys, but as with so many things in the UK, there's an arcane rule that says only, I think, academic institutions granted university status by the Privy Council that can form institutes.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

OS Yes Minister, all over again, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04 7:17

It is, yeah, we we love this. Uh we're very good at it in the UK. And so that's why we have this mouthful of an acronym, CPRMB, and even longer. So the centre or CPRMB is absolutely fine. And most people are now getting used to that and using it.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Like you said, you get waste treating in, gives you that real legitimacy and foundation right from the start. And it's 2025 now. And since I've been doing this in 2017, organizations like yourselves have emerged, and hopefully, you've been able to hit the ground running in a way that perhaps I wasn't almost quite able to back in those days when no one was listening to men, no one was really listening to men's organizations. On the whole, the pictures are very much changed space now. Have you experienced that so far? Like the door is a little bit more open and you don't have to sort of bang through it to get your first kind of foot in the door essentially, proverbially. Yeah, basically, thanks, Freddie. That's been great.

SPEAKER_04 8:07

We'll take over now. No, I I think that uh you're absolutely right. The work that guys like yourself have done has been absolutely essential to extending that permission space. Yeah. Eight years ago, nine years ago, even five years ago, it would be difficult to get a hearing around some of the messages that you want people to hear about the trouble that men and boys are in, and where we've ended up in this uh new economy. I mean, twenty-odd years ago I was working for another think tank called the Work Foundation, and we were describing what the knowledge economy was going to bring and how it was gonna the good bits and the bad bits, but we didn't think about the gender dimension to this. And the gender dimension has been pretty stark and it's not been great for men and boys. We didn't see that coming, and we probably should have done. And now what we're looking at is just far too many members of our community who happen to be men, who are sort of locked out of some of the opportunities that we'd want them to be locked into. I think the work that you guys were doing early on was absolutely essential. And it was also the sort of genesis of the journey that Richard Reeves went on when he was looking at American data and kept coming across these anomalies, these these big differences between boys and girls, particularly in education, but also in health outcomes. I mean, staggering stats really that people were sort of brushing under the carpet. But I think the real turning point was the Trump election in America in 2024. I think what that did was shift the attention of the centre and centre left onto the fact that they'd missed a trick. The podcast election, as it was called. Absolutely. The new media, which whatever you think of Trump, but he was brilliant at exploiting both social media and and the podcast election. Brogan, Theo Vaughn, yeah. Yeah, all of those, but they were talking about men and boys and and the raw deal that they were getting, which fed into that populist message that Trump was giving. He was basically doing no more than saying, Yeah, I see you, and I'm gonna do something about it, and you're gonna have the sorts of bar wasn't high to get. No, no, exactly. So I think that election was a real electric shock to the whole s political system and meant that parties on the centre-centre-left started to think we'd better do something about this. And it was very confusing for many people because that wasn't how things were supposed to be. The focus had to be all on women and girls because of the historic position that women and girls have found themselves in. And surely we have to keep doing that because otherwise, you know, the patriarch is going to come in and smash us over the head and all of these things. Well, we can think two things at the same time, as Richard says. And the fact that yes, we've got to be doing all the things we still need to do for women and girls, but we also need to attend to men and boys who are in these extreme situations and difficulties. So the door has been opened. I think the key challenge now is to sustain the drive so that we embed gender-sensitive approaches to policy wherever we need to. And I think that the forthcoming government summit on men and boys, allegedly to be held around Easter, is going to be an important marker in terms of how that uh permission space has been expanded and how the current government are looking at doing things in different areas that will benefit men and boys.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

I think my invites maybe got lost in the post there. No invites gone out so far. I haven't been invited either, so you know, we're in good company.

SPEAKER_04 11:29

Billy no mates.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

MFI. There's a book about that as well, to be fair. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, used to that. I want to dive into the work that CPRMB does now, Nick, because you focus, as I said in the intro, on seven key areas when it comes to men and boys. And we haven't got time to dive into all of them in depth, but I'll try my best to go through as many of them as we can. So I'll just list them again, which is health, i.e. suicide, mental and physical, education, fatherhood and family, economy, employment and skills, criminal justice, and the portrayal of men in media and culture. Why did you choose those seven areas in the first place, mate?

SPEAKER_04 12:05

I think because they, in a sense, give you a full 360 about some of the key issues that are facing many men and boys. And we also, you know, there is a danger in this debate to get skewed by the headline grabbing, the you know, masculinity debate, the identity stuff. And I think that um what we wanted to do was say, well, look, in these areas where we've already got fully fledged government departments, policy programmes, and all the rest, we're not doing very well for too many men and boys. So what is it that we need to do? Our focus in the first year, because obviously we're still at the end of the sort of start-up phase for us, has been very much on looking at employability and skills and education as the two sort of key focus, while also attending to what's happening in with health, because we've got the men's health strategy, so our focus is is very much on, well, what does that mean, and how do we create the sort of outcomes that we want from that in terms of the institutional mechanisms that need to change at the local level. So we're doing a lot of reaching out to the combined authorities and the regional mayors, and basically just saying, look, we're here, we think we can help you if you want us to by doing audits of your policies and your ideas to see how they might land with the male population, and whether you're going to get the traction you want when you're setting up and investing in a scheme here or a program there. So that's very early work. We're having those meetings, we're talking to them. At the same time, we're talking at the centre around the same sort of issues, and again saying, look, here, here, and here, we think we've got some insights. But we're also started our research programmes, thanks to the generosity of funders like the Randall Foundation and uh Children's Investment Um Fund Foundation who have supported different tranches of work, some of which are more advanced than others. And that's again trying to, as I say, be dull and boring and give the evidence around, you know, what is actually happening. So one of our key focuses is education. Our education system just isn't working for boys.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

And not enough men in it for teachers.

SPEAKER_04 14:13

Well, certainly on the structural side, yeah, something's gone terribly wrong in that um we're not recruiting male teachers, and indeed one of our research. Especially primary, yeah, is showing there is a cognitive bias going on in the selection process. You know, that men shouldn't be around what uh has been described as heel professions, you know, health education, administration, literacy, all those areas that are traditionally seen as women-dominated. No, they weren't in the past, but somehow in education, we've got less than 25% teachers, about 13% in primary schools.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

My headteacher was a man, and my school was tiny. We had six classes and one teacher for each class, and we still had two male teachers in it for quite a long time.

SPEAKER_04 14:50

Yes, and and you find that's increasingly rare, particularly in those smaller schools, and we've got to bring it back because boys need male role models. It was massive for me. Yeah, it it is. What we're doing is a big comparative study into other countries' education systems, and we've asked ourselves the exam question: are there any systems out there where there doesn't seem to be an attainment gap between boys and girls? And if so, or if it's a small gap, what are they doing? And how are they doing it? So that we can then bring that back into the work we're going to be doing around reinventing an education system for the 21st century that benefits boys and girls, not just girls, because it's pretty appalling. And as you go through the socioeconomic data, white working class boys, 24% of them, achieve five you know, GCSEs.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Traveller boys and black Caribbean boys as well.

SPEAKER_04 15:40

Yeah. All of those, all of those groups. So something's going wrong. I'm not saying it's all in the school system, but there's boys that are further up the distribution that just are not getting what they should be getting out of school. And the focus on the academic route to the exclusion of technical routes harms everybody, actually, because it it limits choice. A big announcement's coming up soon on that and what we're going to be doing about it. So that's one of the focuses we've got. The other focus is on men's community groups. We've set ourselves a target of understanding how they work so that we can scale them, so that we can tell policymakers where to put their money. Like the walk and talk? Yeah, absolutely. So we can reduce suicide amongst men by at least 10% in the next five years. That's our target we've set. And that's been very generously funded by the Randall Foundation, which are a great outfit, and do some really, really good work. So we're doing that in partnership with them and with University College London and Professor John Tom and his team. So this will be really rigorous research, but also really helpful in saying, well, you I mean, we've got to do a heat map so we can find out where these men's community groups are clustered and where they're not, so that we can bring them in because we know that um they work and they work for many people, and we've got to do something about the increase in suicide rates, which are just appalling. I mean, in the northeast and northwest, twice the rate in London. And we think that a lot of that is to do with lack of opportunity to work and the stripping out of work opportunities in so many parts of the country over the last 30 odd years. So that's one of the areas that we're doing, you know, deep research work into what we should be doing and what's really working.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

I want to combine the next two areas here to discuss, which is fatherhood and family and criminal justice, right? Because having more male role models is obviously vital. And the best way of increasing this, but one with the most stigma, is the family court, right? And I've spoken to several male guests who've either been victims of abuse through the family court system and or are running organizations to help tackle that, give more men a voice, give them abilities or communication skills to be able to challenge and advocate for themselves, etc. So, how are you helping more dads to be a present in their children's lives without the family court system, but also trying to tackle this decades-old problem in the UK, which was previously seen as just this kind of conspiracy theory, and it was just chalked down to kind of fathers for justice stuff and all that kind of stuff, basically, in in the sort of early 2000s.

SPEAKER_04 18:06

Yeah, we're doing a number of things, and we've only just really got going on this agenda, but we will be working with Anna Machin, who wrote The Life of Dad, and she's done a piece of work on the recent decision to suspend the presumption of uh contact. So there's some basically, I can't say too much, because what we were trying to do is influence through that work because clearly the family courts aren't just not working. I don't think they're working for anyone. I don't think they're working for the women, the mothers, and they're certainly not working for the children. And the adversarial nature of this is just not any good for anyone. I think that's um not a decision that's sensible, the recent one. I think we need to at least think about putting something else in its place. And we need to understand better what's going on, because you know, it is difficult to get in there and really see what's happening. And also things don't happen irrationally, they happen for reasons. So understanding the reasons and addressing those reasons is really important to creating better solutions. So this is why the research pieces is so critical. And in this area, the desire to protect children can end up in a situation where the outcome damages them even more than the separation of the parents. And it's also very clear that children need fathers, father figures, father substitutes. So putting barriers in the way of families having fathers as part of this is really, really critical to improving the quality of lives of families, of communities and of the men and women and children who make those constituent or the constituent parts of that, if you like. So I think we're in the foothills. There are some interesting things that we've got in the pipeline to make the case about why children need dads and need dads as much as they need mums. And that's something that is quite a battle, I think, because it sounds counterintuitive after many, many years of people thinking care that comes in a female form. And we know from the work that Anna's done and her colleagues that this is just simply not true. In fact, Anna H in her book Life Dad says that dads saved the human race about half a million years ago. Evolution created the dad, and modern society is trying to destroy that. With probably the best of intentions, actually, to start with. But we've now got to a position where we've got to roll that back really and understand the value of fathers and do everything we can to keep them connected in the sad situations where divorce happens or separation happens.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Another area you focus on, and like you said earlier about the Northeast and Northwest and opportunities for young men in particular, especially from working class backgrounds, is employment and skills. And providing millions of men with purpose, identity, or belonging is employment and skills, right? And it's not a a hundred percent solution, but if you want to solve a lot of mental health problems with those men, giving them great work they enjoy, identity, an income, housing over their head, that can do a lot for it, basically. Just tell me about a project you're running, which is about publishing a quarterly scorecard, right? And how it will hopefully improve the picture right now, which is not great for men, especially Gen Z lads.

SPEAKER_04 21:20

Yeah, I think thanks for that. It's called Missing Men. It is a scorecard approach. What we're trying to do is map the state of men in the UK over time. We're using official data, this is uh ONS data and other sources of data to tell the story about what's happening with men, but you're absolutely spot on when you say that men haven't lost that sense and that need to provide and protect. And you can't do that if you haven't got a job. And work is fundamentally important to men, even the men who think it isn't. It is. It is how we act upon the world as adults, it's how we create meaning for ourselves. When you ask someone what they do, they could say. I'm so and so's friend, or I'm such and such his father. But we don't. We say, I'm a this, I'm a that. And this is not going to go away, and we need to create jobs. It's as simple as that. And we need to create jobs in the places where people are at. People don't want to travel miles. It's all very well to say And relocate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. AI revolution's going to come along, and we're going to create all these amazing other jobs, and those other jobs are going to be in London. Well, if you live in Blackpool or Sunderland, or you want jobs where you are. You don't want to have to travel all the way to London for them and uproute from your family, from your community.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

And then you don't have kids because you're not near your family again.

SPEAKER_04 22:42

Yeah, exactly. And where you can't afford a house. I wrote a piece for LBC website called Getting Rid of the Triple Lock on Young People. That's where they are.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

I'm in plan two student loans, mate. I know all about that.

SPEAKER_04 22:54

Exactly. So this is a nonsense. We're going to have to have a new deal. Like the Roosevelt New Deal in America, when to get out of the depression, we're going to have to create a new deal in this country to create jobs. It's as simple as that. And if we can reform the education system so it creates the opportunities so that we can grow lots more entrepreneurs because they're skilled and forgetting those skills earlier. At the moment, what we're doing is we're putting people into a conveyor belt of failure. And that conveyor belt of failure ends with formal schooling and too many young people and the numbers don't lie, and then going on to a life of benefits. That is a tragedy. It is a completely immoral thing for us to do as a society. Work is a moral imperative. And we have to create those jobs, but we have to create them where people are at. So that's really the sort of what we're trying to say with our quarterly work is say, hold up that picture and say we've got to think again. And that means more radical policies than we're actually engaging with at the moment. I won't go into sort of the details around what the current government are doing, but I think we've got to try harder, particularly in those places where we desperately need to get more work.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

This is not a politics podcast, but it doesn't help the generational divide either, because on the one hand, you've got the triple lock, you've got most people over the age of 70 getting winter fuel payments, barring the the means tested system. You've got people in London who get a free train and bus pass, regardless of their age, sorry, regardless of their income because of their age. And then at the same time, with young people, you've got student debt, which is going to be one of the biggest scandals, I think, in the next two, three years. It's affected me. They don't get the benefits in the same way. Their generation, most of them, will never own a house or the one that they'd like to, especially if they're in an area with their parents, which is more middle class. So you've got these two things coming together here. And I think a lot of young men are thinking, well, what is in this country for me, basically? No, no, you're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_04 24:51

I mean, it's a worrying case. The desperation amongst so many young men in Gen Z is exactly the sense of helplessness and hopelessness that the situation is going to get any better. And we've had this sort of transfer of resources from young to old. Which in a sense we've always had in because of pensions and all the rest of it. But people are living much longer. The generation that are now pensioner age is the richest that there's ever been. And we need to stop doing this. I don't want to impoverish pensioners, but we've also got to stop impoverishing the generation that funds those pensions so that when they get to a pensioner status, they actually do have some resources left. But this is a problem of decline, economic decline, and we've done some things, acts of self-harm, I think, in that regard. But we absolutely need to solve the student loan crisis. We're going to have to have some sort of resolution that requires that to be got rid of, halved, whatever. It's ridiculous that you've got a situation where people who happen to go to university between 2012 and 2023, I think it was, isn't it? The plan B period. You have to earn £66,000 a year before you actually can pay off any of the capital.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

This doesn't make I paid far more interest than I did the debt last year.

SPEAKER_04 26:06

This is cruel and it's unsustainable, and people will start voting with their feet and stop paying.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

It could reframe a whole generation of young men and women, especially young men if we're talking about it for their voting patterns.

SPEAKER_04 26:17

Only today I saw that the architect of the loan system, a guy called Nick Hillman, who used to work for David Willetz, has said, oh, it should be the CPI rate, not the RPI rate. But I think that misses the point. If education is a public good, we need to reform higher education systems that everyone can benefit from that public good, and that doesn't happen at the moment. And what we've done is we've marketised our university system in a way that we should never should have done. Because education is about enabling, it's about growing, it's about creating better citizens. If you have the ability to go to university, you will never be lonely because you'll always have an inner life, an intellectual life that you can use to sustain yourself. And that creates better citizens. It's an investment in human capital. And we talk about investment all the time. It's not a cost, it's an investment. We've taken so many wrong terms. We have the most competitive, as in market competitive, university system in the world and the most expensive one. How have we ended up there? It's crazy. So we've got to rethink the whole thing. And that's another piece of work that uh we're doing getting started, which is what sort of university system do we need? And I think the government's announcement that we want two-thirds of people to get to level four, but not to go to university necessarily, is a way into saying, well, the whole system then needs to be reformed so that that can be enabled, and then we might then have fewer people with the sorts of levels of debts that you, Freddie, have uh got shouldered, you know, lumbered with, which is unsustainable. They've got to be forgiven. Those debts have got to be forgiven, I think, in time and reduced because you can't um saddle a whole generation with that level of debt before they've even started their lives. It doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Yeah, this is a whole separate podcast. I don't want to get myself cancelled or lose my job. So I'll move on to a different project that you do, and it builds on something that we talked about earlier, mate, which is this boy cares. And it's about encouraging more men to get into caring professions, which are traditionally female dominated. For example, nursing, primary school teaching, therapists increasingly too. How are you breaking down that stigma for men in the first place?

SPEAKER_04 28:23

Well, I think we're just launching this, so it's just getting going. I think the key thing is to show role models and to talk to those organizations that are interfacing with young men around their choices and to show them what great careers these can be and how you know uplifting it can be, that you change lives through becoming a great teacher or a great therapist.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

And that's meaning and that's purpose there.

SPEAKER_04 28:45

That's meaning and purpose, you know. And men are just as well equipped as women to do this work. The fact that we get in the same way that we uh have mounted successful campaigns, I think, to get women and girls into STEM professions, because there's no reason why they shouldn't be, they're just as capable as men are doing those jobs. Well, so too with men with caring professions, including social care. And it's really the campaign, This Boy Cares, is just opening people's minds up to the fact that we've got lots of job vacancies, lots of need. That need is locally placed in many cases, and why would he shut out half the population from having a chance of getting those jobs? You know, nursery level care, only four percent of those um workers are men. This is crazy, you know. Only 4% of the people in nurseries are boys? No, of course they're not. So where are the men that those boys are interacting with when they're in nursery? It creates a rather distorted picture of what the world's like. I think that hopefully through the campaign, through this year and beyond, we can start to change minds and move people into thinking better and more holistically about getting and encouraging young men to think about these jobs and these routes.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Let's go to the heart of the stigma here, because one of the many stigmas that many men face when thinking about going into these professions or even accessing them is that in the early doors stage, it's the judgment they get from society, from other men, sadly, from other women in a dating setting, or it could be a friendship setting or a family setting. For example, if they're a primary school teacher, they could be accused of being an abuser or of being gay. And if you go to the end of that path, only abusers will apply for those jobs. And I think there was a horrific article that I saw in The Guardian the other day about an abuser who was in a primary setting. And if those getting traction, then men are just going to think who are caring, who are nurturing, who want to do these jobs, they're just gonna say it's not worth the hassle.

SPEAKER_04 30:39

Yeah, I think that this is where when we talk about portrayal of men in the media, that we call out, yeah, there are extreme cases, but the incidence hasn't gone up. There aren't more people who are bad apples, evil people out there than there were in the past. And yes, screening will get it wrong sometimes. But what we have to do is show examples of how the majority of these cases, you know, people working in these professions are great people. You're not gonna meet a paedophile around every corner. This isn't the case. You know, I know some real interest from different leading public figures in leading campaigns to get more men into let's call them mentoring roles, but into these sorts of roles. And then we need to celebrate them and we need to talk about them and we need to have awards that celebrate them. And write about them. So there's a job that we would see ourselves doing in doing all of that, in having the opportunity to actually shout out for all those great men who are doing work in these areas that have been, you know, that this wasn't always the case. You know, there were lots of examples where things have changed over time for the very reasons that you describe. And then we've got to work with men themselves to destigmatise roles that they don't see as manly in some way or another, by showing them that actually very manly men are doing those roles. And it's part of being a man, you know. So when we talk about male masculinity and male identity, that's a very rich and full 360 picture that you want to paint, not a narrow description of things that in fact many men wouldn't be able to achieve. We're not going to become Formula One drivers or Premier League uh footballers or top rugby players or you know, look like Brad Pitt, but we're really great guys, you know? So let's celebrate the great guys out there.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Another issue is money, and these professions, some of them anyway, until you get to the top level, stereotypically aren't highly paid at an entry level or even at a sort of mid-level. Yeah. And in today's economy, people are struggling more than ever. You've got a sort of semi-permanent cost of living crisis, high inflation, a housing emergency which has gone on since for at least the last 10 years. The choice that a lot of these men might be making is I have these nurturing desires, I have these aspirations to do these kind of jobs, but for my long-term ambitions to maybe start a family or become a provider, I might choose a job that I maybe don't enjoy as much, but will give me financial satiety or security that I can then use to secure a long-term partner, build a family, all those other things and consequences. How do you and how do we respond to that challenge, mate?

SPEAKER_04 33:23

I think it's a very real challenge, and that there isn't a sort of glib, simple answer to it. It is about a process. The process starts by encouraging more men to go into those professions. It starts by having better policy about who the investment into those areas, so that you get different types of organizations. Or maybe bursaries, mate. Um, bursaries certainly support in different ways and taking it away from you know private equity funds who are buying up all the care homes and bringing people in on minimum wages to earn money that way. Many and varied, I suppose, will be the responses to how over time you raise the floor for these sorts of professions. But in many cases, if you look at teachers and you go beyond the starting salaries, and you're talking about the career opportunities, the lifelong career opportunities, the whole package. You know, teachers' pension is one of the best pensions you can get. And it will be true in other areas as well. So that's very attractive to people who want to have the certainties that you might not get working in another sector that might pay a bit more, but where your opportunities are going to be more at risk, let's put it that way. I think it's about really describing opportunity in a in a different way, bringing new competitors into marketplaces that want to do and create public goods, and we've seen that in other areas too, and showing people that these are great jobs with great career prospects. But that's a process. It's not something you do overnight.

SPEAKER_00 34:52

Let's reflect on this journey so far, Nick. So, first of all, what's been your proudest achievement running CPRMB so far?

SPEAKER_04 34:59

I think um that's a very good question. The proudest achievement. I think where we've got to with it in this time we've we've had so far is it's we know we haven't been running for for a year yet, but we have been able to do our bit to open up that permission space, and I'm very confident the work we've got coming out is going to rattle cages and shake things up and do some real good. So I think that's probably the position we're in at this point in time, I didn't think we'd be there so quickly. You know, I again I pay testament to guys like yourself. I think you opened up the doors, the doors were opening when we set up. And because we're deliberately not trying to do things that other people are doing, that we are focused on an evidential base and acting in that classic think tank way, I think people have been willing to listen. So I think we've been fortunate and luck always plays a part in life. I think we've been lucky that we launched at the time we did. If we'd left it any later, it might not have been as propitious. But doing that, that was good. And I think just getting the interest of the stellar people we got on our board is fantastic. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to get people of that calibre, and we have. And that again shows how concerned people are.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

And they're public about it, and they're not secretly going, I'll support you in private, but I will have nothing to do with this in public. Exactly right.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

Exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, really good.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

And second of all, what goals and ambitions do you have for the centre going forward in the future?

SPEAKER_04 36:28

Well, I I suppose I want it to be around for some time. I don't this isn't the flash in the pan. I think these issues are not easily solved. They're going to need a lot of heavy lifting and hard work and evidence to get where we want to get to. But the long-term goal is that we have a return to a good society where men and boys, women and girls, exist side by side in harmony. That's what I want to see. I want to see a return to the good society. I want to see people happy and flourishing, because that's what we should be aiming to do and play our part in doing. At the moment we're miles away from that. We're living in a world where people are riven with unhappiness and anger and hopelessness in many cases, and helplessness. We've got to attend to that urgently over the next five, ten years.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

And as a final question before we move on, what has running it so far also taught you about yourself? Um that's a good what's it taught me about myself?

SPEAKER_04 37:28

Um I'm more resilient than I realised.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

That's a very, very common answer on this podcast, mate.

SPEAKER_04 37:35

Yeah, that's definitely it, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

We've talked all about the amazing and incredible work that CPRMB is doing, Nick, in 2025 and hopefully beyond too. Let's dive deeper and talk about your own mental health journey. So I ask all my special guests on this topic this question first. Timmy back to early life, teenagers, and looking back, were there any early mental health experiences? If any, who's the Nick we meet here?

SPEAKER_04 38:03

No, I had a very happy childhood. I was one of four, grew up in uh Kent, in a town called Maidstone, and went to the local grammar school, as it was then. And yeah, had a great childhood, no problems, until I messed up my A-levels. And that was the first time when I really had a what I would call a setback. Up to that point, I'd had a fairly sort of easy ride in terms of mental health, but that really knocked me for six.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

One thing that we spoke about off air mate was, like you said, you didn't have any major issues yourself until obviously that setback with your A-levels, but you did sell me that your grandfather had quite severe mental health difficulties during World War II, you know, the idea of shell shock, I'm using inverted commas there, which we now know as post-traumatic stress. I call it post-traumatic stress injury rather than a disorder for reasons I've discussed on this podcast before. So, how has your attitude changed towards what you were exposed to, maybe, or what you were told about, your grandfather and other family members as you got older and saw the lens of mental health a bit more clearly, shall we say?

SPEAKER_04 39:05

Oh, massively, yes. I mean, I was not really aware of actually what he'd gone through. I mean, he was sectioned, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital. He was so ill. And it turned out that his grandfather had hung himself. So there is a genetic predisposition, I think, to depression and anxiety. And my father was a very anxious person, would have sort of what Mr. Churchill used to describe as sort of black dog days, where he'd just get into a terrible pit. A stupor or a funk, stupid. So that was something that we experienced with my dad, but on the other hand, he was an absolutely wonderful father and a very, you know, engaging guy. I mean, he he loved nothing better than playing with us. He was an engineer, an electronics engineer, so he was pretty handy. And uh one time he said, Shall I make a bow and arrow, like a proper one? And we were like in peak Robin Hood days, and it's like, yeah, yeah, let's do that. So he got carried away and he made this longbow, and then he got his you know Bunts and burner out or whatever, and made the tip of the arrow, made this arrow, found some feathers. I mean, this you know, it went on all day. By this time we're bored, rigid to go out for God's sake, dad. We just said yeah, but you didn't think and then he came out with this thing and we had a metal garage door and he tried it and the arrow went through the door. So at that point he said, Right, we can't use this and put it up. We're well pissed off, brother and I. So that's not fair. You know, we're only you know, seven, eight, something like that. I've done too much here. I've made it too that that's the insight into how he was. But he did have this inherited, I suppose, you know, tendency to anxiety as the way I would describe it.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

After A-levels, you have another mental health difficulty or challenge, which is something that all men who go through university have. Well, most of them on if they get the uh graduate jobs straight out of unit, that's obviously a different thing. But most of us who didn't get those graduate jobs, we have this post-university, what the hell am I going to do in my life moment, right? It's a writer's passage, how we react to it, what we choose will sometimes shape or define the rest of our lives. You graduate university with an arts degree. How did you navigate this period yourself?

SPEAKER_04 41:09

Not very well. Yeah, I mean, I sort of looking back on it now, I think that in today's world, I'd have said I probably need some therapy following my A-level crash, because my whole my whole life was based around going to a particular university and then becoming an academic. I mean, that was sort of you know what I thought I was going to do. When that's taken away from you, and not that it was taken away from me, but when it feels like it's taken away from you through your own actions, internalizing of blame and sense of lack of self-worth is pretty crippling, however irrational it might be. Because obviously I went on to a perfectly really good university and did my degree and had an amazing time there. But that was that sense of failure, and I hadn't experienced that before. So it hit me really hard, and that lasted quite a few years. So when I came out of university, I hadn't really addressed that, and so it meant I wasn't really sure what I was capable of doing. And I was doing a course after the first degree in law, and I'd ended up doing it, if you know what I mean, rather than I wanted to do it, and I hated it, absolutely hated it. And so I I left, which was a big thing for me to do, because it felt again that I was sort of letting people down with this sense of it's not just me, it's my parents and all the rest of it. So I was lucky enough then to see a little job ad in The Guardian for a films and publications secretary for the charity Christian Aid. So my first thought was, Well, I'm not a practicing Christian. So what do I do about that?

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Brush up on the Bible.

SPEAKER_04 42:56

Brush up on the Bible, yeah. So I thought because you know I had no idea, it was just like I needed to get a job, and this just popped up. Anyway, um uh it didn't matter that I wasn't practicing Christian as it turned out. I did get an interview and I got the job. It wasn't what I expected it to be, but I was working and I was on the sort of ladder, and uh and so to your point, it was all accidental. There was no real planning in any of this. It was sort of, well, I don't like that, but I've got to do something. And this is what I ended up doing. And I was very lucky really to have been able to get that job. God knows why they appointed me, but they did. It was like the cut of my jib or something like that. Um but but yeah, but I was still not really addressing the sort of fundamental shock I'd had. That's the way I would look at it now, is I'd had this like massive shock to me that had knocked me for six. And I was hiding from that, and I was hiding it from other people. This wasn't something I was going to really talk about or address. And I think now, looking back, I would have benefited from therapy sessions. To reorient my thinking about, you know, what had happened and what I'd done. All of which was perfectly logical. You know, I hadn't spent enough time studying on one of my two of my A levels really, but one particularly. Because I joined a band and we were quite successful. So I was going to be a rock star, you know, which was much more important for me at that time in terms of trying to pull girls. Unsuccessfully, I have to say. Unsuccessfully. But if you've seen photos of me as I looked then, you would not be in the least bit surprised that I was that unsuccessful. So yeah, you know, some therapy sessions which would have said, look, mate, you know, stop beating yourself up about it. What were you doing with your time? You chose to do that as well.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Own it.

SPEAKER_04 44:41

Yeah, yeah. We all need that. You know, and own it, and you know, you're you're fine. You've got to learn to find different pathways mentally to deal with that sort of great scheme of things, minor failure. There's much bigger things that uh people overcome than that.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

I want to talk about an event which has shaped a lot of your mission of helping men and boys now with their mental health, Nick, was when a close relative died in 2021. He was very young at the time, and we won't be going too deep on this topic to protect your family's privacy. But can you just tell me how you felt when it happened, maybe some of the details about it, and what you feel comfortable sharing here? Sure.

SPEAKER_04 45:18

He was extraordinary. And for him to have lost his life in that way was just so tragic. And we knew that social media was playing a part in this. And I thought it was a big driver for me to get interested in what was going on when something like this can happen. So, yes, uh, you know, in terms of my personal involvement in issues around men and boys, that incident, that uh event has been instrumental. And when something like that happens to you, you can't really uh describe it because it's so painful. And I'm not even his parents. So, you know, uh it's difficult to put into words just because it it doesn't stop, it's it's ongoing because of the sheer waste of talent and ability. And he was an extraordinary person and would have been an extraordinary man. So, you know, you can't help but take on a burden of guilt around that, that you didn't do more, even however irrational that is.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

I know, I've had it before with mates as well, and other people, you know, friends of friends that have supported Venn or close friends, and I hear about and I go, Oh, what if I could have and I have to go, nah, you couldn't have Fred.

SPEAKER_04 46:36

Yeah, I think I'm comfortable with that in the sense that, you know, but it doesn't make it easier. It doesn't take away that sense of responsibility. And I think that goes to the heart of, you know, being a man as well, that sense of protecting when something c close to you, something you really value, is harmed in some way, you bear the responsibility for that, however illogical that may be. But I think that's a very male trait as well. And that's why, you know, having the opportunity for men who go through these sorts of circumstances, whatever it might be, whatever trauma it might be, that they can access mental health support is really important. And that mental health support needs to be attuned to how men are, not how you might want them to be.

SPEAKER_00 47:24

No. I had a previous guest reference his colleague who says we need to fit therapy into men, not men into therapy.

SPEAKER_04 47:31

Yeah. There's a great guy called Neil Smith who's uh along with Bear Girls set up this outfit called Metal, which is deliberately designed, it's an online program, but it's designed to meet men where they're at, as opposed to this is how therapy works, and you have to just go along and fit into it. Men won't do that. Particularly the men who need it most, actually, who are more closed to the idea that they should be asking for support, which affects many of us.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

I talk a lot on this podcast when it comes to grief, Nick, about finding peace and not closure, and that's something I've evolved with time and my own views on grief as well in my education. So, A, how and when did you find peace with this relative's death? And also B, how much of the work that you're doing with C P R and B is almost a legacy for him in advocating on issues or things that might have helped him in that moment, perhaps?

SPEAKER_04 48:25

Yeah, I think for me personally, all of it really, it's the main driver of why I'm here in a sense. I mean, there's an intellectual driver, but this is the emotional driver. And in terms of peace, I suppose I've got so much to do. For me, it's it's in the doing. And the fact that I've also got children that I need to still look at. They're they're grown up, they're adult, they don't really need that, but I like to think they need me to be there. And uh I'm sure you'll get a DM after this when they hear this bit and and protect them. So I think you don't get peace in that sense, but you learn to live with. I think that's the only thing you can do, but it fundamentally destroys, it's destructive, and you can't rebuild from that in the sense of, oh, it's all better now. It's never better. They just have to accept that.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

Well, you mentioned there about fatherhood. I want to talk about this a little bit before we reflect because you are a girl dad to five girls, four biological and one stepdaughter. So, how did they change your life, your mental health, your outlook from your eldest daughter to when you took on your stepdaughter too?

SPEAKER_04 49:26

Yeah, well, fundamentally. I mean, you know, there's a cliche that uh having children changes your life completely. And it does. Certainly in my case, I think it was having a child, made me realise I was doing things not just for me, which was a bit dull and boring, to be honest. You know, I was like, rather have a game of football or something, you know, and uh read a good book or or whatever, but actually then having a responsibility to provide and to protect becomes overwhelming. I mean, you know, the the feelings you have when you see your child being born and when you hold them for the first time is pretty indescribable. And then when they start to respond, which is when dads really come into their own, is when the child's a little bit older, it's just happiest times of my life, by none. And it's a different type of love to romantic love. It's quite hard to describe it, really. And it is it's sometimes relentlessly one way, particularly when they're going through the teenage years and uh all of that. Everyone who's been a parent knows that, but it's amazing, and they give me so much joy. In fact, we took them all away last summer to stay in a place near Marrakesh.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

All five. That's a lot of cash.

SPEAKER_04 50:41

Plus as a stepson as well, so so six of them. He was a very brave boy. But they all got on really well. It was a lot of cash, but we had some big birthdays, so we said we did. We asked them actually, we said, you know, do you want presents or how about doing something like this? And they went, Oh yeah, that'd be great. So we created some incredible memories, but you know, I just sat back and enjoyed them.

SPEAKER_01 50:59

Remember you said yes when you want presents.

SPEAKER_04 51:02

Oh, they wanted the presents as well.

unknown 51:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:04

Right. Actually, it was quite it was quite funny. When we said, you know, would you like to go on a holiday and stuff? Or go somewhere special we haven't been to before, like you know, we've been to lots of European places.

SPEAKER_03 51:12

So the first thing they said, yeah, Hawaii. And I said, We're not going to Hawaii. Because we only had a week. It would take us half the week to get there and the other half to get back. And it's phenomenally expensive. No, we're not going to. I went, Oh, okay then. What about Bali?

SPEAKER_04 51:28

So we settled on Morocco as being A, A, we could get there in a reasonable time, and B, it wasn't going to completely break the bank. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

Until they go to one of those markets and they see them coming.

SPEAKER_04 51:38

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We know we had the day at the souk, I tell you.

SPEAKER_00 51:44

Oh, God. Um, I remember we were chatting off air, mate, and I kind of joked to you, you're a little bit like Lois and Malcolm in the middle, but in reverse, and um, hopefully maybe a slightly less chaotic household. But like, go more deeper, obviously being a dad to five girls, and obviously you've got your stepson as well now. How have they shaped your attitude towards a range of issues and also fuelled your work C P R M B so you can help impact the lives of the other men they have in their lives, whether that's male friends, boyfriends, husbands, other male role models as well?

SPEAKER_04 52:11

Well, that was another driver. I mean, my daughter's sort of saying it's hard to find men we like. And I thought, this can't be right. Something's going wrong here. I think this is sort of the dating scene, dating apps is that which is.

SPEAKER_00 52:25

Don't get me started, mate. Horrible.

SPEAKER_04 52:27

We haven't looked at in any detail, but we are going to be doing work on that. But I thought, this is hopeless. You know, we've got young men and young women in a sort of Mexican standoff here, staring at each other a bit like you know, the early days when you used to go to discos and the girls are on one side and the boys on the other. I mean, it's and they're not meeting in the middle. So that was certainly something that was important. The other thing is their viewpoint on stuff is really valuable. You know, just having a almost like your own focus group, with a particular slant, of course, a particular view, but is always helpful because I've got a bit of a sounding board. So, you know, they're interested in what I'm doing. You know, they've got views, not always aligned with mine, as you would expect, but it's very helpful having this group of people of this age in my life. And uh I respect them and value them.

SPEAKER_00 53:15

Let's reflect on your mental health journey now, Nick. So, similar question as before. What has this mental health journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_04 53:22

Well, I think it's to be okay about letting emotions in.

SPEAKER_03 53:30

And out. Sometimes out. Yeah. If you want to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 53:33

Yeah, yeah. If you want to. I was brought up with a very patriarchal household. My parents had the typical 50s, 60s marriage in the sense of dad was uh, you know, the the breadwinner and mum was sort of, you know, there to look after the kids and cook the meals and all of that. I didn't want that for myself. In a sense, it was quite interesting to have that as a role model. Not that, you know, as I say he was a great guy, but I didn't want to be that man. I wanted to be my own man and I wanted to do things differently. And for me what was the driver and always has been is a sense of equality with me and my partner that we, you know, we share things together properly. So I think that meant I had to accept that that way of thinking as a man was too closed. I had to show some vulnerability. And by being vulnerable, you know, exposing yourself a bit, you learn more about yourself really than if you don't. So I think they were the things as I matured and went through my mental health processes that I came to learn that it's okay to say when you're not okay, when you're in trouble. And you're struggling a bit. And there are times at life where you will struggle for different reasons. Things happen to us as people, and accepting that sometimes things aren't very good is important. It's as important as saying, Oh, it's brilliant, I'm I'm fine. You know, when someone says, Are you okay? you know, how's things? You're alright? Sometimes it's okay saying no, it's a bit shit, really. And this is why. I think learning to be open, learning to show some vulnerability, in and of itself shows you to be a stronger person.

SPEAKER_00 55:13

And as a final question before we move on to our mental health chat, if you could go back and talk to that 21-year-old Nick fresh out of university and not knowing what to do with his life, the Nick who had just become a father for the first time, or the Nick who was contemplating whether to take on this role at CPRMB, what would you say to him, knowing what you do now, if anything at all?

SPEAKER_04 55:33

Um, I think to my younger self, I would probably say, You're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. You don't know it yet, but you will. And just get on and be you and do things. I've always done things. You know, I've always wanted to do things, and I think that's what I would have said.

SPEAKER_00 55:56

Our final topic of conversation, Nick, and it's one I try and have with all of my special guests if we have time. It is a general natter and quickfire chat about our mental health. So, firstly, how is your mental health out of 10? Oh, I think 10. Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

I think that's the first 10 we've ever had. I've done 440 of these.

SPEAKER_00 56:16

There you go. Oh, God. What age were you, Nick, when you became self-aware of your mental health and you realized that the feelings you were having weren't physical and they were actually in your mind? 18. And was it a eureka moment or a gradual process? Um, it was a response to what happened to me. And can you remember either the first or the most important conversation you've ever had with someone about your mental health? So if you can remember, who is it with? What did you say, and how do you look back on it? Did it feel like the stereotypical big moment or big weight have been lifted? Or on the other hand, something quite easy and normal to do?

SPEAKER_04 56:50

Um It was a friend and it felt like a weight lifted.

SPEAKER_00 56:56

What things do you find in life, if any, that trigger your mental health? So it could be things people say to you, it could be a sound, smell, taste, social environment, or have you not figured all of them out yet?

SPEAKER_04 57:05

I'm not sure I've figured them all of that out yet, actually. I think I'm much more resilient now. So there's very little that really knocks me out of kills. Okay. Conversely then, what positive triggers do you have then? I think spending time with my wife. That's the number one. That's the tick. You've got the husband points there. Yeah. No, it is generally. And uh we like travelling, looking forward to travel and having the kids over and just letting them be. They get on. They're such good friends. And that's the nice thing.

SPEAKER_00 57:35

Conversely, as well, what positive tools do you use to improve your mental health or help you feel better? Which ones have worked and maybe which ones that you've tried but haven't? Exercise beyond anything.

SPEAKER_04 57:44

Exercise is really, really important. I don't exercise as much as I want to, but when I do, I feel so much better. When I'm starting to get a bit cranky, as we all do, physically feeling a little bit under the weather or whatever, I go off. So I do pilates every week. In fact, I'm missing my pilates. Be with you, Freddie. But I found that really, really helpful. It really hurts and it's hard, but I feel fantastic afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 58:08

I saw uh a really viral video of like a load of bodybuilders doing pilates and they were fighting for their lives.

SPEAKER_04 58:16

Oh no, I I look like an Egyptian dung beetle on my back. I mean, it's pathetic. But it's um it's been fantastic. And again, my wife got me into that. So thanks to her, I'm now going pretty regularly most weeks. Pilates is for men. Pilates absolutely is for men. And I also I'm a member of a gym, so I I do weights quite a lot. And then the dog walking is a bit of cardio. I need to do more. You always need to do more, but doesn't help with the weather.

SPEAKER_00 58:41

I've wanted to do a run for ages, and it's like two degrees outside and raining. Like I go in. It's horrible.

SPEAKER_04 58:47

But if anyone was to say how to improve your mental health, start exercising.

SPEAKER_00 58:51

What is the best book or mental health Bible, I call it, you've read for your mental health? Now it can be non-fiction, but it can also be fiction. And if you can't think of a book, album, TV show, any piece of popular culture.

SPEAKER_04 59:01

I'm trying to think what's the best book. Actually the thing that's helped me most is Metal, the app. That's been really, really good when I've needed to sort of refocus a little bit, or getting a bit anxious about some big thing coming up. I think that's had the biggest impact rather than a book, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 59:19

If there was a mantra in life that summed up your mental health, what would it be and why? I think always be positive and enjoy life.

SPEAKER_04 59:28

It goes quick. I know that's difficult at times, but I've always um seen the funny side of things as well. That's just in my nature. I I write comedic stuff. So um seeing the absurd in things has always been I mean Monty Python was a big influence on me, I suppose. That type of view, but you know, just utterly absurd stuff.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

We're the people's front of Judea. I thought we were the Judea's people's front. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 59:50

I mean, is it just iconic classic stuff, and you know, and you see it again and again. They had an eye for satire which was unmatched, I think.

SPEAKER_00 59:58

What do you love about yourself?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:05

I think my enthusiasm, I'll say my enthusiasm. I I think that's what I'd say. That's what my shells are like. Give me two other traits. Um well, I'm devastatingly good looking, so that's that's not sarcasm, Nick. Come on. Give me genuine. Um I think I'm kind. I think I'm a kind person. And I quite like people, you know, I quite like being with people. I can be on my own, but I'd quite like being with people. And uh but yeah, I think kindness I would see is one of my traits, hopefully it is, most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

And as a final question, you can answer it any way you want. What more do you think we have to do to ensure men from all backgrounds, all social classes, all walks of life feel comfortable and safe in opening up about their mental health issues or just their general mental health, if most importantly, they want to do it.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:55

More of this, Freddie, more of what you're doing, talking about it, creating opportunities for people to um take part in it, use it, and creating those other role models that men can look to and go, well, if they're doing it, it must be okay. You know, that is the mission, and that's what we've all got to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:12

Nick, it has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much for coming on the Just Checkin' In podcast and talking to me. My pleasure entirely. Thanks for inviting me, Freddie. Well, that's all we've got time for on this episode of the Just Checking In Pod. I want to say a big thank you to Nick for being my special guest, for telling me all about the incredible work that the Center for Policy Research on Men and Boys is doing, and of course, for letting me check in with him as well. I will put some links to where you can find out more about the very important work CPRMB does, and follow them on social media in the show notes. As always, thank you to all the vendors who've tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, give it a share on social media by tagging us at VentsHelp UK. Tell your friends, family, or work colleagues about us. If you're feeling generous, write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support us further, go to patreon.com slash ventshelpuk or make a one-off donation to our PayPal. All of those links are on our link tree. That's linktr.ee slash vents helpuk. We hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember, guys, it is always okay to vent.