The People's Countryside Environmental Debate Podcast

Leon's Law [TW]

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Episode notes

Trigger Warning: The topic of male suicide is discussed in this episode. If this is a subject that you find difficult to listen to, then this might not be the episode for you right now.

We tell the story of Leon, who was a listener of this podcast, a friend of Stuart's (co-host of this podcast) exploring Leon as a person, and breaking down the barriers, and stereotypes around mental health, and a very set of very human challenges.

This episode offers you the listener, one of the most far reaching calls to action this podcast has ever made.

In a very different episode to normal, Stuart and William invited Leon's mother Dianne and his step father Cyril to come onto the podcast and talk about Leon. Recorded on the balcony of the home Dianne and Cyril share, they explore family grief, and talk about Leon's Law. They explore the emotions that came as the result of Leon's death including confusion, helplessness, anger, guilt, loss, despair, sadness, and longing.

Leon was a very kind, caring, intelligent, skilled and knowledgeable person in a non-conventional way who lived with a form of Schizophrenia, which, sadly, led to him to making a series of decisions that ended in him taking his own life. Leon's story reveals the weaknesses in the current mental health system here in the UK, together with the possibilities of the better support if mental health conditions were framed and supported in a different way.

This episode is not about blame, but a candid look at the harsh truths of the systems we rely on to work in daily life.

What do you make of this discussion? If you have any views you can email us at [email protected]

Here are some helpful links:

You can get in touch with Dianne at [email protected] 

You can buy Dianne's book 'A Bird of Paradise, Lost' which tells Leon's story here https://www.russellturner.org/paradise.asp

And here is a list of online resources that you may find helpful:

• A list of every British MP https://members.parliament.uk/members/commons
• Calm https://www.thecalmzone.net/
• David Kessler https://grief.com/
• Global Retreat Centre https://www.globalretreatcentre.org/
• The Oxford Mindfulness Foundation https://www.oxfordmindfulness.org/
• Mind https://www.mind.org.uk/
• Rethink https://www.rethink.org/
• Self-Compassion https://self-compassion.org/
• Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide https://uksobs.org/
• Zero Suicide Alliance https://www.zerosuicidealliance.com/

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