Interview Spotlight with Si about HATW for Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week!
Before we get into Children’s Mental Health Week, could you tell us about HATW and how it began?
HATW is a mental health not-for-profit. Initially, we focused on supporting young people who self-harm as our niche, but as we put out information about managing self-harm, it turned out that people would respond to that with other things they were struggling with. Our advice would help people with BPD, post-natal depression, and broader mental health struggles. So, we now cover mental health for young people more generally. We began a Tumblr page with a suitcase, going to gigs and selling our merch. The money went towards more t-shirts, but also printing literature, making videos, and sharing stories. Now, we do workshops at schools while selling merch and having chats in our shop in Canton, Cardiff.
It started out because I struggled a lot in high school. I didn’t have many friends; I was bullied really badly; and I always struggled with how to express myself properly. When I was bullied, it was by people who never really knew me. I tried to deal with that through self-harm, and ultimately playing drums as a healthier coping mechanism. It was never a light-bulb moment that fixed me: it just relieved what I was feeling without making myself feel too bad afterwards. It was a way to process my emotions and express myself: unapologetically existing. My initial idea was to teach people drums to ‘fix’ their mental health — but it’s never that easy! So, a few folks and I got together and started HATW.
The theme for this year’s CMH week is ‘My voice matters.’ What do you do to empower young people?
Taking on feedback is really important to us. There’s no point in us (a bunch of thirty-year-olds, by this point) sitting around and thinking we know what young people want, or are interested in. From trivial things, like the colour of our t-shirts, to bigger things, like how exactly we can be serving you, give our young people a sense of ownership. What’s the point of any of this if we’re not helping the people we want to help? For example, at the beginning of our journey, a lot of similar organisations were pushing on custom apps. But, when we went into schools and asked our young people about it, they weren’t interested at all. Instagram polls and Google forums have shaped our next booklet on managing self-harm. Building feedback into everything we do is so important to empowering the people we work with, too. Every interaction we do in schools — be it with young people, parents, or staff — we ask how we can do things better. Young people are our purpose, so it only makes sense that we listen to them. They are so innovative and creative, and challenging supposed professionals can work so well to both empower them and progress our work in the long run. It’s a no-brainer.
In a similar respect, how best can carers help empower their young people on a day-to-day basis? Does agency play into it, as it does with HATW?
There’s a fine line of being authoritative but not authoritarian, isn’t there? Obviously, we need to give them structure and security, letting them know there’s someone watching over them, while allowing them to express themselves and feel heard. Acknowledging their independence and unique, personal feelings definitely plays into it. Like we were saying with being present, it’s also really important to set aside dedicated time to talk about our feelings and mental health. There’s a TikTok trend at the moment about giving children a dedicated room to get bad words out of their system — and while that’s more for internet clicks, there’s definitely something to be said for creating a time and space to talk about mental health. Whether it’s through talking sticks or agreed rules, just some kind of regiment to speak unrestricted and un-interrupted on a routinely basis can have a really strong impact on letting young people be heard.
Music and passion has always driven Heads, both in your story creating it and your work now volunteering at gigs and festivals. How did you find music as your drive? Do you have any thoughts on how young people, particularly when struggling to find joy in things, can find their own drive?
I had been playing drums for years as a project to learn — I’m going to my lessons, I’m practicing my instrument — rather than something to manage my mental health. What I learned was that what you do matters less than the mindset you do it with. With drums, I could sit down with the aim of improving at the instrument, or I could play it with the intention of just raging at a drumkit for an hour to release my feelings. One will have more of an impact on my wellbeing than the other. Setting it as an intentional act of emotional regulation and self-care will increase the positive impact it has on your mental health.
For finding the drive in the first place, it’s just about putting yourself out there. Do you think Coldplay started off super successful, or did they start off playing to no one in an empty pub on a Wednesday evening? To quote Adventure Time, ‘sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something’. Not being afraid of sucking — particularly when online, we have an echo-chamber of uber successful creatives, and don’t see the hours and work that goes behind it — is imperative. Don’t be afraid of failing; just get stuck in.
We talk about how stopping self-harm can only really happen when a person is ready to stop. Are there any signs or ways that carers can support their young people to come to a place where they are ready to? How can they best support them when they aren’t at that stage yet?
One of the activities we do in workshops a lot is talking about the pros and cons of self-harm — because it’s obviously serving some sort of purpose. We have to acknowledge the pros, while acknowledging the cons: it’s not the safest way of dealing with things, it leaves us feeling bad afterwards, etc. But when you acknowledge what the pros are, you can then find things that serve the same purpose. Understanding what it is bringing a young person — for me, it was a visceral reaction rather than an activity trying to help myself, like a kettle boiling over. Taking the time to sit and think about it logically helped to rationalize it, and understand the realities of the situation. This rationalization can be a good sign to see when a young person is ready to make a change. There’s a lot of parallels to alcoholism and addiction, where the first step to overcoming the problem is admitting you have a problem.
For supporting your young people before we reach that point, there’s probably a case to be made for adults physically being there. From my experience, at the time I thought my parents were bothering me when I wanted to be alone. But my mum being there to talk about my favourite drummers — showing her Slipknot, even when she didn’t necessarily want to listen to them — and playing video games with my dad was really valuable. It meant I knew they were there for me: I knew I had space to talk about my problems, even in small bites. I was being heard, and this was huge for my progress. Being present to let people talk about whatever’s on their mind was invaluable. Also, encouraging them to find things they like doing, particularly when depression rips joy out of everything, with time set aside for it on a regular basis helped in itself.
What does the next year look like for HATW? Any upcoming plans to look out for?
The big one is that we’re releasing a new booklet to help people coping with self-harm. We’re continuing beta testing online versions of our workshops for school, as well as offering workshops made specifically for parents and carers to support their young people who self-harm. These’ll be held in the shop, with a few online for those who can’t make it down. We’ll be at festivals and concerts at the arena as usual. We want to hone our social media as a resource for people to access tips and information. We’re going to up the game on our resource packs. Long-term, we’re hoping to create fidget items that help manage anxiety.
Finally, what’s an underrated or surprising tip we can use to manage our mental health on the daily?
Ultimately, the real source is finding what works for you. There is no one solution to mental health. Finding the thing that works for you, but also having the thing that works for a bunch of different scenarios. What helps you when you’re anxious won’t necessarily help you when you’re feeling angry; and what helps you when you’re feeling angry won’t necessarily help you when you’re feeling numb. It’s a case of having this toolkit, this range of different coping strategies, that allow you to acknowledge how you’re feeling at any given moment, and having things that help respond to that particular feeling or situation. Knowing that the same thing won’t always work for each situation. For example, on our website, you can select how you’re feeling, and it’ll take you to a list of different coping mechanisms that have worked for other people.
As for surprising, wear your special socks and pants. We have standard underwear and socks, and then we have really nice socks that we save for special occasions. Having those and wearing those things — underwear that is just for you, not for anyone else — when you’re not feeling very sparkly can turn it into a little treat. But, you’ll feel like a million bucks once you do something nice for yourself.
Where else can we find you?