Founder of a Shropshire Stay Mentally Healthy Hub says her team are saving lives as she tells her story from attempted suicide to helping others

The founder of a Shropshire Stay Mentally Healthy Hub that is saving lives is telling her story from attempted suicide to helping others while also calling for sponsorship to keep the vital service running.

Mary Phillips, founder of the Stay Mentally Healthy Hub in Bridgnorth, says she hopes that talking about her difficult childhood and her battles with depression will encourage more people to come forward and seek help.

The community hub, in Faraday Drive, provides one-to-one sessions, group sessions, workshops and events through a team of qualified Self Empowerment Journey (SEJ) volunteers, all dedicated to helping people stay mentally healthy - and some of the self-help services are free.

Mary said: “I had a very difficult childhood. I was abused mentally and sexually by my father, an alcoholic and a very violent man. Back then we really didn’t know what depression was but when I track it back, I think I was starting to sow the seeds of depression from the age of seven because of everything that was going on at home.

“By the time I was 28 I had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Then I was at work and had a car accident and was fortunate that I ended up in the Priory Hospital. At that point I was married and had actually achieved quite a lot in my life: I had a very good career, company car and owned my own home - so in spite of my childhood, I had achieved a lot.

“But I got very depressed after the accident, suffered really bad anxiety and was told that if I didn’t stay there voluntarily I would be sectioned. I was there for about two years and had every treatment available.

“I had the best care, the most amazing psychiatrist and psychotherapist, but although I had tried so many medications and various therapies, I still wasn’t happy. I was just existing is the best way I can put it. Then one day I was told that everything possible had been tried, I needed to manage my depression and I would probably have recurring episodes for the rest of my life.

“It was at this point I thought ‘I don’t want to live’, which had been a recurring thought in my mind for a long time. I was just holding on for the professionals to fix me. I had attempted suicide while in the Priory and when I was told this I thought ‘I can’t do this. If that really is my lot in life, I’m done’. I was constantly having thoughts that ‘I don’t want to live’. Then, in one moment, my thoughts changed from ‘I don’t want to live’ to ‘I don’t want to live like this’.

“In a profound moment of awareness I had gone from believing my thoughts about ending my life to the truth that I didn’t want to live like this - just two words that changed everything for me. There had to be another way of living that had never occurred to me. That changed something in me and I could suddenly start to see things really clearly.

“In that moment I realised that the only reason I was suffering was because I was believing my thoughts. So from that moment I started to question all sorts of things. I had a powerful awakening and not long after that I left the Priory and have been depression-free for 28 years.”

Mary’s life changed from that point. She left her husband, the place she lived and started again. She ended up teaching everything she had learned through her awareness, which became the SEJ process.

“It’s a beautiful process,” said Mary. “It’s really about understanding that when we believe our thoughts, we suffer and we are all identified with the story we run in our minds - a story that’s often put there by other people, which we then reinforce ourselves.

“I teach the SEJ process and use it in one-to-one sessions. It has amazing results. People come to the sessions and can be in severe trauma response, and between one and three sessions many are completely done.

“What I want to get across is that it is so simple. You don’t need to be re-traumatised by having years and years of therapy talking about the problem. Why do we want to do that when we have been living it for years?

“What we have to do is look at the thoughts we are thinking and believing right now in relation to the past. For example, I recently worked with somebody that was in a severe trauma response.

“After two and a half sessions this person came back and said ‘I don’t know what you have done to me but my life has completely changed’. The SEJ process leaves people no longer a victim of the past, they can learn from it, move on from it but are no longer traumatised by the past, because they are now fully living in the present.

“So when we do the process on a thought, it’s a process of self enquiry where the client has their own answers - they always have their own answers but just don’t know how to access that. This is because they are identified with their thoughts and are so used to listening to thoughts about the past and continually replaying them, often unconsciously.”

The life-saving work Mary and her team are doing is making a massive difference but Mary is keen to spread the word about the services provided and encourage more people in need of help to come forward.

“I said I wanted to open the hub for people who can’t afford to go private, don’t meet the criteria or simply won’t go to the doctor, for whatever reason,” said Mary. “The whole idea of the hub is to help people and save lives. I cannot tell you how grateful people are who have used the hub - help they might not have got anywhere else.

“But not enough people know about us. Not enough people know what we are doing and how fast it is. We work with everyone from sports professionals, enhancing performance, to police and clergy - professionals in all walks of life.

“However, we need funding, the more funding we can get in the more people we can help. We need the community to help the community and I have a vision that if every business in Bridgnorth gave £10 we could train more consultants to work at the hub.   

“If businesses help us we could help them. I can go in and give talks, we could link their business to the hub - something that would work particularly well with small businesses that have no mental health provision.

“If they gave £10 a month we could provide on-demand training for people that could be accessed online at any time. There are all sorts of packages we could put together for businesses and the money would ensure we can keep things going at the hub.”

Serving Bridgnorth and surrounding areas, the hub offers services including a free personalised wellbeing plan and all appointments must be pre-booked. No referral is necessary and partial or fully-funded sessions can be obtained through online application.

For more information, visit https://www.staymentallyhealthy.org.uk/