Why Will Young’s message got me out on a Sunday night - Christa Ackroyd

In true pocket book psychiatry speak I think it stems from my childhood. As I recall we were never allowed to play out on a Sunday. Sunday was family day.

In my early years it was Sunday School in a morning while mum and my gran went to chapel as they called it (we were a Methodist family).

Sunday best was the order of the day. I got dressed up in whatever ‘best’ clothes mum had made for me. And then we came home to Sunday lunch or in our household more often than not Sunday tea.

Sunday salad in summer was a big thing for us. And the menu was always the same. Tinned salmon mixed with a little salad cream and decorated with the prongs of a fork. Best salmon mind you. And ham out of a triangular tin. I don’t know why.

Mum was a great cook and often boiled a ham in the pressure cooker for dad’s sandwiches. But on Sunday it came out of a tin. The accompaniments never varied. Cucumber, tomatoes and freshly washed lettuce beautifully presented on best china with spring onions, always spring onions.

Even now I can’t eat a salad without a spring onion, not chopped but served whole neatly lying side by side. We ate boiled eggs with our salad, sliced with one of those plastic and metal slicers (that was my job).

Granny came for tea every Sunday along with assorted relatives, including grandad and grandma, with my Uncle Keith and his girlfriend of more than ten years often joining us. I loved my Uncle Keith. After trifle or mousse, as my mum called whipped up jelly and carnation milk, that was it.

Everyone went home while for my brother and me it was early to bed ready for a school day, books, homework (that wasn’t done on a Sunday ether) P.E kit sorted and best clothes hung up again, because unless we had spilt down them who washed outer clothes after one wear when it meant dragging the twin tub out?

Sunday was a day to prepare for the working week ahead, not for gallivanting. And so last Sunday felt very strange indeed. Especially going into an underground bar in Leeds. At my age.

Though I needn’t have worried. The audience reflected that it is more than two decades since Will Young beat Gareth Gates to win Pop Idol.

I didn’t vote for him, because well Gareth was from Yorkshire. But over the years I have come to love him. Not just for his voice, which is so unique. I love the clarity of his diction, his wit, his longevity in the throwaway industry of pop.

I admire his strength (who can forget his standoff with Simon Cowell when he told him, I respect your opinion, but I don’t think you can ever call that average). But above all I admire his vulnerability.

Will Young came to Leeds to showcase his new album. He had been up since silly o’clock appearing on Sunday Brunch and travelled to Leeds in a van without air conditioning.

He performed for us wearing Harry Potter pyjamas making the point he would catch a few hours sleep in Manchester before getting up early for BBC Breakfast then two shows in Liverpool. That’s showbiz.

He has sold millions of records, showcased his considerable acting skills on screen and on stage to much acclaim, and has millions in the bank.

Yet he has contemplated suicide, suffers from a lack of self worth, and was diagnosed with PTSD because of the pressure in part of being told to hide the fact he was a gay man. Which he refused to do. Will Young’s brother died by suicide two years ago after a long battle with alcoholism.

And just a couple of months ago while receiving an honorary doctorate at his old university Will spoke out about mental health and the challenges faced by young people in particular. And that’s what got me out of the house on a Sunday night. I connect not just to his music but to his message.

My Uncle Keith, my father’s only brother, took his life aged 40 in the 1970s. And no one said a word.

My mum was honest when I saw my dad in tears after taking the phone call that from a neighbour who had shockingly discovered that, after many attempts, Uncle Keith had finally succeeded in taking his own life in his flat in Headingley. I couldn’t understand why.

He was a handsome man. He was a successful man. An artistic man. He never married his girlfriend though she was desperately in love with him. I wonder now if he was gay.

My grandma would never have accepted that. But I will never know. Later mum told me he had been treated in several mental health institutions over the years where he had also received electric shock treatment. But it hadn’t worked. It was all so sad. It still is.

I loved my Uncle Keith, in fact mum said that the two of us (me and my brother) were the only things that seemed to bring him joy. I don’t think my father ever got over not being able to help him. But the word suicide or the causes never crossed his lips.

This week the family of cricketer Graham Thorpe, the life and soul of a successful England team, took his own life aged 55. He had tried to before.

His wife described him as being ‘so handsome, so funny and a free spirit.’ She added the family had made a decision to speak out to show that someone so mentally strong on the field of play was also a man who had fought depression for years.

But it is the comments from his eldest daughter that resonate when I think of the years my uncle must have suffered in silence, a silence that continued for decades in our family after he died.

“There is nothing to hide,” she said. “We are not ashamed of it … it is not a stigma. .. he had loved life and he loved us but he just couldn’t see a way out.”

Every year 5,000 people take their own lives, the vast majority of them men. And often young men. So thank you to Andy’s Man’s Club, a few pals who met in Halifax to talk after their mate took his own life aged 23 and formed a charity that now has 150 groups across the country.

Thank you to the Thorpe family and all those whom I know suffer the trauma and yes the stigma that a man in their lives couldn’t see a way through.

And the guilt, the tremendous guilt that they couldn’t save them. To my Uncle Keith, I am so, so sorry. But thanks for the fun and laughter you gave us as you hid your own sadness. I think of you often. And hope you found peace.

But thanks especially to Will Young who got me out on a Sunday night. Not just because he is a great singer. Not just because he is funny, irreverent and thoroughly entertaining. But because he is part of a conversation that we haven’t had before.

That no matter how successful, how outwardly sparkly and bright, behind the facade depression and anxiety is very real. I suspect it always has been. But now we are beginning to talk about it. At last.