HUMEN founder River Hawkins on why now is the time for truly preventative action in men’s mental health

Actor River Hawkins is behind a new UK wide organisation where men can discuss their emotions and a five-part series that tackles male mental health. Featuring the likes of Andrew Scott, it will air on the Evening Standard online from September 24
Samuel Fishwick @Fish_o_wick19 September 2019

It’s hard to put what’s happening inside your own head into words, so when River Hawkins, an actor, director and producer, talks about men’s mental health, he picks his sentences carefully. “I could lie and say I’m cool with where I’m at now but I think I’ll always want to have progressed further than I have,” says the former Harry Potter actor (he played a Gryffindor student and now says he was “more of a glorified extra”). “But I feel more content with myself now because I don’t wake up wishing I was still asleep.”

We’ve met on a bright, autumnal day in a Kensington office, his wistful mien reminiscent of a young Jake Gyllenhaal. He has spent the last 18 months setting up HUMEN, a men’s mental health organisation based in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden. It’s a service which is free to use “and always will be”.

He expects to have two new spaces open in Manchester and the South-West in the next six months. It’s a charity where the focus is on creating a comfortable, non-clinical environment for men to discuss their own struggles, or simply listen to others. “It’s what I remember looking around for and not being able to find for myself when I hit rock bottom,” he says.

Hawkins has also directed and produced a five-part documentary about mental health. In it, a teenager, a university student, a cab driver, a City worker and a homeless person discuss their own experiences, including stories of grief and eating disorders, alongside actors Bill Nighy and Andrew Scott, rugby player Danny Cipriani and comedian Alan Carr. “No matter where we come from, what we do, or how famous and wealthy someone is, we’re all bound by the same human condition,” says Hawkins.

Boys are taught to reject ‘feminised’ feelings, like empathy. But they’re actually just human emotions.

River Hawkins, founder of HUMEN

Scott “talks about his struggles, and how they seem they can last forever, but it does always change, and nothing is permanent.” Nighy has “a knack” of connecting with young people: “He said nobody knows what’s going on in your mind, and the only person who has any great enthusiasm for this idea that you’re inadequate, unsatisfactory or unfinished in any way seems to be you.” Nighy’s father was a driving instructor, and always said: “It’s not about how many times you mess up, it’s how you recover that counts.”

Hawkins finds his own head is clearest when he is rock climbing. He also goes ice climbing or deep-water soloing, where, he says, “you don’t use a harness and if you fall you fall into the ocean.” While we’ve come a long way in talking about men’s mental health over the past few years, he adds, “it’s like we’re missing the step after that”.

Andrew Scott on the set of The HUMEN Series with River Hawkins
HUMEN

The landscape has certainly shifted: charities such as the Mental Health Foundation have stressed there is an alarming disconnect among men who may be in need of professional support. A 2016 survey of people who have had mental health problems found 28 per cent of men admitted that they had not sought medical help, compared with 19 per cent of women. At the same time, suicide is the single biggest killer of men aged under 45 in the UK.

“Awareness and inspiration are brilliant but they dissipate, whereas action solidifies. We need to think about what’s truly preventative, because there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of this torrent. It’s long overdue that we need to head upstream and stop people from falling into the water, or, in some cases, jumping.”

Behind the scenes of The HUMEN Series - in pictures

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At 18 Hawkins moved to London from Bournemouth to begin a career in acting, leaving three older sisters, his mother and his father (they worked in nursing and marketing respectively, but now run a bed-and-breakfast called Honeysuckle Farmhouse).

“Playing different roles, it made me go to the depths of different emotions,” he says. “What I found strange was that in society, you’re then as a man expected to shut those emotions off. Young boys are taught to reject everything that has been ‘feminised’ — things like empathy, compassion, vulnerability — when they’re actually human emotions. Political scientist Caroline Heldman describes it as “the great set-up”: men’s identity and worth are staked on rejecting feminine gender norms. By his early twenties, Hawkins found himself in a “no-man’s land “going out too much, numbing myself”. His star was on the rise, with a role in the Harry Potter franchise and, alongside Eva Herzigova, in the 2017 documentary, Manolo, playing the young fashion icon Manolo Blahnik. “But there was that washing machine, that conveyor belt of the same thoughts going round in my head, reminding me of all the ways I’d failed,” he says. “It was the thought that ‘you’re not good enough’, or ‘you haven’t achieved enough’, and then even when I’d have moments of happiness it would be, ‘what have you got to be happy about? Why are you happy about this’.”

He initially struggled with anxiety and depression came only later. “It was so fast at bringing me back down to that dark, low place. I haven’t spoken about this feeling for a while. And it’s not a sad thing in itself, thinking back on it now, but what makes me sad — and why I created HUMEN — is because so many other guys are still experiencing that place right now.”

State of mind: River Hawkins has launched a new mental health organisation and directed a documentary
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

Hawkins was “very self-destructive” and “way back when I was at school, I was into a lot of fighting, because I thought that’s how you dealt with things. You numb yourself, and there was a lot of fighting, and a lot of hospitalisation, physically. I was never sectioned mentally, it was just broken bones. And I guess that’s an appropriate metaphor.”

Eventually he went to see his GP, who offered to put him on medication “which I decided I didn’t want”, and then provided him with six free sessions with a trained counsellor. “When we came to the end I said, ‘This is starting to help, but we’re only just scratching the surface, what happens now? I feel like I need to continue.’ And they said they could only offer me further sessions if I told them I was suicidal.”

He pauses. “It’s not an accurate means of establishing whether someone needs help, the way you’re asked to tick how well you’re feeling on a sheet of paper. Because [a person] could be in denial or lying. Especially as men. I was in this low, no-man’s land of not wanting to live, but not wanting to die because I wanted to live. So it was this weird paradox. Even though I wasn’t saying I wanted to kill myself, I was miserable.”

River Hawkins with Bill Nighy
HUMEN

He didn’t have the income to support private healthcare. “That’s just as serious, because there are so many men who don’t attempt to take their own lives or outwardly self-destruct, but they’re plodding along on this path of muted misery. They carry on until they naturally die, having lived a miserable life because of this condition that men don’t open up.”

Which is where HUMEN steps in. “What’s amazing, when it happens, and I’ve witnessed it so often, is someone articulates what someone else is going through, can relate to it, but has hitherto been unable to speak about it. Then it gives people the confidence and the permission to open up, and there’s this domino effect.” Which is how we make progress, one ladder rung at a time.

HUMEN, a new organisation for men’s mental health, launches today and The HUMEN Space runs every Wednesday at 6.30pm at 14 Neal’s Yard, WC2. For more information, to attend sessions or make a donation, visit wearehumen.org

Watch The HUMEN Series, a five-part documentary on men’s mental health featuring the likes of Bill Nighy, Andrew Scott and David Gandy, exclusively at standard.co.uk/HUMEN every Tuesday from September 24.

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