It started as an after-school club to try and help young people understand their mental health and within a few short years, an established charity was born to bring about real change in mental health in Northern Ireland starting with education.
Matthew Taylor, co-founded Pure Mental when he was 17 in school with his friend Jay Buntin, to try and tackle what they believed was one of the root causes of poor mental health in young people and that was lack of education and understanding.
Now a registered charity, the 20-year-old has already made a huge impact in the sector with plans to do much more including legislative changes to bring mental health education into the classroom from primary one. Speaking to Belfast Live, Matthew explained how Pure Mental was born and how he seeks to bring about real change in Northern Ireland for young people.
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"Mental Health was never really talked about in school, in primary or secondary, through my years of formal education, mental health was never really talked about or brought up, it kind of had a lot of stigma attached to it. For us, all of our own friends and family at different points had struggled with their own mental health and we thought yes there are mental health charities out there who are providing support and preventative support, but no-one was really tackling what we thought was the root cause and that was the lack of education on mental health for young people," said Matthew.
"So we thought let's try and do something to change that for a group of young people like us. When I was 17, myself and a friend from school set up an after-school club called Pure Mental, using some Northern Irish slang for the name. At that time it was just the two of us and we met in Lisburn library to come and plan our idea.
"At that time as well there was no government in Northern Ireland so we thought let's start by doing something very small scale. We held a protest in Belfast in early 2020 which got a lot of media attention and that kind of made us realise we could use this activism to help try and create solutions to the problems we were facing."
The charity is currently the only youth led mental health charity in the UK with all those involved aged under 25. Despite Covid and the current Stormont impasse, the charity are pushing forward with their long-term plan to create a mental health curriculum for schools.
Matthew explained: "It's still our big project to create a mental health curriculum for young people that goes from Primary one right through to Upper Sixth. So that would entail providing those skills in terms of emotional vocabulary, so being able to put a name or definition or explanation to what young people are feeling.
"Then being able to use those to explain how different emotions react to other emotions and getting the really young people to verbalise how they are feeling instead of maybe acting out or using their emotions in a physical way to then use them verbally."
Pure Mental became a registered charity in December 2021 and despite the challenges associated with Covid and with Matthew having to shield throughout the pandemic, the charity remain determined to bring about real change for young people.
"We had a lot of growth in the last year but that too has been hampered a bit by Stormont not being up and running because of the manifestos. We spent nearly five or six months planning what we were going to say and how we were going to pitch those manifestos to each individual party and we were really glad to see that four out of the five main parties had four or more of our five key asks, and we thought that was great, we can try and make those into legislative change. But now we don't have Stormont up and running it's not possible to achieve those legislative changes that we have.
"We do have a two-tier approach because there is a lot we can do ourselves but you need that statutory requirement in a lot of cases to safeguard the change that we do want to make on a bigger scale. So currently we are in a bit of a limbo situation where we would love to push up another level but we can't because we don't have the funding or that legislative change without a government."
Now in his final year studying Anthropology and Philosophy at Queen's University, Matthew himself admits he has undergone a huge personal change and admits helping people through the charity, in turn, helped him through the Covid lockdown.
He explained: "I was 17 when Covid started and I'm 20 now so it's been a substantial amount of time. I obviously missed out on my first year of University experience in person and a lot of my course was in person so you kind of felt like 'was it going to affect your grades?' but also that social aspect of making new friends as well. It just felt like I missed a key moment in my life as a fresher at University as you only get that experience once.
"But for me helping people made me feel better so that's probably why I put all my efforts into Pure Mental and other things that I was doing."
Matthew represented Northern Ireland as part of a delegation at the One Young World Conference and was part of this year’s Washington Ireland Program Cohort. It was through those programmes combined with his work for Pure Mental which saw him win a Diana Award this month for his efforts.
The Diana Awards, set up in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales is the most prestigious accolade a young person aged 9-25 years can receive for their social action or humanitarian work.
"I still can't quite believe I won to be honest. I was nominated by one of the leaders in the One New World programme who had seen a whole lot of personal growth from me over the last year, said Matthew.
He continued: "I'm a very different person to who I was, coming out of Covid I was very introverted, I hadn't seen a whole lot of people, I hadn't seen my friends in maybe about a year or more so after that was quite difficult.
"We went to London quite quickly that summer after the second lockdown when things eased and 'freedom day' was the first day of that trip. So for me being isolated for so long, I was very apprehensive. But they saw a whole lot of growth in me and then they got to know about the work I was doing with Pure Mental so they thought I was worthy enough to be nominated.
"We were in DC and Puerto Rico for another trip in May and that evening when everyone was having dinner it was announced that I had won the award, I was speechless."
Despite being small organisation, Pure Mental were placed as finalists for the U.K. Community Organisation of the Year as part of the 2021 National Diversity Awards, in competition with 22,000 other organisations and charities.
Matthew hopes with some additional funding in the coming years they can advance their plans to bring about legislative change for mental health in schools.
"Two of us are employed part-time which is myself and Jay who is the other co-founder and we have about 18 volunteers currently. We are trying to get funding to bring some of them on as employees as well. We are looking to become more sustainable as we are both going into final year [at university] so we can hopefully both continue to do this, hopefully full-time after University but the charity sector goes from grant to grant which usually only lasts for a year so we are trying to maybe outreach towards corporate funding and trying to get businesses on board.
"It doesn't even need to be an awful lot, £200 a month from two or three businesses funds a salary for a sustained period of time so that's our next step but that's quite hard to get, so grants are our lifeline at the minute."
If you would like to know more about Pure Mental you can visit their website here and you can follow Matthew on Twitter here.
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