Content note: This interview contains brief references to suicide and depression

Mental Fitness Month is an initiative launched by a Bristol-based charity that’s tackling the social stigma surrounding men’s mental health and wellbeing head-on.

If you live in Bristol, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Talk Club by now. Whether you’ve seen their distinctive black and white logo on a billboard or shop window, picked up a pamphlet or know someone who’s been to one of their sessions, they’re asking the same simple question: How Are You Out of 10?

At the start of one of Talk Club’s group sessions, according to co-founder and CEO Ben Akers, most people score themselves around a 5.5 out of 10. By the time they walk out of the door, it jumps to 7.4. If an hour spent talking and listening to others about our feelings can improve our wellbeing by that much, why aren’t we all doing it?! 

We think everyone should know about Talk Club, so this year we partnered with them to deliver a nationwide out of home campaign, using roadside billboards to spread the word across England, Wales and Scotland. But how did it all start? And where’s it all headed? We sat down with Ben to find out…

Hi Ben, thanks for taking the time to meet with us. Can you explain what Talk Club is all about?

"Hi! Nice to meet you, too. So the whole point of Talk Club is about teaching men how to build mental fitness in society. Whether you’re a scaffy or a solicitor, it’s for you. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50, and seventy-five percent of suicides are male, so statistically, the thing most likely to kill me is me. There is clearly a very large number of men who are crying out for help, but they don’t know how to get it. So that’s the reason we do it and why we try to make it really really accessible. 

It can be as simple as asking someone you care about how they are. We say look, if you support us, wear our badge. There are loads of amazing mental health charities, but you don’t really see people walking around wearing their slogans. We’re trying to say ‘it’s ok to be mentally fit and it’s ok to look after yourself’. I was in a pub yesterday and the bartender was wearing a ‘How Are You?’ t-shirt, it’s amazing. People want to be part of the solution. Especially if they’ve been helped by it- they want to help other people, too."

How did you come up with the idea?

"I’m a CEO of a charity I didn’t mean to start. It wasn’t a burning desire, but I started Talk Club because my best friend Steve took his own life. When I got the phone call, I’d been living in Australia and he’d been in Canada. Anyone who’s ever been affected by suicide will understand that you can spend years in therapy, but you’ll still never really find out why. I was running quite a big advertising agency at the time and I fucking hated it. So I moved back to the UK, quartered my salary and started using my evil powers for good. 

I’ve always started fights. I’d say, ‘I’m going to fight Coca Cola because I don’t like what they’re doing’, or ‘let’s have a fight with the government about the way they’re treating people’. I wanted to start a fight with suicide because I was angry at the way Steve was taken from us. I read an article that said men my age watch sports and documentaries, so I decided to make a film about it. Whilst I was making it, I realised that no one was really tackling mental health in a preventative way. A former England rugby player called Danny introduced me to the idea of mental fitness, and as soon as he said it, a lightbulb went on in my head. If you say ‘mental health’, most blokes immediately think of weakness or ill health. But if you’re mentally fit, you’re mentally strong. So I nicked it."

How does Talk Club work?

"It’s a really easy process. People will reach out to us and say ‘I’ve seen one of your posters and I’d like to set up a Talk Club in my town’. So we spend an hour and half on zoom teaching you everything- how to find a venue, how to advertise it, how to be a Team Captain. Each club is totally dependent on the captain. We also work with local councils, but only on a really small scale. They can help us to identify places where people might need a bit more help and then we’ll set up three or four in that area.

What we’ve found, especially when it comes to blokes, is that men have never been taught how to talk about their feelings. So when you tell them to go and talk to someone, they might as well be trying to speak Latin. It’s like me trying to teach my son how to gargle - how do you describe gargling? Don’t get me wrong, I think society’s attitude to mental health is better than ever. A woman came up to me the other day and said ‘my husband comes to your sessions and now he’s listening to me more at home’. And what we didn’t realise is that we’ve been teaching men how to be active listeners. Because when you get to Talk Club, the phones go down, you’re looking into people’s eyes and you’re being heard. So, in theory, communication at home should be better as a result of that, too. We try to get rid of all the noise and help people to focus on just being here.

Of the thousands of hours we’ve had of men sitting down and talking about their feelings, we’ve got an average check in of 5.5 and an average check out of 7.4. No magic pill in the world is gonna give you that. And that’s just from sitting there and talking. And what’s beautiful about it is you’ve done that work by yourself. I think it’s a very male thing. If I say to my wife ‘how are you out of 10?’ she’ll say ‘oh, I dunno, I’m a 4 and I’m an 8…’. But if I say ‘well, what colour are you then?’ she’ll go ‘mauve’ straightaway, and I'm thinking how does that work?!"

Your branding is super bold and simplistic, can you tell us a bit more about that?

"We want everything to be simple and transparent. Our brand palette is black and white because your mental health should be black and white. When we were designing the ‘Here are the Rules of Talk Club’ booklet, I thought ‘what’s the first thing a bloke’s gonna do when he picks one up?’ - he’ll fold it up and put it in his pocket. So I covered every side of it. The whole idea behind ‘How Are You Out of 10?’ came from one of our founders, Blue O’Connor. We needed a hook and he was using that question with his kids. Men are kids, so we thought ‘let’s just use that’!"

How do you survive as a small charity?

"I dunno! We’re growing at a rate of knots. In January we set up eight new groups, so we’ve got roughly 150 around the country now, but only four of us are actually permanent, salaried staff. There are six founders: me, Neil, Gav, Tom and my partner Claire (we needed an adult in the room). Me and Gav run the daily operations; Gav is training to be a therapist, so he’s the brain of Talk Club and I’m the mouth. Our other two permanent employees are Tidy and Barney. Tidy used to work in steel and now he’s also training to be a therapist and talking about his feelings for a living. Barney started coming to one of our groups, then he started captaining one, which became four. He was working at Sainsbury’s before and now he’s our only full-time employee. 

There’s a few people who run up mountains for us, but ultimately we’re still a tiny charity. We crunched the numbers and something like 70p of every pound we make goes towards setting up a new Talk Club. The rest goes towards paying the team and our marketing budget, which is tiny thanks to partnerships with businesses like Out of Hand.

Brand partnerships are really important to us. The idea is obviously for us to get our messaging up in places where men are- in the toilet, the pub, walking down the street etcetera. When Out of Hand reached out, I immediately said yes, but, to be honest, I didn’t know how much of an impact it would actually have. So many people have come up to me and said they’ve seen our posters everywhere since the campaign started! We’ve got our own Wogan’s coffee blend and Talk Club wouldn’t exist without the support we’ve had from Bristol Beer Factory. They let us use their taproom for our first ever meeting and we collaborated with them to make Clear Head - an alcohol-free beer. We all know about the link between alcohol and depression, so that’s why it’s AF. They donate 5% of its total sales to us, so I can afford to employ someone straight off the back of that. Their Brew to Give initiative also came out of the success of Clear Head, so it’s a very symbiotic partnership. That’s what’s great about Bristol- we’re a big enough city, but we’re also small enough that everyone wants to support each other to move forwards. 

Statistically, May is one of the worst months for male suicides, so for Mental Fitness month this year, we’re doing takeovers at Shindig festival and the Tobacco Factory, the Talk Club Cup, the Big Talk Club Walk and the Talk Club 180 Race. We’ve started holding sessions in prisons and even a Talk & Bushcraft club! 

We’re holding group sessions in prisons across the country and we’ve just started offering business support to help people communicate better at work. We call it the Robin Hood model: give us money, and we’ll put it back into the community. We have a check-in every morning at TC HQ, so if I see one of my colleagues is a 6/10 and they’re working from home, I’ll give them a call. They might say ‘Oh, the missus is going into hospital’, so then I can ask if they need me to take over any meetings for the day. It’s just man-management, it’s like football…if I know a player is carrying an injury and we’ve got twenty minutes extra time, then why would I put him on at the start of the game? It’s just knowledge, and that’s what we’re trying to build."

One last question: what are your plans for the future of Talk Club?

I want to get ‘How Are You Out of 10?’ everywhere I can, big or small. Loo rolls, scaff wraps, billboards, crop circles…I don’t need the world to join Talk Club, but when everyone starts asking each other how they are out of 10, then we’ll be winning."

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this interview or know someone who has, Samaritans are here- day or night, 365 days a week. You can call them for free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.