Living Without Answers and Surviving the Unimaginable: Darren Barden's Journey

Darren Barden's story: Surviving a Mistaken-Identity Hit, PTSD, and Turning his trauma supporting others to aid Suicide Prevention

On The Power of the Truth podcast, Fran Willoughby interviews Darren Barden, CEO of iTalk and author of “Let’s Skip to the Good Bits,” about surviving a brutal mistaken-identity attack at his home in 1996, in which he was stabbed over 20 times at home while his wife and 1-year-old son were upstairs, with no one ever caught. 

Darren describes the immediate aftermath, fear of a repeat attack, media appearances on Kilroy, and long-term psychological impacts including anger, PTSD/depression, suicidal planning, paranoia, and strained relationships. He highlights barriers to accessing support, sharing that 75% of suicides are male and that 90% of those men had previously sought help. 

Darren explains how medication and support helped him recover and how he now focuses on suicide prevention and psychological safety in construction through iTalk and his podcast Under the Hard Hat, encouraging people to talk and others to look out for those struggling. 

About Darren 

Darren Barden is a speaker, best selling author, and CEO of iTalk MH Ltd, a company on a mission to reduce suicide and improve psychological safety in the construction industry.

After surviving a brutal attack in his own home, Darren found himself at rock bottom. What once felt like an anchor holding him back has since become the wind in his sails, fuelling a purpose to help others avoid reaching crisis point.

Now working with construction companies across the UK, Darren believes that a 3-dimensional approach is what is needed. Psychological Safety for Organisations, Mental Fitness for Individuals and Suicide Prevention for All. His message is simple: we must move beyond awareness and start saving lives. 

Mental Health & Suicide Prevention Support (UK) 

Samaritans
Free, confidential emotional support 24/7.
Call: 116 123
www.samaritans.org

 Mind
Support, information, and guidance for all mental health challenges.
www.mind.org.uk

 CALM – Campaign Against Living Miserably
Support for men and anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts.
Helpline & webchat: 5pm–midnight, 365 days a year
www.thecalmzone.net

 Shout 85258
Free, confidential text support for anyone in crisis.
Text: SHOUT to 85258
www.giveusashout.org

 Papyrus – Prevention of Young Suicide
For young people up to 35 and those supporting them.
HOPELINE247: 0800 068 4141
www.papyrus-uk.org

NHS 111
Urgent mental health support via your local NHS crisis team.
www.111.nhs.uk

Darren’s Organisation 

iTalk MH Ltd
Creating mentally healthy, psychologically safe workplaces.
Website: https://italkmh.com/

If you have a story that you think would be good for the podcast, please do get in touch by emailing thepowerofthetruth@mojo-motivator.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Power of the Truth podcast. If this is the first time you're listening to us, welcome to the party. If you have listened to other episodes, then welcome back. Pull up a chair, because this is going to be a good one. I'm really happy and excited to tell you about today's guest. I met him just over a year ago now and was instantly fascinated by his story because it sounds like a scene from a gangster movie or a thriller. Something you could never imagine would happen in real life to a normal person. But it wasn't fiction, it did happen. A savage, life-altering attack, a fall into suicidal despair, a journey that reshaped his life. Somehow he found a way not to just survive, but to speak, to lead, and to lift others with the lessons carved out of his own pain. An important statistic he shared with me after we finished recording that not only are 75% of suicides male, but that 90% of those men had previously sought help for suicidal thoughts, but not been able to access support that they needed. It's a statistic that shouldn't exist, a testament to just how urgently we need better support systems and better listening and better care. His story is one of hope through adversity, which resonated with me immediately. And if you are affected by anything you hear in today's episode, please don't suffer in silence. There are links in the show notes for you to get help if you need it. And I'm very excited and proud to introduce to you Darren Barden. Hi, Darren. Welcome to the Power of the Truth Podcast. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you for being here today.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Thank you very much for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

You're very welcome. This conversation has been quite a long time in the making because we first met up last year, didn't we? And I was so fascinated by your story. So would you mind just explaining a little bit about who you are and how you come to be here today? What's your story?

SPEAKER_00 2:25

I thought it was only going to be an hour long. Obviously, Darren Balden, CEO of iTalk now, and best-selling author to my book, Let's Get to the Good Bits, which is pretty much where the story began. So, I mean, my son's 30 now, so 29 years ago, I got a knock on the door on a Monday night at midnight. Two guys uh I opened the door to them because I used to have two jobs. So I used to work during the day and at night as well because we had no money. And I ran downstairs and opened the door. Um and two guys come in and stabbed me in my head, back, chest, and legs over 20 odd times, seven serious stab wounds to the skull, one in my back, you could put your whole hand in it, and it was in my knees, you know, across my chest. So over 20 stab wounds in total. Um, and then they left. They left and and just left me there, pouring a blood. My wife and one-year-old son were upstairs at the time, uh, hearing all the screams and that type of stuff. Uh, but then it sort of it moved on from there. This is sort of just the the introduction, if you like, because it, you know, we went went through all the process of being stitched up, son up, then found out he was a professional head, but mistaken identity. And then some 13 or 14 years after that, I went for about a depression, which we now know as PTSD. And uh, I was on the edge of suicide. I was on the edge of taking my own life. I wrote the book, become a best-selling author, and now I help other people. So that's the really, really, really short version of the of the story. So I'm sure we've got a lot of questions to come based on that.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Absolutely, and that is a really short version of the whole story. But first of all, I mean, I just obviously mm this podcast is all about stories of hope through adversity, and you are the absolute epitome of that, in my opinion. And that's one of the reasons I was so drawn to your story. But obviously, this is this podcast is about truth, and just taking it back to just set the scene a little bit around what things were like for you at that time when in 96, wasn't it? 1996. And obviously, you were just going about your normal business. I've got your book here, by the way. I have read it. Let's skip to the good bits, which is a shocking account of what actually happened. But nevertheless, it's your truth, and it is what it is. You can't change it, it's brut brutal. But just to take you back to that time, what was life like where you were living? You know, I know the house that you had moved into had had a bit of history, hadn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:03

By the time we moved in there, we were trying for a family, and it'd been about two years, we hadn't been successful. So we were looking to go and get a house that we could make our own, like the term, and we could eventually build a family from there. So we've been trying for about two years, and eventually I stumbled on this place through a friend of mine, and it was cheap enough. They'd done us a bit of a deal, and it'd give us a leg up the ladder, basically. Literally, we bought the house, and Wendy fell pregnant. So our two-year plan of rebuilding the house became a six-month plan. Um, and basically, we went to work on it. I was obviously doing my day job, working weekends on the house and nights and things like that. But then George was born, and then we had a situation then where we needed to survive. Wendy was at home, so we no longer had the two wages. So I then started doing two jobs, which you know wasn't unusual, it's nothing extreme, but it's you know, there's no uh sort of sob story there. It's just you had to go and work hard to pay the bills, it was as simple as that. And the area, it wasn't the greatest, but I was lucky enough to be born and bred, if you like, in and around the area, so I didn't feel it was as bad as other people made up. And even now, my kids would almost call it a no-go zone, it's not quite that bad. Whereas I I would happily still walk around there, but I think that was just because of my upbringing. So, yes, it wasn't the greatest area, but there's lots of places like that in and around the UK, wherever you are, and this is not as bad as Sullivan, it really isn't. So, that side of things to set the scene was there was a lot of antisocial behaviour going on and things like that in the area. There were some local people that were known to the police, that type of stuff, but nothing nothing really major that concerned me enough to want to, you know, think did lock me door at night and just staying at home wasn't that bad as far as I was concerned. So that was the the sort of setting the scene, if you like, for the area. And what happened to me had nothing to do with the area. And what actually happened was there was a well-known family, if you like, or group of people that were known to the police, known locally, and they was, for want of a better phrase, probably a group of thugs. And afterwards, after this happened to me, it actually scared them a little bit because what happened to me was a little bit above their league. So suddenly they all had a bit of respect for me. Like Wendy went out with the buggy with George one day, and they was all stood around, they just moved and parted because it was Wendy. So it was almost like, oh, hold on a minute, you know. There was a little bit of a it was an element of a badge of honour on this because suddenly all these local people had heard about it, but it was way out of the link. And it probably bothered him who I was. Little didn't know, I couldn't bite me way out of a paper bag and I was a nobody, but it didn't register with him in that way, you know what I mean? So Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

But the house had a bit of history, didn't it? Because prior to you buying it, it had been empty for a while, and there'd been some dodgy goings on, hadn't there, in that house.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

So basically the house had been empty for about 18 months, and prior to that it was let out to about four or five in individuals who were less than savory characters, so they ended up getting thrown out of property because they were just causing a lot of trouble locally. So by the time my stabbing had happened, it'd sort of been three years from them leaving, like 18 months it was empty, then the 18 months I was in the house. So it had been about three years from all that so you would have thought it would have passed by, you know, whatever had gone on there. But there's so many theories around the stabbing. There was one of the guys he may have lived there before, may have got released from prison on that day. You know, there's there's lots of things that may or may not have happened, but ultimately none of them rang true with me. It was just the CID officer said to me in the time, Mick Clark, he said, You're gonna have to put it down as a bad day at the office. Those are his words. And I'm still friends with Mick now, by the way, so there's quite good.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

Yeah, but that I mean, that must have been so difficult to swallow at the time, because obviously, having read your book, I know that the after effects of the stabbing went on for a long time and really affected you greatly for a long number of years. But again, just to go back, so and you mentioned the locals were a little bit wary of you because they didn't really believe potentially that you didn't know who'd done it or you weren't involved with something. So all of a sudden you you garnered this kind of newfound sense, like this badge of honor, this bit of respect, basically, because they just weren't quite sure of who you were and what you were involved with.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

It makes me smile now, and even back then it was a strange feeling. It wasn't something you'd want, you know, to be even uh thought not fondly of by these people, that's not what I wanted, but for that area at the time, it sort of weren't okay. You know, they worked out in our favour for a little while. The area around our house was generally well respected because of that. And all the neighbours were pretty good anyway. It wasn't like we had any trouble with anyone on that side of things. It was just generally it was just the normal council estate, you know, um, and and working people doing what they do to get by. So that side of things wasn't the problem, really. It was obviously the the not knowing really impacted my mum and dad first and and Wendy for a long time. And even now, my mum hates listening to the podcast I do because she just can't get over the fact no one was ever caught and made to be punished for it. She's still living the punishment, if you like. Whereas I always had the the sort of outlook on this that it wasn't for me. So I never held any grudges towards anybody, and I I wasn't chasing it. I wasn't chasing an answer because I think the police inadvertently done a great job on me. At the time I didn't think so. But looking back, I think they did. I think they set my they managed my expectations of it's about that the office when you put it down to that and move on. Obviously, I didn't move on, it affected me massively, hence the book, and hence what I do now. But I think wanting an answer, wanting someone to be punished for it wasn't something that's ever been on my mind, which is a strange. Everyone I speak to says, Oh no, I'd you know, I'd I'd want retribution of some description, whereas I've not wanting to just you know, if I if I bunked into someone now and they said to me, I did it, yeah, I've got a million and one questions for them, but I wouldn't necessarily want anything done about it. Do you know what I mean? I don't I don't know, I can't explain it, it's just how it is.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

So if someone came up to you now and said, I've been holding on to this for years, it was me, it was a mistake, uh you were you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. What would you God, what would you say?

SPEAKER_00 12:00

What are you doing up at midnight on a Monday night? You know what I mean? That's what I'll be answering, first of all. Uh the first thing I'd say to them is listen, whatever you do, don't bump into my mum and dad and wife, you know what I mean? Because if they will deal with you differently. You know what? I don't know what I'd asked. Um you know, uh part of me want to know who they were after. Yeah. And well, had they because there was sort of talk of someone had been following me maybe before. There was a couple of incidents where I'd I'd reported something suspicious to a policeman beforehand, so maybe they were following me. We don't know whether they were or weren't. There were a couple of things where it was either the wrong person or the wrong house, and obviously, from my point of view, it's both. And when I opened the door and the two guys were stood there, as I looked out of the door, the one to my right, he sort of looked up the alleyway, why, and just nodded. So it clearly they knew who they were after, or thought they knew who they were after, you know, the face fitted with what they wanted. Um, and then they surged forward. So there were four people in total, one waited at the end of the street, and then one waited in a getaway car. So they were clean, well equipped, if you like. So four of them, and they didn't get much resistance from me. I'm not exactly a fighting person.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Well, I mean, there's a couple of things there, isn't there? The fact that they thought they'd got the right person, they obviously, because four people or one, I mean, they obviously thought they were gonna get some sort of resistance.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

You were they were up there, yeah, exactly. But there was an eyewitness, but back then, if you go back 29 years, we didn't have mobile phones attached to our sides. So the eyewitness was out walking his dog, and he'd seen all the the kerfuffle, the s heard the screaming and everything. So he took his dog back to his flat and then walked to a callbox and phoned the police from there. By then it sort of finished and the car was speeding up. But that's all we had. That's the only thing we could cling on to. So to put a bit of clarity on it, is that I opened the door, they were just stood there. Like I say, the guy to my right nodded, and they then surge for what I sort of remember holding my hands out. And from that point, I was then on the floor, I was sitting in like a sort of fetal position, and I've just be on my head, being bashed about continually from side to side. And I don't know how long this went on for. Obviously, I was screaming, I was screaming, stop, police, help, whatever I was shouting, I don't know. And then it just stopped. They just literally stopped and they walked away. And even in my mind now, I've got this um this vision, and it's like one of those TV programs where they blur out you know people's faces. And my memory of that moment is I saw their faces, I definitely saw their faces, but in my memory, they're just blurred out, like they've done on the TV, and their shoes as well. So I could sit with a police artist and get them to draw the jackets, the jeans. I've got a quite decent memory of that. But for some reason, their shoes and their faces are blurred out, and I may be some sort of therapist to get hold of me later on in life and draw it out of me, but there's nothing to be gained by that for me anymore because I've moved on from that stage. But then as they sort of stopped and walked away, I I shut my front door, and I don't know if I shut it in my hands, my feet. I couldn't tell you what I did. I then turned, I was in a little hallway. I then turned and crawled through my living room. In the process, the blood was going all over the floor, it was going over the sexes. I'd got blood on both sexes, and it was the blood when it was stabbing me, although I didn't know I'd be stabbed at the time, it splashed up so high on the wall, gone above the light switch, it was just everywhere in the hallway, got through to the phone, which was a landline back then with a cable, one of his old things we used to have. Yeah. And 999. And, you know, bearing in mind my wife and one-year-old son are still upstairs at this time. And I'm just screaming down at the operator, police, fire, ambulance, whatever. The operator was really, really good. What information I gave them, I don't know. Um, and then I'm on the phone listening, right? Okay, with police and ambulance are on their way. And I then said, I need to phone my dad. So they said to me at the time, I've got the phone down, count to 10, and dial the number. You I don't know how I did then. Right. I've got no recollection of how I did. I don't even know why I did it. It's probably I've got two little regrets in the whole of my story. One of them is phoning my mum and dad that night, you know. So he's I put the phone down, counted to 10, dialed the number I wanted, and my dad answered and I said, Dad, can you come round? I'll be beat up. Him and my mum came round. They got there after the police, but before an ambulance. In a small town, why it took an ambulance that long on a Monday night at midnight. I don't think they could have been that busy. Maybe the police were just making sure there was no follow-ups after, I don't know. But yeah, my mum and dad turned up, and there was blue and white tape all around the house, apparently. They waited to stop my mum coming in, and obviously, my mum with a little boy in there, or I was 29 with my own son, I was still her little boyish. They weren't stopping her, so they came in and they rushed straight upstairs. But they actually got to see me sitting at the end of the living room just bleeding to their face in a dime. So that that's probably one of the very few regrets, if any, that I've had over the time with just getting other people involved. Obviously, I wouldn't have chosen to do that. It was a poor decision at the time, but I wasn't in control. Uh, but that was the moment, you know, that's it all happened, and then all of a sudden, then the ambulance turned up. And in the meantime, the police they kept repeating my name, and this is one of the things I remember is every question started with Darren, this and Darren that. He was like, Darren, who do you know drives a red car? Darren, where is it? What time was this? Darren, what did this happen? It's Darren. And I think they were just trying to keep me alert. Wherever I was drifting out of consciousness, I don't know. I can't couldn't remember that side of things. And then the ambulance guys turned up, and one of them the police had spotted a little look on the end of a standing knife blade, which had been broken off in my chest. And what they do is with a standing knife, they put two blades in there and they separate them with a match. So when it cuts you, it it can't be sewn up. It just forces, yeah. So lucky enough for me, it was just it was just a scratch. It wasn't they didn't really, they didn't cut deed with it, it was just a scratch across my chest. But it went from side to side, but actually broke the standing blade off in me in my chest. So the blade was on the floor, so then everything stopped. The police were like, right, did you just tread that in here? Was it already here? And I'm like, hang on, I'm sitting at the end of the living room here, bleeding to death, and they're arguing over a bloody end of a knife, you know. So the ambulance men came in, done what they'd done, dressed my wounds, put me on this metal frame. And as they were wheeling me out, what I'd been looking at at the bottom of my stairs, I thought was it like a small child's cricket bat is what it looked like. And I thought that's what I'd been beaten up with. And it turns out it was an 18-inch meat cleaver with a cardboard and cling film holster, which they hadn't used, but they'd dropped and left behind. So as I've got to it at this point, I've now seen what it is as they're wheeling me out, and that point it freaked me out. I was then I've been fucking stabbed, I've been fucking stabbed, they fucking stabbed me. This is how I went. I just went into this breakdown almost as they were wheeling me out. And then, so from the front door, from my literally from my front door to the back of the ambulance, as I went out, the the sky, which is why the the front of the book is this midnight blue, it was so clear. It was an October evening, and it was so clear. I don't remember the cold because I was already freezing. I was so cold, and with the shock side of things. And at that point, as I they were getting the ambulance ready to put me in, that was it, I was dead. As far as I was concerned, that was the moment I died. I'd seen the sky and the stars, and I was gone, you know. And obviously, then I got caught in the ambulance, realised I wasn't dead, and then we had a bit of a giggle, me being Darren Bard, and on the way to the hospital. I kept saying, Oh, we got have we got blue flashing lights on? Because I've never been in an ambulance before. And then we got got to the hospital and it was it was full on. It was literally, it was a bit of a panic on around me. I was whisked into these rooms, I was put in a room when I had hose my head down to try and find where all the wounds were, and they were sewing them out. I stopped counting the stitches, I think about 40. I had about 20 wounds in total, seven in my skull, which needed stitching. And some of those in the skull were just like where, well, that was one wound. I might have been stabbed in the same place more than once. So it wasn't just a cut, it was like a series of cuts all in one place. I think about 22 stab wounds in total. I may have been stabbed, possibly in excessive other times, you know. It was a brutal frenzied attack. And I can remember, I've got my head over, and the only way I can describe my memory of it is like a trough. And I've got my head over there, showering my head, trying to find where the wounds were before they showed them off. And I remember the nurse saying to me randomly, you can get compensation for this. And I didn't know what she was on about. I wasn't really paying attention to any of the conversations. I think she must have had experience in the criminal injuries compensation board, which we'll go on to later. But that's the only thing I could come off because it was a random thing to say at the time. But maybe I'd been speaking to her, I couldn't tell you, you know, I wasn't fully with him. Uh but once they finished showing me up, in the meantime, the police have been interviewing my wife. You know, she had an affair, and I had an affair. Was we involved with Lone Shah? All sorts of stuff going on with questioning. And then they put me in this room. I had an armed guard with me because they thought they may come back and finish the job. And then all of a sudden, they moved me into another room where they thought I'd be safer. I was in this little tiny ward, and they put me near the doorway, and all of a sudden, I was surrounded by doctors, nurses, and police. And they literally dragged me off of one bed onto another and wheeled me off into the room with five old ladies. Because apparently someone had been seen walking around the hospital. They thought they'd come back to try and finish me off. So because I wasn't really with it, whatever I can rem remember it happening, I didn't really have much emotion around it. Because anything was going on, I was just there. I wasn't really with it and acting upon anything. I probably didn't even know what day of the week it was at the time. So it's quite sort of hair-raising for quite a while for a lot of people with me. Yeah. And you know, for me mum and dad to witness it all the aftermath, and Wendy as well, is that's that's the painful part. You know, I sort of wish they hadn't seen it because I had to live it. Be different than being an onlooker into something like this.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Well, there would have been a PTSD for all of them, I would have thought, in some form. I mean, for Wendy, just that fear of someone knocking at the door again. Every time someone knocked at the door, it must have felt terrifying. Anyway.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

It was a strange moment, actually, because we went and lived with my mum and dad for a little while because I didn't want to go back to the house. And so we went and lived with my mum and dad, I think probably six to nine months, something like that. I couldn't exact times. And anyway, we eventually we said, look, no, we're gonna move back and we're gonna get on with life, you know. And we moved back to the house. And on the very, very first night we moved back in, our phone rang at midnight. Bearing in mind the attack was at midnight.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

And the phone rang, and I answered it, and there was no one there. Like, so straight away, everything comes back to they're coming back, they're making sure we're home. So Mick Clark, who was my CID uh guy at the time, he just gave me his number and he said, You ring me whenever you want. So I literally put the phone down, I had a business card of his, which I still got, and I phoned his number and he answered, and he said, Leave it with me. And yeah, he then went in and they do what they do, they trace the call. And uh, it was quite funny actually, because the person who had phoned me was working in a local factory. And basically, what he used to do on his tea break, he used to go and have an affair with a young lady. And so, what the police done, they traced the call to this office, went back in, and it turns out my phone number was very similar to this woman he was having this affair with. Now the police have raided this factory, got him, he's now had to confess all that this I was ever gonna arrest him as part of this. He's had to confess all, he's then had to tell his wife why he's been arrested. Well, so the old booing saga around my stabbing carried on for other people as well. So I don't know who that guy was, and I don't need to know, but because he never holds it against me. But um gosh.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

He accidentally got involved in something he didn't mean to there, didn't he?

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

So just that of interest and uh obviously you've said Mick is still a mate to this day, and very obviously very grateful for his help and support at the time. Did it occur to you that it might have been covered up by the police if there was someone being paid off, if it was gangles? Was there ever any worry about that? Did you ever wonder if it had been covered up?

SPEAKER_00 25:07

No, there was talk of this at some point, and there's lots of theories, but there's always the rumour meal going around with certain things, and as time moved on, certain things would come to light. And a little while after there was someone that was also stabbed locally in the town, and it's something to do with football hooligans, nothing nowhere near where I lived. And it was just something there's an organization called Combat 18, which were a football hooligan.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

I remember.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

And but worst thing is I'm a Chelsea fan, and they were very much associated with Chelsea. Right. And uh they went and stabbed someone, a rival or whatever it was in the town. And I thought that'd just be my luck. It was Combat 18 coming after me, but it had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with them. It was a completely separate issue. But these things kept happening over the first few years, there would always be something, and that then created a little stir around the story. Yes, there was talk about the police, why did they not do certain things and then did certain things? And to be honest, there was times when I thought they could have done a better job. I thought at the time they just assumed I had something to do with it because of where we lived.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

I went on to Kilway, the TV programme, one of their twice, actually. And one of them, I said, no, I think the they prejudged me because of my location.

unknown 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

And I think they're a big dude. But yeah, I think the local police, they just thought, oh, this is the area, he's obviously got something to do with it, you know. And I don't think they took it serious enough at the time. I think if if the CID on day one had been involved right from the first minute, I think there might have been a different outcome. I think it would have been investigated a lot more. So I do think it was not brushed under the carpet, but once they established it wasn't for me and it wasn't meant for me, and their underworld, who had informants, if you like, had gone very, very quiet. So no one wanted to take ownership of it. That said to them Darren Bardon was a nobody, and this was a mistake. So they knew it was a mistake. And I think at that point it's like not pointless to him, but they didn't really need any energy into him. You know, that's probably the only criticism I've got of them, is that they prejudged, and I don't know, because I wasn't connected, they there was nothing to gain, they couldn't find who dunny, and there was nothing to really gain by going any further with it with me because I wasn't in that world.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

There's no justice for you, though, in that by them having bigger fish to fry, was that which is the frustrating thing about that scenario. And I know from the conversation we had before that there were people years after that still come to you and say, Oh, come on, mate, you must know. You must have some inclination.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

I was at a party once and some distant family sort of took me to one side and said, you know, it's just us now, you know, going, what happened? You know, you know what happened. I was looking at thinking, are you bloody mad? You know what I mean? It's like, first of all, I don't know you that well, and just to assume for one minute I did know, life, I'd even bother telling you, you know what I mean? It's like, what a random thing to say. It was one of the questions that always came out. I've done a the podcast with Dodge Woodall, and he asked the question as well, you know, did you know? People were going to be asking, you must have known, and the answer was no. We didn't, and it was one of those things. And in life, we make some choices, and I've made some bad choices through life. Some of them have been born out of the mental health issues that bothered on from this. And obviously, opening the door probably wasn't my best choice on that night, but you know, did what I did. But some people choose to ask that question, and I think, listen, the story's been out there long enough, and clearly it is what he is, it was mistaken identity, that's how he is. I wouldn't be putting this much effort into sharing my story if there was some form of cumber. There would be nothing to gain out of that, you know what I mean? But I do believe people do think, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

And in terms of the truth, and obviously you know your truth, which is that you have no idea who did it. It was a complete out-of-the-blue attack, mistaken identity, and that and that's that is the truth. But how do you cope with knowing that other people don't believe that?

SPEAKER_00 29:14

You know what? It's better now. When I do my talks in the construction industry, it's better think people get it. I think maybe how I deliver it. But back then, there was still this sort of cloudy area, this grey area where people didn't really know, and people didn't really know me, and that doubt that was in their minds, that probably annoyed me more than the event itself.

SPEAKER_02 29:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

You're making judgment on someone you don't really know. You know, which then, you know, with the internet now, people do that all the time. You know, but back then it was literally word of mouth going around. That meant someone was saying to someone, oh, I think he knew who did it, or he knew why. And then they would say, Oh, I was speaking to this person, and they repeat the same thing. So, yes, his that side of things for me was probably annoying more than anything.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

So then after the event, you move back into the house, you've got to try and regain some sense of normality, whatever that looks like, after you've been through such a horrific attack. And I know you were quite shocked when you went on Kilroy, weren't you? Because you were all surrounded by all these people that had been victims of knife crime. And you were quite surprised about that, weren't you? When you went into the green room, you talk about it in the book. Were you open up a new world of something that you weren't really aware of before? And it never really crossed your mind that there were so many people that were victims of this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

When I went into the Kilroy in the first one, so the incident took place on the 7th of October, midnight of the 7th twice, and on the 28th of October, which was my birthday, I got invited to Kilroy. So it's 20 days after the event. One hour on the TV, went in a TV show, and they put me in with victims of knife crime. But what they also done in the studio, they put in people that carried knives. You know, that that was what they had on them. And so there was a couple of moments um where I got in a bit of trouble in there because you know, this is 20 days after I was stabbing, you know, I was I was still sore, I had the stitches out, but I was still sore from the wound, and I shouldn't have been there. And there was a couple of moments where you know, one of these silly idiots, you know, who carries a knife. He said, Oh, he said, if I broke into your house and you caught me, you'd stab me with a bread knife or whatever it was. And I was like, What are you doing in my house? He went, That makes you the same as me. And I'm like, No, mate, he really, really understand me in the time. The killboy was with me and he put his hand on my leg and my hand just let's keep it here. So afterwards I had to be escorted out of the building with security and then into a car, a waiting car and they drove us off. I don't even know what I was thinking going on that program at the time. I'd be right, I couldn't have been that bad. I actually went back on there a second time when Jill Dando was killed, so because he was obviously saying that Herd was a professional hit for mistaken identity, and the programme was about doesn't happen in that world. Mistaken identity doesn't happen in Professor Walking. And obviously, I was living walking proved that it does. So that I went back on a second time. But the whole thing around the TV programme was to think that there was there were people in this room that carry knives and they're quite happy to go and do what was done to me. And there was mums of people in there who'd had their sons killed. There was there was a woman who'd had a throat cut by her husband. And I was always looking at these people thinking, oh wow, you're so worse off than me. That's how I looked at it. These people either lost someone or they had unbelievable attacks that have got onto them. And I just didn't think I was as bad as they were. That's how I looked at it. But obviously, I was because of the mental impact that lasted, you know, still does through a lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Yeah. You do talk in the book about what happened next with the psychological effects that went on for a significant amount of time afterwards, and you became very angry, didn't you, with the world, really?

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Yeah, very angry with the world. There's a few things that happened right in my life, and the immediate fallout of the anger side of things was that I was driving down a road and a police car would come the other way, but take my seatbelt off and almost yeah, they'll come and arrest me because I thought I was invincible. Like it was all crazy stuff I was doing, and I just really hated the world. I was with my cousin at one point. I was I was found on a computer going in an arcade at centre park. So I couldn't weep. And I was punching this screen and headbutting the screen in front of all these people, just like some mad psychopath. And I'm not naturally an angry person, I'm just not that way inclined. So there was lots of random stuff that went on. And then also later on in life, when I when I went into the what we now know is the PTSD, the depression, what that done to me was, I think, far worse than the attack. And one of the things I'll always tell everybody if someone comes to me and said, Right, you've got a choice to make, you either have the stabbing again or you go through the depression again, you've got to choose one of those. I would go with a stabbing all day long. Because the depression was a thousand times worse than the stabbing. And then that's probably my platform for doing what I do now because I know how bad the depression can be. For someone like me, just you know, the life and soul of a party, the first of the bar, the last at the bar, the clown in the corner telling the jokes, to be where I was didn't even make sense to me. So that's why I don't want people going, whatever their reasons, I don't want anybody else suffering like that. Depression is was far worse than the stabbing. As their wounds would heal, I could see the progress. When you're going through the depression, you can't see the progress. You can't see a light at the end of the tunnel. There's no hope. And that feeling of loneliness which you get when you start getting towards a suicidal crisis state, so alone. I had this huge circle of friends, a fantastic family, networks of colleagues and associates. Yeah, I was so alone, like really, really alone. There is no one, and then there's also that feeling of being surplus to requirement. No one cares. You know, no one cared about me. No one cared if I lived or died, or if I wasn't here anymore. And I believe that, you know, obviously it's all thoughts. It was just what I made up at the time. And those two feelings probably epitomised what the depression was to me. It was that loneliness and that sort of surplus to requirements feeling. So there was no point in me being around. There was no hope at all. And that's one of the things, me and my friend Paul, one of the things he taught me is we're in the we're in the hope business. Rather than we do type of renture, we're in the hope business because we want to give people hope. Because that was the one thing I didn't have back then. It was just everything. And the world was against me. I went afterwards, we were struggling with the mortgage because I went from having a job to having no job. The mortgage company were horrendous at the time. We went in there, Wendy had a baby in her arms. We're explaining what's happened, and the guy was basically tough shit. See you later. If I put your mortgage, or we took the house back, was how they loot it. Eventually, that manager through victim support, who are very well connected. They uh had that manager moved on. I got a new manager who then invited me back and said, Listen, give us a pound a month for as long as you want. But that was the initial reaction, the council. I said, Look, can you just get me somewhere? I don't want to move back to the house. While we sent it, and the council was like, No, you're not on the list. There was no one, everywhere I went, there was no one wanting to help. And then eventually, when we took the criminal injuries compensation ball, which was probably one of the worst days of my life going through that process, when we took them to a parliamentry ombudsman and lost, it was like even then no one wanted to be there for it. You know, it's no wonder you ended up going down the road on Ender. I just wanted someone to acknowledge it. Not your friends and family, they were all acknowledging it, but someone somewhere in authority that would come up to you, put their arm around you, and go, listen, what's happened to you is really, really bad, and we're gonna help you. And no one did. Instead, they might go and sort yourself out, not have problems. I still see it when people are struggling with their mental health, they've got nowhere to turn. And there's 200,000 charities in the UK, I would have thought a large percentage of those are mental health charities, but you to reach out to those people because they don't know you've got a problem. And if the organizations around that is where you really need the help, the banks, the building societies, the councils, you need them to be a little bit more sympathetic at the time. So when you look at that scenario, is that surely these organizations, this is not the first time someone's gone to them who's hit on hard times because of an extreme circumstance. Whatever it may be, the house has burned down. So you're now homeless. There's that situation there that you've got say a family that have had a house burned down, they're now homeless, and they're they're crying out for help. There's no one in the authority being proactive to help these people.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

I guess the problem in this day and age is there's so much fraud, and they just tie everybody with the same brush, and there's no ability to differentiate between the people that are in genuine need and those that are trying to rinse the system. And that's the problem, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 38:21

Absolutely. The world I work in with mental health and suicide prevention, the mental health card. If when I go into people and how they're with mental health, you can always see their eyes roll as if to say, I've got another one. And it's because there's so many people out there that are fraudulently claiming poor mental health. My doctor, when we used to have actual doctors, Dr. Richards, I went back done when I don't know how many months after, and he said, Darren, he said, I've known your family a lot. I went, he said, you come from a family of workers. He said, and what you need to do is go back to work. You need to be back at work. This is because of vice. You know, he wasn't writing me out as prescription of the tablets, and you're saying you need to go back to work. So I then put up all the obstacles of I can't go work in my state. But he said, Well, go and get a job three times a week, three days a week. And I said to him, Oh, he's going to employ me three days a week. He said, Darren, you're a resourceful person. He said, I'm quite sure someone will take you on three days. And that was good doctoring, you know. That was that was a doctor doing what they should be doing now, as opposed to walking in, signing you off and moving.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Yeah, it's good practical life.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

Yeah, but he was correct. Look, and enough I was doing van driving at the time, I knew a lot of people, and sure enough, I ended up getting a part-time job with someone who led to a full-time job, and then I was back on with life. So he was right at the time, very much right. And I I think there's a lack of that in our approach to these days with mental health. He's it's become the new bad back because you could say you had a bad back and no one could prove it or not, you know, back in the day. And now you can say you're struggling with mental health, whether you are or you're not. You might just be feeling a bit pissed off, you know, which is understandable. And it might go on for a few weeks, but you're not necessarily bad enough, you can't go to work.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

No, and it's really interesting, as you know, I've lost both my parents in the space of a year. And people have said to me things like, Are you sure you want to be here? Lots of people wouldn't be able to come back to work because I haven't really missed any work on either occasion, other than for funerals and things like that. But what's the alternative? It wouldn't do me any good to sit at home and feel sorry for myself because of the way my brain works. Now, that wouldn't be for everybody. Some people need to take that time out, and I completely appreciate that. But because of the type of person I am, and like you, I'm a worker, I c I have to keep busy. If I was to sit at home on my backside doing nothing, I'd just stir myself up into a frenzy. I'd get worse.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

That's one of the things even to this day is that when I have nothing to do, that's that's the old demons can come back. It's different if you're on holiday, slightly different. But with even Saturdays and Sundays now, I make myself busy because I can't stand sitting there doing nothing, just thinking about things, because sooner or later those bad thoughts come out and you end up suffering because of it. So for me, I think work is I I would always recommend it. Listen, if work's a problem, it's a different scenario, and some people are different. So I wouldn't say to everyone, oh, you should get them for a man up, you know, get back to work. That's not the right attitude. But actually, for some it is very much the right thing to do. And also getting back into work, especially if you work with a decent group of people that can carry on as normal and they're not treating you with key gloves, they're back to taking the piss out of you at work because you spilled a cup of coffee, and as opposed to all she or he's spilled a cup of coffee, we've been not saying anything.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

I know you had to face some pretty hard truths about your behaviour, didn't you, in the months that followed the attack, and you didn't really like yourself very much. What was the moment that you realised you couldn't outrun that behaviour anymore? What was the turning point when you kind of went, This is not good, I'm gonna have to do something about this?

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Well, years later, it's more through the depression side of things because afterwards, after the attack and that initial period, and I went back to work, we had a one-year-old, and life had to carry on. And what I'd done, I sort of buried everything in the back of the head and went, right, okay, sort of that didn't happen. I'm now getting around and we looked carrying on with life. Well, which then proved my downfall later on when I ended up going into the depression. But the turning point was that knowing I was gonna take my own life, knowing that that was gonna happen. I planned, I knew how long Wendy was gonna mourn, I knew how long the kids were gonna be off work, right? So I could actually put a date on it at the time. I was like, right, so I'm gonna die on this day. Wendy's gonna go back to work on this day, the kids are gonna go back to work on this day, and then I started creating these scenarios around this moment. Actually, like the kids are then gonna be laughing in a park with their friends on this date. But this was to Lee, it was very real, very, very real. If I'd mentioned it to anyone at the time, they they would have quite rightly said, Are you mad? But I didn't tell anybody. And what actually happened was I then decided that there was a couple of people at Wendy's work, friends of ours, still friends now. I decided that when I die, they're gonna muscle in on Wendy, right? They're gonna want to get Wendy's affection. Like, this is all going through my head, right? These people were oblivious to it, completely oblivious, very, very nice people. And so I then decided that these people were gonna do this. I then developed this hatred of these two people. Like I really, really hate them. I couldn't stand that hearing their names. And if I was going to parties, I would try and make sure I stood near them because I wanted to hear what. They were talking about and things. This stuff was so far removed from reality. I was very much like, right, these particular people, I I hated them so much. I think inadvertently they stopped me taking my own life because I was like, no, if I go through with this, then this is true.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 44:21

So I I actually think they they contributed to me not taking my own life out of spite for these two people who were completely oblivious, all this was going on. It's crazy to think that your brain can do that to you. Yeah. You know, although obviously I've heard stories of people that have suffered far worse. And some of the stuff, but then you know, I took a lot of a lot of my frustrations and a lot of my depression. I took out on Wendy in the sense that I decided Wendy was having an effect. There's no proof in this. In fact, even if she was, I don't know where she would have got the time because like literally she used to finish work at four, and I knew it took her seven minutes to get home. So by the time if it was seven minutes and 15 seconds, I was like, right, what's going on here? And I then started to try and trip her up with things. Like there was nothing there to warrant any of it. I went and put a single rose on her car at work. Hoping that she would come home and go, Oh, there was a rose on my car, was that you? Or she wouldn't tickle me about it. So she took the rose back into work and said to her work colleagues, look, no, there's no note left with this rose. Are you like doing it to wind me up? Or, you know, I don't know whether to tell Darren or not because of how he is. So she was caught in this dilemma of I don't know what to do. And it was almost playing into my plan. I look back on it now, it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. There was a lot of things like that I don't. I was consistent with it as well. It was over a period of time.

SPEAKER_01 45:48

You were almost searching for someone to blame or looking for something that you could take your anger out of. You were you were searching for an outlet, basically.

SPEAKER_00 46:02

Absolutely. Um Wendy, this year we would have been together 40 years, 36 years married. She's still here. Christ knows why she's still here. She's there for all of that. And I think that I was even doing to the one person that was there 100% of the time, always there to pick you up, always there to cuddle you when you needed it. You know, the one person that I shouldn't have done it to, I was doing it to, you know. But it wasn't like I was I was being verbally abusive, that certainly wouldn't be physical or anything like that, but it's just I was just being horrible. And it went on for quite a while. It guts me to think that, and that's why I didn't like myself. I hated myself for that. I loathed who I became in that period, and then that makes you worse. Because then I don't like what I see in the mirror. That makes you keep compounding the problem. Looking back on it now, we could say that was a bad time. We don't even talk about those days now, very rarely. Not like, oh, we won't ever talk about it. Just actually, there's no point because it was horrible. I was horrible. Wendy was on the receiving end. There's no need to recover that. So that's the taboo subject, if you like. Every now and then it gets mentioned, we'll talk about it. And Wendy tends to joke about it a little bit more now. It's one of those bits you want to put behind you.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

Very much put behind you.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Well, and I guess the more those things happened, or the more feelings like that you had, the more shame you felt. And then the shame ultimately then leads to you just hating yourself for who you are, what you're doing, what's happened to you, that frustration. And then obviously you got to the point where you were suicidal. Um, didn't you throw out absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

And you're not in you you're not in control of your emotions. Prior to the attack, I was your standard stereotypical, alpha male, you don't cry, you man up, and all those things that we say, and for quite a long period after, I I could cry at a TV program. Why would I be crying at a TV programme? I wasn't even in my DNA to do that, but I became that person. I became a bit emotional. But then that sort of led down a bat a bad room, if you like, because I wasn't in control of those emotions. So that was the hard part as well. You just didn't control it. You really couldn't control it. My appointment was one of the biggest days of my life. I phoned and booked an appointment based on a fictitious story. I had a bit of an itch here, which may have been eczema, may have been wherever it may have been, I don't know. That's it. That was my reason for going into the doctors. And the doctors, I went into the doctors and I sat down, and you go and press the screen, and there's different doctors' name come up on the screen. So I went to reception and said, I booked an appointment in my doctor, but there's another name on there. A Shell Yeah Eating training. So I went and sat back down and I started building this frenzy, this anger inside me. It is my biggest day of my life today to actually book the appointment was huge. Because it was accepting I had a problem. And they put some trainee doctor in this room. That really angered me. So I sat there and then when I went in to the doctor's, I walked into the room, and as I looked at my doctor's desk, there was this training doctor or wherever he was there, and my doctor was round to the right, and I just I went into this tirade of abuse. I didn't even see the door behind me at this point. So I launched into these two guys and just said, listen, I've booked a fucking appointment with my fucking doctor, and I was just off on one. And then I then told him, I've come in here because I've got a fucking problem with my head, bearing in mind I booked the appointment over something completely different. And um if you don't swap seats now, you'll never see me again because I'll walk out of here and I'll be fucking dead. And I I literally went into this abuse. And they swapped seats. He sat me down and he put his hand on my leg to the doctor and he said to me, Right, um, let's have a look at this. And he lifted his shirt. He knew, he he clearly knew, right? He made some story up, right? Okay, we're getting that story. Right, now tell me about the other problem. And I couldn't breathe, I couldn't talk. I was I was sort of sobbing, I couldn't get any words out. I just I just couldn't physically make it happen. And I was hysterical, absolutely hysterical, sobbing and like really couldn't breathe. And he just kept his hand there on my leg, on my hand as well. And he's take your time, take your time. And then it just all poured out. And so he was absolutely brilliant, and then he clearly knew I needed help. Unfortunately for him, what he then done was he wrote on a little yellow post-it note, a phone number. And he said, When you go home, phone this number. And it was the number for mind, the charity mind. And so I went home and I actually felt a bit better. I thought, oh, so I've gone home from the number, and it's an answer phone. It says, Look, you can go online and fill in a questionnaire. So I went online, I filled in this questionnaire, and I was answering questions like, have you had suicidal thoughts? Yes. Right, how often do you have suicidal thoughts? Once a month, once a week, once a day. Like bang, bang, bang. And I was always at the most extreme. So as I'm filling this form in, I'm almost confirming my thoughts. So I was trying my eyes, literally sobbing, as I'm filling this form in. I completed the form and send it off. And a box popped up and it said, We're very concerned about your welfare. Someone being in touch within 24 hours. The next time I spoke to mine, it was seven years later. Seven years. No one ever got in touch. That's not mine's fault. They're a charity, and you know, they were mainly they didn't have enough findings, enough people. So it wasn't their fault, but once again, it was that moment I needed help, and then no one came to my aid.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:44

Because I wanted to write about that experience. Not to ever go on, because I probably have thousands of emails, thousands of phone calls, every day, and it just probably got swept up with all the others. And then to be never contacted was really just compounded the pain that was already there.

SPEAKER_01 52:00

Well, that acute loneliness of there's no one gonna help me here, I've got nothing. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? The stories that we tell ourselves to get us somewhere, like you said, you had to make up this bit of an itch to get yourself to the doctor when in actual fact you knew why you needed to go to the doctor and you knew you were in trouble with your mental health, but you had to make up a physical issue to get yourself there. And I think that's so interesting of the way that our brains work and the way that we make stories up almost in order to make something else happen. I often talk about our mind being the architect of our reality, and I do think the stories we tell ourselves, we create a reality around them based on that story. But I do think it's really important to highlight as well that with depression, there are chemical imbalances within the brain that sometimes can only be treated with medication, and there is a lot of shame around that, and there shouldn't be. But it was the magic pills for you, wasn't it, that turned things around, really?

SPEAKER_00 53:05

Well, eventually I went back to the doctors and he prescribed me centering. And if I'd have taken these pills at the time, it meant depression had beaten me, and I wasn't one for that happening. I was like, No, I'm not, I'm not depressed. I'm not having this. And so by taking the tablets, I'd lost, I'd lost the fight against depression. So these tablets in this box, they went on our kitchen windowsill, they went on a dining table, they were on a coffee table, they were in the bedroom, they were in the bathroom. They went everywhere, but in my mouth, right? I was not taking them at all because I would have lost. And then on the boxing day, I was round Wendy's mum and dad's house, and Wendy and my daughter Shannon and my mother-in-law were in the kitchen. My father-in-law had had a cold for about three weeks, and he just said to me, He said, he said, they don't prepare you for this in old age. What? He said, This being ill, he said, they don't prepare you. And I looked at him, and he what he basically said to me there is, look, if anything happens to me, I need you to look after my daughter. And what he was also saying was you can't actually look after yourself at the moment. Now he would never have saying those words, but I knew that's what he meant. Simultaneously, what had happened was Wendy had phoned my friends up in Yorkshire and said, Look, Darren's in a really, really bad place. And they were coming down the day after boxing date. So we got home from boxing date, and on the morning, my friends were due down. I sat there and decided I'm gonna take the tablet, right? The first tablet, and it was a massive moment for me. And I cried, I just sat there crying. Wendy sat there overall rally as I took a tablet. This is it's it was such a monumental moment. But I took the tablet, cried a bit, and then it was almost like I think they call it a placebo effect. It was like, oh right, everything's okay. I've taken a tablet. The world's suddenly good and flowery and happy, and it wasn't, it was just that feeling that I'd actually made that first step. Yeah, and those two influences really, really helped. You know, my friends coming down, Stuart and Rachel, Wendy's dad, Herbie. He basically inadvertently, I think, had shook me, you know, not physically, but just actually slapped me in the face with reality of how it should be. And the one person I loved more than anything in the world was Wendy, and that was the one he needed me to love. And I couldn't even love myself. So that moment was really, really good in the sense of it just put me back on the right track. There was some advice from people, but I was ignoring him. I didn't believe him because I didn't have a problem, as far as I was concerned.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

And you were being consumed by all these other feelings that you couldn't cope with the shame and the frustration and the the the sadness and the loneliness, and so anything outside of that, you would just go, no, I'm fine. And I think that's so common and so important that we talk about. And obviously. Just to jump forward a little bit now, your story is that of hope through adversity, and you have gone on to create something really important and special off the back of everything that you went through. So tell us about what you do now and how what you've been through has impacted what you've built.

SPEAKER_00 56:20

Well, it's about my story, right? But it's not my story, it's everybody's story. Those that have been through something for, in my opinion, it it becomes a disservice to people if I didn't share that. Because the story is, we we spoke about it earlier, what the podcast is about is about truth, and that's my truth, that's my story. And I can't go back and change that. And so one of the things I tell when I do my talks is that my story was like a huge anchor weighing me down. I've dragging it around everywhere with me, worries me, my life is crap because of this. But then you realise I can't go back in time and change that. There is nothing I can do to go back and change that. So now the same story is no longer the anchor, it's actually the wind in my sails. And I'm no longer creating a disservice by not sharing my story. And I share it in a way now that when I used to share it years ago, it would be very much like, oh look, this happened to Lee. It was about Lee. Whereas now it's the same bloody story, it's still about me, but it's not me saying, Look at me, I had a bad thing. It's actually, look what I've achieved. You can go and do the same. You know, let this be the wind in your sales to go and change whatever your circumstances are. So some time ago, we created something called iTalk. And the idea was that I've been working in construction, supplying the construction industry for many years, realized there was obviously a problem. Taking my pain and transferring that into a purpose was probably one of the greatest things I've ever done. And I would, when anyone's struggling, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a counsellor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm none of those. I'm just someone who's lived. And one of the things I would always encourage people to do is get a purpose. Whether it's going to a knitting club or fishing or making Christmas cards for a charity, whatever your thing is, whatever you want to do, having a purpose can change your world, you know. And and so now my purpose is to make sure that people don't go the route I went down, you know, don't want people doing what I've done, you know, and getting to suicidal crises. There's no need. Nearly every suicide is preventable. Not all, immediately, but nearly all. And when you're talking about 6,000 people in the UK dying by suicide every year, yeah. If you could prevent most of those, well, you know what I mean? It's it'd be great. So that's what I want to do. And I I can't save everybody, but I've chosen the construction industry. I want to share my lived experience so people can look and go, you know what? That's his truth. He has got hope. You know, I should have hope. There's a story of resilience in there that I needed to be resilient because of the setbacks and the constant put downs and so on. So I'd like to encourage other people to bring out their inner resilience. Because as humans, we are very resilient. We're resilient and we're resourceful, and we can use both of those things. And if we're given the right guidance from a lot of people who have lived it, whatever experience it is, whether it's bereavement, whether it's financial problems, whether it's drugs or alcohol uh addiction, if if someone's lived that experience, they'd probably far better equipped to help you through it, you know, or at least show you there's light at the end of the tunnel. And so I created Idol. It's a service, a three-dimensional service we offer now to the construction industry, not schooly construction, but that's pretty much where we work. We can take this the theory across any industry, basically. But I've also created something called under the hard app because I want to get construction talking. And one of the things I've learned from my leaked experience, people will say to you, Oh, you should have said something, and you never do. The last thing I was going to do was put my hands up and say, I'm struggling. However, we do know talking about your problems is a great way of getting over them. So if people can just start talking a little bit more, just whether it's football, whether it's the weather, whoever it may be, whatever it is you got going on in your life, share it. Just start getting used to talking and sharing things. But I wanted to make it fun and upbeat. So we created under the hard app. We've got a little Hector toy, which is Hector the Protector, which is a rhino, just for a bit of fun. If you go on camera, you get one of those, and just have a chat. Tell us how you got involved in construction, tell us a joke, tell us what the pitfalls are of being in construction, tell them what the good parts are of being in construction. Just have a chat and get used to having a chat, and hopefully we can have a bit of a laugh and people to start talking to each other. It's just actually getting people talking, and especially on camera, once they start sharing their stories, it's amazing, absolutely brilliant. Because it's like we're giving them permission to share. So they're the two things. We're creating a whistleblowing app as well for companies that should be out hopefully with the next few weeks. Everything we do is around mental health and suicide prevention, primarily suicide prevention. Because if we can get to people before they get to suicide crisis, then hopefully I don't have a job in a few years. That'd be a lovely way to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

I know you you said construction workers are 10 times more likely to die by suicide than by accident. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

Physical accident, yeah. Yeah. It shows you when I was first working on construction sites many years ago, you'd be on there in your trainers, your shoulder, you'd be swinging from ladders, and there was no real attention. And if you went into a local calf near a building site, you wouldn't see a hard at because the moment they didn't have to wear it, it'd be put down. Well, you go to a calf near a building site now, or canteen as they've got on site now, they're fantastic. People are still sitting there, they've forgotten they got their hard hats on. The world's they've got their safety booths, they don't work in their safety booths, come home in their safety booths, whereas they used to just change into a myth. They had to we've moved on with health and safety, and now we need to do the same with psychological safety. Make sitting there, having a chat, having a conversation, make it so that people can reach out easily without having to think they're reaching out just by chatting to someone, something good can happen. And make that the null as well. That's where we want to be with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:19

Yeah, and reduce that acute loneliness that people feel when they sense they've got nowhere to go. 100%. Well, Darren, I think we could probably talk for hours, but we're gonna have to draw it to a close. Thank you so much for giving me your time today. I really believe that your story is one that will help people who are have obviously been through this acute trauma and have any feelings of suicidal tenses. And I do want to make it clear that there are organisations out there that can help and support anybody who is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health. And obviously, we'll make sure there's links in the show notes if anybody feels like they need support off the back of this. But Darren, thank you so much for your time. And I would urge anybody to go and get Darren's book, Let's Stick to the Good Bits. It's a really compelling read. And yeah, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:14

Just one little factor, one little thing. We talk about in the UK, one in four people are struggling with mental health. And we tell that one in four to reach out through my lived experience. I know that doesn't happen. So I would like to ask the three in four people out here, just look out for the one in four for them. That'd be great.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:33

Great, that's fab. Thanks, Darren. Wow, what an incredible story. Um I'm a bit lost for words, to be honest, especially by some of the stuff that Darren said. And I hope you enjoyed hearing his story. He's been through an incredible ordeal, and I think we can all agree that for most people, living through that kind of trauma and having to deal with the never knowing would be too much. And the fact that he's gone on to turn it into something positive is just beyond admirable. He's a really incredible guy. And I would urge you to go and find his book, support the cause, and check in with your mates, especially the men. Ask them, are you okay? Are you sure you're okay? Too many men die because they're just so good at hiding how they feel. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Can't wait to do the next one. And please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Please follow me on Instagram at the Power of the Truth Podcast, or follow me at Mojo Motivator. Yeah. And if you've got any ideas or thoughts about people that would be good for the podcast, send me an email at the Power of the Truth Podcast at mojo motivator.com. I look forward to hearing from you. All right, take it easy, everyone, and I'll see you for the next one.