Dealing With Grief

It is certainly noticeable by the enquiries we receive that organisations and companies are paying more attention to supporting their staff in terms of mental health and wellbeing.

On some occasions, we have been asked to help supply a speaker who can talk about dealing with grief and how people and organisations can support their colleagues through these difficult times. These are just a few speakers we work with who share their story and offer their own advice on dealing with grief.

CATHERINE MAYER

Catherine Mayer is a bestselling author, journalist, and activist. She is the co-founder and President of the Women’s Equality Party and co-founder of Primadonna, the festival celebrating brilliant writing, music, and ideas and giving prominence to women.

Her most recent book, the memoir Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death, includes letters written by her mother after both women were widowed at the start of the pandemic and one of her talks includes –

Lessons in Loss, Lessons in Life: Insights from the front line of grief – Catherine’s stepfather died at the start of the pandemic; 41 days later, her beloved husband died too. Then came the first lockdown, forcing her to live alone with her fresh grief, seeing nobody in person apart from, once a week and at a distance, her newly widowed mother. She distilled these experiences into her memoir Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death, a book that Marian Keyes said “made me want to cling tight to the people I love while acknowledging their mortality and mine too”, Rio Ferdinand described as a “fantastic book, full of beautiful honesty” and Sandi Toksvig called “the most life-affirming book ever written about death”. In this talk she shares her insights and answers questions about not only living with loss, but learning from it, and why she thinks so many people take the wrong approach to grief.

HEMA PATEL

The last one in the office on a cold January evening, Hema Patel receives a text message that changes the trajectory of her life and puts her on the path to search for greater meaning. The text message contained the news that her 27-year-old cousin had died from suicide.

The news came completely out of the blue. No signs. No warnings. No indicators. Shocked to the core, Hema Patel armed her family with the Help is at Hand booklet and then set about to know everything she could about suicide. Determined to make a difference somehow, Hema almost became a Mental Health First Aid Instructor. And now is very grateful that that wasn’t the choice she made.

Instead, Hema Patel decided to train in RTT, Rapid Transformational Therapy. A form of hypnotherapy combined with NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She learned about neuroplasticity and subconscious reprogramming.

She took course after course on suicide prevention and binge-read every article about university students who’d died from suicide. Hema Patel’s cousin was a final year Med student. Last year, Hema campaigned for a statutory duty of care for university students. Her efforts on LinkedIn contributed to the petition receiving 128,000 signatures, more than the 100,000 needed for a parliamentary debate.

Facing her own fears of being seen and visible on social media and overcoming the negative self-talk in knowing what to say, when, and how Hema has gone from the child whose school report said ‘needs to speak up more’ to actively campaigning for greater awareness of suicide prevention, suicide bereavement support, unhealed trauma, grief, loss and coping mechanisms.

MICHAEL MAISEY

Michael Maisey is an inspirational speaker and founder of CIP Project who takes you on his journey from Prison to Purpose. Michael survived a turbulent and traumatic childhood that resulted in him joining a gang and eventually being imprisoned at sixteen.

Now, the Change is Possible Project (CIP Project) helps those wanting to go on a journey of self-discovery to become a better person, those dealing with a lack of connection with those they love, or those needing help dealing with grief, addiction, trauma, childhood trauma, poor mental health, or are struggling following being released from prison.

Twenty years after the armed robbery that changed his life, he is an accomplished TEDx speaker and also the founder of a nonprofit organisation, the CIP Project, which helps people with mental health, addiction, PTSD, and childhood trauma. He has also written an autobiography, Young Offender, which Pan MacMillan published in 2019.

SIMON THOMAS

Simon Thomas has been a highly successful broadcaster for over 20 years. He began his career in 1999 when he became the 27th presenter on the BBC’s flagship Children’s show Blue Peter.  After leaving Blue Peter in 2005, Simon joined Sky Sports. For eight years he was one of the faces of Sky Sports News and then became Sky Sport’s Football League coverage before going on to present the Premier League for Sky at the start of the 2016-17 season. He is now the main presenter of Soccer Saturday.

In 2017 Simon experienced a life-changing event when his wife Gemma died very suddenly, just three days after being diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Four months later he took the hard decision to leave Sky Sports and devote his time to looking after his son Ethan. Since then Simon has become President of Blood Cancer UK, has written his first book – ‘Love Interrupted’ on his journey through grief, and has written a number of Blogs on his site A Grief Shared. To date, his moving posts on grief, mental health, and solo parenting have been read by over a million people.

if we can help with any of these speakers please do email us on enquiries@scampspeakers.co.uk.