Rory McKelvie shared his battle on social media in the weeks prior to his death and urged those suffering to speak to friends and loved ones.
A troubled teenager who opened up about his mental health struggles online has been found dead.
Rory McKelvie bravely shared his battle on social media in the weeks leading up to his death and urged those suffering to talk to friends and loved ones.
But he said he received little support from doctors – and was told to come back when he felt he was “at breaking point”.
The teenager was found dead at an address in his hometown of Biggar, Lanarkshire, last weekend. His death is not being treated as suspicious.
His mum Sharryn shared the devastating news online, writing: “Our beautiful 19-year-old boy Rory passed away in his sleep today. RIP bonny lad.”
Rory told how someone had stopped him from committing suicide in November.
He said: “I was lucky that someone stopped me from committing suicide and the only reason I’m sharing this is because there is always another way no matter what. So please, please talk before doing something stupid.”
The teen previously opened up about his struggles on World Mental Health Day, October 10, and told how he was fobbed off by his doctor because he wasn’t “bad enough yet”.
In a powerful Twitter post, he wrote: “After explaining to my doctor (who knows I already have a pre-existing issue) I was told there are a lot of people worse than me and that I probably wouldn’t be dealt with and that I wasn’t bad enough yet and that I’m going to have to find another way to get help for my issues.
“Basically told me that I need to wait until a get closer to breaking point and then come back.
“The reason I’m sharing something that is personal to me, is I can’t stress how different things could’ve panned out for myself if I didn’t talk and I want to make sure that people know help is there, even though for me I tried and nobody helped.
“So anyone out there who is currently feeling not right, talk to your pals, your family or even f****** me, because those are the people who will pull you out that dark place.”
Tributes have poured in for the popular teen, including from Rory’s heartbroken girlfriend Caitlin Brigham, who said: “My amazing boyfriend got his angel wings this morning.”
A new mental health support line has launched for people working in the music industry.
The phone line, which has been created by Help Musicians UK, will offer advice for not only musicians but those working in areas like management, tour crews and record labels.
The service is part of their Music Minds Matter campaign, which launched after the death of Chester Bennington.
The 24-hour helpline is being launched after the charity’s health and welfare team saw a 22% rise in requests for help from musicians.
It identified a “mental health crisis” in the industry and pledged to set up the support line in a report, Can Music Make You Sick?, published earlier this year.
Image captionNothing But Thieves have discussed their struggles with mental health problems
Mental health is something lots of musicians have spoken to Newsbeat about in the past.
Nothing But Thieves guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown explained how their latest album, Broken Machine, “is mostly about it, it’s affected us in different ways”.
“It’s affected loved ones, it’s affected us on the road.
“If I’m being totally honest, at one point it looked like it was going to break up the band because we weren’t coping mentally with what was going on around us.
“It’s an invisible problem to a lot of people, so the more people can raise awareness and tell people it’s OK to talk about it, the better really.”
Those needing help and emotional support can call 0808 802 8008 free of charge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If you’re struggling with your mental health, you can find help at BBC Advice.
A late Dundee musician has been immortalised with his own pair of unique Adidas trainers.
A flood of tributes have been paid to popular Lee Welsh following his death in July. The talented guitarist played with Dundee band Modern Culture and loved mod culture.
Following Lee’s death, the 27-year-old’s family have tirelessly campaigned for mental health awareness.
On Saturday, before a fundraising night thrown in Lee’s honour, his parents Phil and Lesley were presented with a pair of specialised Adidas trainers emblazoned with Lee’s face, name and signature.
The trainers were created by Lee’s friend and designer Kris Boyle.
Lee’s mum Lesley says the tribute has left the family “blown away”.
She said: “Lee always wore Adidas. The shoes are totally made for Lee. He would have thought they were brilliant and would have them right on his feet.
“Kris and Lee were at school together and played in rival bands. Kris got in touch with Lee’s cousin and asked for a couple of pictures of him. Next thing , Kirsty, Lee’s sister, was looking for Lee’s driving licence – she wanted something with his signature. I asked Kris what his plan was, but he said: ‘Nothing, nothing’.”
Lesley continued: “We met up with family in the Victoria Bar before heading up to Skyaxe for the race night and Lee’s cousin brought out this brown box, an Adidas box.
“On it, it had: ‘In loving memory of Lee Welsh, shine on, you crazy diamond’.
“We opened it up and were totally blown away. There was a picture of Lee on the tongue and ‘Welshy’ under the picture. Lee’s signature was on the back heel tab.”
Kris said the gift was a tribute to “brilliant” guitarist Lee.
He said: “I knew Lee’s mum and dad and it was just an idea I had.
“Lee was in the year below me at school. Every time I saw him, he was always a happy guy.
“I had wanted to use a picture of Lee with his guitar, like a silhouette, but in the end I got his signature sent over and used that.
“Lee was a brilliant guitarist, he was the driving force in his band.”
The family will create a display featuring the trainers.
The comedian’s father killed himself when she was three. She was plagued by the fact he made no mention of her or her sister in the letter he left. Then, 30 years after his death, a box arrived!
Aisling Bea
My father died when I was three years old and my sister was three months. For years, we thought he had died of some sort of back injury – a story that we had never really investigated because we were just too busy with the Spice Girls and which one we were (I was a Geri/Mel B mix FYI). Then, on the 10th anniversary of his death, my mother sat us down and explained the concept of suicide. Sure, we knew about suicide. At 13, I had already known of too many young men from our town who had taken their own lives. Spoken about as inexplicable sadnesses for the families, spoken about but never really talked about … “terrible tragedy … nobody knows why he did it”. What we had not known until that day, was that our father had, 10 years beforehand, also taken his own life.
When I was growing up, I idolised my father. I thought his ghost followed me around the house. I had been told how he adored me, how I was funny, just like him. Because of our lovely Catholic upbringing, I secretly assumed that he would eventually come back, like our good friend Jesus.
My mother, being the wonder woman that she is, never held his death against him. When she looked into his coffin, she felt she saw the face of the man she had married: his stress lines had gone, he seemed free of the sadness that had been dogging him of late. But it was still tough for her to talk about. She didn’t want to have to explain to a stranger in the middle of a party how he was not defined by his ending, but how loved he was, how cherished the charismatic, handsome vet in a small town had been. She didn’t want his whole person being judged.
Once she had told us, I did not want to talk about him. Ever again. I now hated him. He had not been “taken” from us, he had left. His suicide felt like the opposite of parenting. Abandonment. Selfishness. Taking us for granted.
I didn’t care that he had not been “in his right mind”, because if I had been important enough to him I would have put him back into his “right mind” before he did it. I didn’t care that he had been in “chronic pain” and that men in Ireland don’t talk about their feelings, so instead die of sadness. I didn’t want him at peace. I wanted him struggling, but alive, so he could meet my boyfriends and give them a hard time, like in American movies. I wanted him to come to pick me up from discos, so my mother didn’t have to go out alone in her pyjamas at night to get me.
I look like him. For all of my teens and early 20s, I smothered my face in fake tan and bleached my hair blond so that elderly relatives would stop looking at me like I was the ghost of Christmas past whenever I did something funny. “You look so like your father,” they would say. And as much as people might think a teenage girl wants to be told that she looks like a dead man, she doesn’t.
And then there was the letter.
My mother gave us the letter to read the day she told us, but, in it, he didn’t mention my sister or me.
I had not been adored. He had forgotten we existed. I didn’t believe it at first. When I was 15, I took the letter out of my mother’s Filofax and used the photocopying machine at my summer job to make a copy so I could really examine it. Like a CSI detective, I stared at it, desperate to see if there had been a trace of the start of an “A” anywhere.
I would often fantasise that, if I ever killed myself, I would write a letter to every single person I had ever met, explaining why I was doing it. Every. Single. Person. Right down to the lad I struck up a conversation with once in a chip shop and the girl I met at summer camp when I was 12. No one would be left thinking: “Why?” I would be very non-selfish about it. When Facebook came in, I thought: “Well, this will save me a fortune on stamps.”
Sometimes, in my less lucid moments, I was convinced that he had left a secret note for me somewhere. Maybe, on my 16th … no, 18th … no, 21st … no, 30th birthday, a letter would arrive, like in Back to the Future. “Aisling, I wanted to wait until you were old enough to understand. I was secretly a spy. That is why I did it. I love you. I love your sister, too. PS Heaven is real, your philosophy essay is wrong and I am totally still watching over you. Stop shoplifting.”
This summer was the 30th anniversary of his death. In that time, a few things have happened that have radically changed how I feel.
Three years ago, Robin Williams took his own life. He was my comedy hero, my TV dad – he had always reminded my mother of my father and his death spurred me to finally start opening up. I had always found it so hard to talk about. I think I had been afraid that if I ever did, my soul would fall out of my mouth and I would never get it back in again.
Last year, I watched Grayson Perry’s documentary All Man. It featured a woman whose son had ended his life. She thought that he probably hadn’t wanted to die for ever, just on that day, when he had been in so much pain. A lightbulb moment – it had never occurred to me that maybe suicide had seemed like the best option in that hour. In my head, my father had taken a clear decision, as my parent, to opt out for ever.
My father had always seemed like an adult making adult decisions, but I suddenly found myself at almost his age, still feeling like a giant child. I looked at some of my male friends – gorgeous idiots doing their gorgeous, idiotic best to bring up little daughters, just like he would have been.
Finally, just after my 30th birthday, a box turned up.
The miserable people he had worked for had found a box of his things filed away and rang my mother (30 years later) wondering whether she wanted them or whether they should just “throw them in the bin”.
She waited for us to fly home and we opened it together – three little women staring into an almost-abandoned cardboard box.
Now, most of the box was horse ultrasounds – which, I’ll be honest, I am not into. But there was also his handwriting around the edges and, then, underneath the horse X-rays and files, there were the photographs.
Any child who has lost a parent probably knows every single photograph in existence of that parent. I had pored over them all, trying to put together the person he might have been.
The photos in the box had been collected from his desk after he had died. We had never seen them before. They were nearly all of me. He had had all of these photos stuck on his desk. I was probably the last thing he looked at before he died.
My father’s death has given me a lot. It has given me a lifelong love of women, of their grittiness and hardness – traits that we are not supposed to value as feminine. It has also given me a love of men, of their vulnerability and tenderness – traits that we do not foster as masculine or allow ourselves to associate with masculinity.
To Daddy, here is my note to you:
I’m sad you killed yourself, because I really think that, if you could see the life you left behind, you would regret it. You didn’t get to see the Berlin wall fall or Ireland qualify for Italia 90. You didn’t get to see all the encyclopedias that you bought for us to one day ‘use at university’ get squashed into a CD and subsequently the internet. You have never got to hear your younger daughter’s voice – it annoys me sometimes, but it has also said some of the most amazing things when drunk. I think you would have been proud to watch your daughter do standup at the O2 and sad to see my mother watching it on her own. Then again, if you hadn’t died, I probably wouldn’t have been mad enough to become a clown for a living. I am your daughter and I am really fucking funny, just like you. But, unlike you, I’m going to stop being it for five minutes and write our story in the hope that it may help someone who didn’t get to have a box turn up, or who may not feel ‘in their right mind’ right now and needs a reminder to find hope. Aisling
SHE was an unknown writer who tragically took her own life after struggling for years with mental illness.
But Sophie Reilly’s work has at last received critical acclaim for its searing honesty and the joy she expressed in small things as her brother prepares to publish a collection of her work .
Ms Reilly, from Glasgow, died last year at the age of 21 leaving behind poems, drama and prose which have now been compiled into her first book, Tigerish Waters.
Launching next month, the collection has been praised by literary experts and fellow writers, who have hailed the young writer’s burgeoning talent.
The book is to be sold to raise money for the Scotland Association for Mental Health (SAMH), and has been edited by Ms Reilly’s brother Samuel.
Carl MacDougall, President of Scottish PEN, the writers’ association, described her writing as “riddled with honesty” and that the measure of her success magnified her loss.
Fellow poet and author Magi Gibson added: “These are extraordinarily insightful pieces from a hugely talented young writer we have lost way too soon.”
Mr Reilly, who is also a writer, said that Tigerish Waters is both a celebration of his sister’s creative energies and a record of their destructive nature, which he hopes will aid other families who have a loved one struggling with mental illness.
He said: “I had the idea to put the book together shortly after she died. She always wrote from a very young age, very personal stuff where her place in the world was her main focus. It was difficult to read this stuff at the time, and I used to suggest that she write about something other than herself.
“When she died I went back to read it again, and was shocked to realise how powerful her writing was.
“We hope it reveals Sophie as she was, and in so doing, encourages her readers to reflect on the mental illnesses she suffered, and which continue to afflict so many young people today.”
He said that despite its tragic starting point, the book is “sadly uplifting” and that his sister, who suffered from bipolar disorder among other illnesses, wrote best when she was writing from a place of hope.
The 24-year-old said: “The writing itself is sadly uplifting, and I did not know how that could be because it was such a difficult time for her.
“What spurred her into writing was the compassion of people who reached out to her, and the moments when things seemed hopeful and optimistic.”
He added: “It’s very easy for people to think that mental illness defines who they are. But she wrote that ‘we are people, not diagnoses’. That was her rallying cry.
“She was an effusive, charming, bright, passionate and witty girl who was extremely funny. That comes across in the book.”
Jo Anderson, Director of External Affairs at SAMH, said: “Knowing how important it can be to open up and talk we hope people who read these works will be encouraged to start their conversation.”