My bad. I woke up this morning thinking it was just another day in London, granted an unusually sunny and warm October day, but a normal day nonetheless. Social media told me I was wrong! Celebrate everyone! It is World Mental Health Day!

Posts and pictures from so many people embracing this opportunity to share their mental health journey, to give a little hope, maybe to heal, to look within, to celebrate life. What a beautiful message of openness and genuine appreciation of the human mind, what a warm hug for all of us who've experienced mental health difficulties in our life.
Then it hit me... what happened yesterday? Or on May 7th? Or July 23rd? Not much. And why not? Why not be mental health champions every day? Why not share beautiful, heart warming, challenging and often very difficult moments to help us heal? Move forward? Love one another?

My name is Valentina and I am a singer and a life coach. I am Italian and I moved to London in 2009, what a ride it has been! Plenty of ups and downs and plenty of stories to share, specifically around mental health struggles and wellbeing successes.
I live in Richmond with my partner Jason, also a musician, who teaches me about patience and pace on a daily basis. We have seen our best and worst, we have walked side by side through incredible highs and face-in-the-dirt lows and we've grown stronger together. I am forever grateful.

I am very passionate about mental health in the music industry because the majority of my friends and the people I care about are musicians, creatives, artists and all-round incredible souls. This is my tribe. Musicians are my people, my community, and I want to make a difference.
I have studied Popular Music Performance at University and a lot of us at Uni struggled with mental health stigma. Let me hit you with some truth. We hear a lot of talk around mental health social stigma, however rarely do we address self-stigma. Self-stigma is the internalizing by the mental health sufferer of their perceptions of discrimination (Link, Cullen, Struening & Shrout, 1989), and perceived stigma can significantly affect feelings of shame and lead to poorer treatment outcomes (Perlick, Rosenheck, Clarkin, Sirey et al., 2001).

What if we were kinder to ourselves and one another? What if we were more open? More compassionate?

What if it was World Mental Health Day every day?

It is hard to be a musician, there is no clear path, no general direction, the right way always comes from within you. It is also incredibly exciting! Inebriating and so fulfilling to express yourself through music, our universal language.

After finishing my Degree in Music I have battled with depression for about a year. I've got to be honest, I was about to edit myself there and replace the verb "battled" with something with a more positive message and less judgement attached, maybe "experienced depression"... however as I am talking about my own experience I feel very well qualified to define it as a battle, cos it sure felt like one!!
Going through periods of not showering, nor leaving the bed, let alone the house. Stuck in a day job that did not bring me any satisfaction nor pleasure, scared of singing because I was too afraid to disappoint myself, constantly telling myself I was not good enough, I was never going to amount to anything. It definitely felt like a battle.
I went into therapy and with a ridiculous amount of perseverance and a few failures I dragged myself out of the trenches, which were becoming weirdly comfortable and strangely appealing.

Then something emerged from within me, here it was. I had a purpose, it was crystal clear right in front of me. I looked around me and there were so many who, like me, were experiencing mental health difficulties on a daily basis, and felt lost. It felt as if I could see beyond my own experience into the systemic one, which pointed to a lack of spaces to talk about mental health and wellbeing in the music industry in a proactive and preventative way. In a way that would stop people from hitting rock bottom by making them aware of their feelings before they were slapped in the face with them.
I now dedicate my life to openly embracing my own mental health, talking about it in a genuine and vulnerable way and creating spaces that empower people to be with their emotions, in order to get to know themselves and their patterns.
I believe that by looking within we are all able to stare in the face of our deepest fears, acknowledge them, and still move towards our vision with courage and grit.

I am here to start an open, compassionate and heart felt conversation

around mental health in the music industry.

Will you join me?

World Mental Health Day... every day!

Valentina Passoni