Simon Danczuk calls on music industry to wake up to mental health

Simon Danczuk

Simon Danczuk has called on the music industry to follow the lead of football and wake up to a mental health time bomb in its ranks.

Mr Danczuk called for a fresh approach after interviewing former East 17 star Brian Harvey for LBC as part of a series of interviews exploring political issues.

During the interview, Mr Harvey, who sold 18 million records with East 17 and is now penniless, spoke of his battle with mental health and how he’d considered killing himself.

Explaining how he’d struggled to access support within the NHS, Mr Harvey, now 40, called for better mental health services.

“We need a walk-in centre specifically designed for when, in the middle of the night, someone thinks ‘I am going to hang myself’ or ‘I am going to a forest and jump out of a tree with a noose around my neck’, because I have thought of all these things,” he said. “Desperation takes over.”

Mr Danczuk said he’d decided to press the music industry because he was currently being lobbied by the industry ahead of the General Election. The music industry is pressing for tax breaks and continued government funding for a wide range of initiatives, including the Music Export Growth Scheme.

“It’s a great industry, worth nearly £4billion a year but I think they need to change attitudes towards mental health and do more to support their own,” he said. “The music industry chews up and spits out a lot of people and a study last year by Musicians UK said almost 60% of professional musicians had suffered mental health problems. But no money is going to support these people. The industry is effectively ignoring it."

In contrast, he said the football industry was working hard to raise awareness of the problem.

“There is support for people like Kenny Sansom and Paul Gascoigne – and Clarke Carlisle is doing some fantastic work with the sport mental health charter,” he said.

“But the music industry is still asleep to the problem and I think too many people fall back on a romantic view of mental health. They romanticise the struggles of people like Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. But the reality is there’s nothing romantic about mental health and we need to clear away the ignorance around this problem.”