TOM DAVID

Tom David joined the business consultancy profession having gained an Honours Law degree from the University of Edinburgh in the mid-1980s.

He spent 16 years developing major information systems and corporate change, before completing his employment years advising clients on global corporate mergers and acquisitions in corporate finance.

In early 2002, he decided to give up his paid employment to start his own business, offering his expertise and experience to the NHS in the UK, determined to build a service to help senior executives running our healthcare sector transform a failing system by re-engaging and re-empowering front line doctors, nurses and allied healthcare professionals to lead change they wanted in the service. The only focus was on improving the quality and safety of patient care. Nothing else. Over the following 20 years, a two-man team worked with over 160 of the NHS’s 220 NHS Trusts, supporting medics to deliver sustainable improvement to their work environment and the care they were able to offer to their patients.

The business proved a resounding success, feeding Tom’s commitment to supporting deserving causes, including pro bono work for UK hospices, and financial and operational support to various UK wide charities in the military and defence sector, the arts and sports, and cancer care.

Success in his business career and family life came at an enormous cost though.

Struggling from an early age from the loss of a father who replaced the love and affection and support a young man needs to thrive with criticism and challenge he was too young to understand, Tom’s early years set him up for a lifetime of longing for the love, affection, and affirmation he missed without even understanding why.

Everyone in life has a handicap, often with its origins in our formative years. The damage parents can do to their children, unknowingly and unwittingly perhaps being generous, is devastating in its impact.

It cost David 40 years of angst, stress, strain, and anxiety that was to eat away at his physical and mental health for over four decades and more. Trying desperately to prove himself to everyone, everywhere, constantly took a heavy toll, as David searched for something he wasn’t even aware he was missing.

There was only one destination, ultimately; severe mental health challenges that jeopardised his very existence. Diagnosed with clinical depression in 2018, the past few years has been an enormous challenge for David; retiring from his business career, leaving his 30-year marriage, and setting out on his new life on his own after successfully raising his family and seeing his three children set out on their own course in life.

It took David seven years to arrest his decline and his depression diagnosis and re-discover his health and happiness. Through the dark days of crashing lows and lost weekends, David found the courage and perseverance to search out for ways to improve his health and well-being, overcoming the obstacles and barriers living with mental health challenges inevitably throws at you.

Far from a linear process, with many ups and downs over the years, the overall trend was positive, despite the devastating news that two friends over this period had taken their own lives, unable any more to cope with their illnesses and its impact on them and their families. Let no one say that people living with mental ill-health are not courageous. They are the most courageous of us all, living with their conditions for decades and surviving the damage they are suffering from, mentally, physically and emotionally.

It was David’s loss of close friends that spawned the writing of Project You, intended to save, perhaps, just one person, from succumbing to the most insidious and cruel illness of all.

Losing friends to suicide is incredibly difficult to take, doubly so when you wrestle with your own mental health daily. It’s not okay that as a society we are so ill-equipped to treat people struggling with their minds and thoughts just to the same extent that we treat people with any other illnesses, diseases, or injuries.

Against this backdrop, its clear that our medical profession is way behind the mental health tsumani overwhelming modern-day society with all its slings and arrows waiting to bring us down. If they can’t, as a collective, meet the increasing demands placed upon an historically under-invested service, the only realistic solution to addressing the damage that is being sone to millions of our people in our society is to start to try to help ourselves.

Many people played their part in damaging David’s health throughout his life and the travails he suffered from, and they will have to carry that burden themselves. Karma has a way of working its way around. But David recognises the part he himself played in his decline, constantly and consistently prioritising everyone else in his life over himself.

When you live a life full of criticism and being told you’re never good enough, you start to believe it. Nobody is born self-critical or feeling inadequate, so others must make us so. Recognising the damage for what it is and not taking it on as ‘gospel’ is incredibly difficult, especially when it occurs from an early age when you know no better. But in time, when there is enough maturity and experience and understanding to appreciate who you are and what you are, it is possible to start to learn how to look after your own health and well-being before you worry too much about others.

 

David managed this through the adoption of over 40 interventions he found that helped him regain his health and well-being after decades of suffering. It’s never too late to start to take more care of yourself. Those lifesaving and life-affirming tools and techniques have changed David’s life for the better, and they can help you too.

Project YOU is his first book, and a testament to his strength and resilience to overcome one of the greatest challenges anyone can face in life: being uncared for and unloved, and finding the wherewithal to find a way to fight back and prosper from your own efforts. Enjoy. Stay well. You are not alone.