Natasha Devon

Natasha Jade Devon (born 12 March 1981) is a writer, campaigner and broadcaster. She has visited schools and colleges in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, including in Bangkok, The Hague, Shanghai, Kathmandu, Montreux and Taipei, delivering classes and conducting research with teenagers, teachers and parents on mental health, body image and social equality. She has also taken part in campus wellbeing programmes in British universities including Aberystwyth University and City, University of London, and is a trustee for the student mental health charity Student Minds.

Devon has a weekly radio phone-in show on LBC. She began writing a weekly column for the ''Times Educational Supplement'' in 2015, but resigned from the newspaper in May 2019 in "solidarity with the trans community" after it published an article recommending a resource to teachers that she described as "transphobic". She currently has a monthly column in the online UK edition of Grazia Magazine.

Devon has worked with a number of UK charities and organisations including Body Gossip and Mental Health First Aid England. She is a patron of No Panic, a charity which gives support to people living with anxiety. In August 2015, the Department for Education appointed Devon as its first mental health champion for schools, but axed the role in May 2016. Devon continues to give regular evidence to the Health and Education Select Committees and is involved in political campaigning. In July 2022, she published a novel, ''Toxic.''

Campaigning

Devon's personal experience of mental health issues began as a girl, when her panic attacks were misdiagnosed as asthma. Later, aged 17, she developed an eating disorder which she has described as "a (very bad) coping strategy for anxiety". She studied English at Aberystwyth University.

Devon recovered from bulimia in 2006 and later co-founded the charity Body Gossip with her former school friend Ruth Rogers. At the same time, she began visiting schools to deliver presentations and collect anecdotal evidence from pupils, teachers and parents.

In 2010, Devon wrote an article about her experience of bulimia in the UK edition of ''Cosmopolitan'' magazine. After this, she was given a monthly column 'Natasha Devon Wants a Word', for the publication which ran until 2016.

Mental Health Media Charter

In 2017, Devon launched the Mental Health Media Charter. This is a set of seven simple guidelines for ensuring that imagery and language used in mental health reporting are responsible, genuinely educational and stigma-reducing. The Charter was put together with the help of the Samaritans, Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) England and Beat. It has been endorsed by Girlguiding, the Coalition for Men & Boys & the Labour Campaign for Mental Health.

Where's Your Head At

In May 2018 (for Mental Health Awareness Week) Devon launched Where’s Your Head At with Mental Health First Aid England and Bauer Media. The campaign calls for a change in the law so that provision for mental health first aid would be mandatory in all British workplaces. The change.org petition gained more than 200k signatures and was delivered by Devon to Downing Street on 8 October 2018. It was debated in parliament in January 2019.

Mental Health Champion for Schools

On 30 August 2015, the Department for Education (DfE) appointed Devon as its first ever mental health champion for schools,as part of a wider £1.25bn drive to improve care. Announcing the decision, Education and Childcare Minister Sam Gyimah said: "Natasha is an inspiration to many young people and I'm delighted to have her on board as our first mental health champion. I know that together we can make a real difference in encouraging more young people to talk openly about mental health". Shortly afterwards, Devon wrote in ''The Daily Telegraph'' of her initial caution in accepting the role, adding:

"But then I thought – Why have they picked me? Anyone who's ever watched me on the news knows I'm notorious for being a left-leaning 'gob on a stick'. Surely, if it was tokenism, they'd have selected someone less likely to challenge them? When, during our first meeting the Minister told me that the Government had realised the scale of the problem, they knew they had a responsibility to do something about it and they wanted someone with real experience within the field to advise them, I knew I'd made the right decision."

However, in May 2016 it was announced that Devon's role was to be axed. She was told that her position was discontinued for organisational purposes, to make way for a new interdepartmental role that would be salaried. The decision came days after she had criticised the government's testing regime in schools at the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference, where she had said: "Time and time again over recent years, young people – and the people who teach them – have spoken out about how a rigorous culture of testing and academic pressure is detrimental to their mental health. At one end of the scale we've got four-year-olds being tested, at the other end of the scale we've got teenagers leaving school and facing the prospect of leaving university with record amounts of debt. Anxiety is the fastest growing illness in under-21s. These things are not a coincidence." The BBC
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