Our Time features in Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood

Our Time features in a BBC One documentary by the fitness coach and author Joe Wicks MBE, broadcast on Monday 16 May 2022.

In Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood, he confronts for the first time the challenges he faced growing up. Both his parents struggled with their mental health – his father was a drug addict, and his mother has OCD and an eating disorder. As part of his journey, he investigates the impact poor parental mental health can have on a child, through an interview with our CEO Dympna Cunnane and also a conversation with Kirsty, one of our Trustees who was supported by Our Time as a child. Joe asks what support is available to others in similar circumstances, which takes him to one of our KidsTime Workshops and also to a primary school running Our Time Schools.

We are delighted and proud to be involved in this film, and are very grateful to Joe, Mindhouse Productions and the BBC for this opportunity.

You can watch the documentary here, and you can also listen to Joe Wicks on our podcast My Family, Mental Illness… and Me.

Have you been affected?

If you’ve seen the documentary, you might have some questions about growing up with a parent who has a mental illness. Or maybe you’re a parent who’s struggling with your own mental health. At Our Time we do not provide direct support, but we have put together a list of brilliant organisations that do.

Support

Our work

If you’d like to know more about our work in communities and schools, you can find out about our KidsTime Workshops here, including a template letter that you could use to ask about setting up a workshop near you. You can learn more about Our Time Schools, our outreach programme that raises awareness of parental mental illness among staff and pupils, on our website.

For the latest on what we’re up to, head to our news page, and you can hear from the families we support in our workshops and schools on our stories page.

Make a difference to young people's lives...

Sign our petition

If you want to join us in our campaign to improve the support available to children of parents with a mental illness, sign our parliamentary petition.

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