Haley Graham : A Conversation on Mental Health, Autism, and Finding Your Way

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make your cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Today we have Haley Graham, a psychotherapist, author and chair
ready founder of Bounce Brighter Futures Foundation. She is passionate
about the transformative power of stories and fostering meaningful connections. Today,
she shares her journey with mental health therapy, autism and
her lived experiences. Thanks for coming on.
As my pleasure. Yeah, I feel really honored.
If you would tell us a little bit about what
you do.
I'm a therapist, So I trained first as an adult
psychotherapist and then I went on to train as a
child psychotherapist in twenty nineteen. At January twenty nineteen, I
founded a mental health charvity for children here in Devon.
Also I write I post sephone LinkedIn about autism and
considering myself sort to some extent on a very sort
of low level to be sort of an advocate for
autistic people.
Now you have a charity, Can you expand and explain
to us a little more about your charity?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah yeah, So, I mean it started off in
twenty nineteen basically with me providing pro bono work two
days a week to local schools, and now today we're
sort of a team of twenty people. We've got twelve
therapists working and providing support to ninety families a week,
so that's sort of one to one specialists psychotherapeutic support
for children, young people and their parents. You know. We
also provide some support to sort of teachers in schools
and that sort of thing as well, where.
You work with the school systems. What are some of
the challenges you find yourself facing.
In Marning the charity. The biggest challenge one hundred percent
is money. It's funding. It's it's such a hand to
mouth existence. You know, you're in a position where you've
only got three months money and you're sort of building
same castles in here. So you know, it's because you're
sort of trying to sort of plan and grow and
think about the future. And at the same time, you know,
if the money doesn't come through, you're going to have
to fold.
And that's what it's like.
I mean, it's such a hand to mouth existence, and
it's it's not getting any easier, you know, getting harder
to get money.
Yeah, I understand that it's tough all around. Now, do
you deal with more artistic people or mental health?
So the sort of clients if you like our service users,
I mean, we provide mental health support. And we were
having a conversation the other day as a sort of
a small you know, just small group of us in
the team, and I would say probably fifty percent of
the children and young people that come through our door
either have a diagnosis of autism or are on the
pathway or you know, have a diagnosis of ADHD. So
it's just very very high proportion of the children young
people that we work with are neurodiversion.
Yeah. Okay, Now with all the people that you do
work with, what are some of the issues that you
have to work with and how complex does it get
for you?
Gosh, yeah, it's a big question.
I mean it's very wide ranging, I would say, and
I think it's probably reflected everywhere that the complexity of
what we're seeing is increasing.
So, you know, we.
Don't get a lot of kids now just presenting with
sort of maybe a little anxiety. You know, there's a
lot of trauma there. So we're seeing a lot of
complex problems within. You know, the kids that are sort
of neurodiversion presenting often with difficulties with school attendance, So
we're getting a lot of that as well at the moment,
a lot of kids who are just really struggling with school.
Do you find that you often deal with kids that
may have bullying as an issue because they don't have
their social skills the way they might need to be
to avoid that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I suppose it's across the board.
I think bullying definitely is part of the picture.
Often online, I.
Would say, and I guess people might disagree with me,
but I would say that bullying is probably secondary. I
would say that kids feel like they don't necessarily belong,
but I think that they really struggle with the system,
and I think it's more about the whole all in
school environments than simply being bullied by other kids.
I mean, that's sort of that's my feeling.
I think it's a whole system thing and a sense
of not belonging in that system and not being able
to find a place within it, particularly you know, spaces.
Where they can feel safe.
I suppose, you know, they're very intense environments.
Yes, it can get very difficult for the kids. Unfortunately,
when you deal with the teachers, what do you find
that you're a dressing in that capacity?
Well, I mean, I suppose at the moment, mainly what
we're doing is we're providing support for teachers because it's
a difficult job for them. You know, they're now having
to deal with a lot of children who are struggling.
They're sort of trying to provide mental health support when
actually what they want to be doing is they want
to be teaching. They want to be educating, and you know,
they're seeing a lot of stuff, they're hearing a lot
of stuff, so they need support. And actually what we're
often doing is we're often supporting them to think about
children and to think about what the needs of that
child might be, but also to support them so they
can go back to class and support that child because
it's a difficult job, you know, I mean, you've got
thirty kids in a class and you've got you know,
five six kids in that class who are struggling in
some way or another.
It's a difficult job.
Yes, it is absolutely a very difficult job. When you
start working with a child or children, you see they
are having some struggles. What are some of the things
that you do to give them a pathway for a
better mindset and to a better future.
Yeah, okay, I think that's really tricky.
I think that it's again we have these conversations, we
talk about these things. I think it depends on the
motivation of the child or the young person, And I think.
If they really want to be in school, then you
can help them.
You can give them strategies if they're highly motivated, you know,
to help them sort of manage their anxiety for example.
You know, we can do that.
We can sort of go through relaxation techniques, we can
go through grounding techniques. We can help them think about
situations that arise and how they might frame those situations
and think about them in different ways. But I think
it really depends on the motivation of the child. And
I think that, you know, we also need to be
careful and I suppose the conversation that we were having
the other day is somethink around as therapists.
You know, we have to be really careful that what we're.
Not doing is we're not just saying to kids that
are autistic or ADHD, you know, this is how to
mask better, or if we are, we need to be
really clear that's what we're saying.
We're saying to them.
If this is what you want to do, you know,
you can try this, but we need to be really
careful that we're not suggesting that their way of being
in the world is wrong.
Right, I agree. The biggest issue I see is when
an artistic person decides that they want to mask it,
they can only do that for so long before it
will start to affect them mentally and create some issues
for them to cope with it.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, and you know that masking and we
hear this so often. You know, we hear of kids
that sort of managing in school. And actually when we
talk to the schools, they say, no, we're not having
a problem here, and the kids are going home at
the end of the day and they're just going into
complete meltdown, and you know, they because it's been so
difficult all day that they've been masking, and so I think, yeah, absolutely,
you know, if they're doing that and then they're getting
burnt out and their mental health is suffering, we do
need to be careful and I think it's something we
need to think about as therapists really and how we
manage that.
Yes, that's true. Now, you reach out to a lot
of areas with posts and blogs. I understand you have
a magazine. I think it's called Bounce Brighter Future. Is
that correct?
Oh yeah, that's our Bouce magazine if you come across that, yeah, brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's our inaugural magazine.
Yeah, the Bounced magazine. So yeah, Bouts Brighter Futures is
the charity.
Yeah, that's great. Now, is that still an ongoing thing
that you do along with your social media? I know
you have a very good impression out there with your
social media along with your magazine.
I would say in terms of my LinkedIn if you like,
my social media presence is very much for me about
sharing lived experience and hoping that that might help people.
By hearing about my experiences, they might feel less alone,
more understood. So I think very much my social media
presence largely speaking for me, is about that.
That's great. I think anything you can do to help
people like that is a good thing. Now, what led
you down this path to do what you're doing now?
So I started out my career as a pharmacist. So
I graduated from a university as a pharmacist. It was
back I guess in what would have been about two
thousand and five something like that. And I have two sons,
and my youngest at that time would have been seven,
and he was really struggling, was really struggling with school.
We could not get him to go. He was very unhappy.
You know, he would be hanging on to the doorframes
in the morning and we would be sort of unpeeling
his fingers on the doorframes and carrying him, you know,
to the car, putting him in the car, and then
sort of taking him to school and trying to get.
Him out of the other side. I mean, it was
it was. It was a nightmare.
It was a nightmare, and we had absolutely no idea
what was going on.
You know, I looked, I looked for help. I tried
to get help.
I sort of went to the GP and you know,
see if I could sort of get a referral to cams,
which is, you know, the statutory service over here cams.
And you know they were interested, to be perfectly honest,
and you know, I was looking for private help and
I couldn't. I just couldn't find any help, and we
couldn't make any sense of it. Ultimately, we decided to
withdraw him from school because I could see I mean,
anybody could have seen it. I mean my son became
very anxious, very withdrawn, quite low, I would say, and
we took him out of school. There was just no
nothing else to do. I mean, there was no other answer.
And I gave up work to home educate him. And
it was at that point really I thought, Okay, I
just need to try and make sense of this. So
I started doing a relatively local psychotherapy training, but that
was an adult training, and that.
Was over a period of four years.
And then I did that, and at the end of it,
then I decided to go on and do a child training.
And that was driven entirely by my need, my desire
to sort of make sense of things, and also to
help ourselves as a family.
When you was going through all this, how did you
approach it? Did you take any steps with doctors. Did
you find out there was artistic What were your findings
on this?
So, I mean we.
Just sort of carried on the best we could. My son, then,
as an adult he's now twenty seven, decided that he
would put himself forward for an ADHD diagnosi, which he
has now. I think he would self identify as autistic too,
and I think that was you know, that's been the
change for us, really, I guess, and particularly you know,
the change for me is looking back at all those
years and all my life really for myself personally, and
how much sense that has made our life together as
a family. And I guess is the reason why I
put these things out there, because I know how much
difference that made to me to have that understanding, and
it's made to us as a family to have that understanding.
That totally makes so much sense, and I'm glad that
it actually did help your family. After that, did you
find yourself going back to school, back to college? What
were the next steps of your journey.
Yeah, So I did my first training, as I said,
quite locally, and then I did another four year training
sort of going up and down to London and did
a child psychotherapy training in that I suppose I had
a desire to do something to help. I think when
I hadn't been able to get any help when my
son was young, I'd sort of made that decision then
that one day I wanted to try and set up
a charity that would provide support for those parents that
were struggling to find help. And even though there's more
understanding out there now, help is still very hard to
come by because thresholds for statutory services are very high,
and you know, private therapy is very expensive. So there's
a huge number of people that just don't know where
to go. Their children are struggling and they don't know
where to go for help.
Yes, that is a huge thing that I hear from
so many different people. When they find their child's artistic
ADHD or whatever the case may be, there's a huge
black cloud hovering around them because they just don't know
what to do. So in your travels, have you seen
where you've been able to be that bridge between the
known and the unknown for these people where you have
lived it so you're able to help them navigate through
some things that give them a better understanding, so that
way they can move forward with more knowledge of what
they're dealing with, I hope. So.
Yeah, I mean, I feel that we were making it
as we went along for so long.
And I suppose in my experience, the.
Things that work for autistic kids works for a lot
of kids. So you know, it's I think that we
have to I guess, help parents be more confident. I
think the parents are worried they're not doing the right thing,
and I think it's really important we help them to
feel that they have the skills, the tool to feel
confident to help their children.
And yeah, I mean I think.
Certainly as a therapist in sort of my own private practice,
I'm able to sort of help parents think about autism
and also think about ways of helping their children. But
there's nothing what's the word, There's nothing complex about it.
Maybe that's not quite the right word. You know, it's
not rocket science, then what I'm suggesting, it's still things
like just being curious, you know, being curious about their experience,
what's going on for them. I think that sort of
curiosity is so important because I think for me personally,
I think I can say, you know, for my family,
what I see in the people that I work with,
whether they're adults or kids. You know, is this sort
of negation of experience. We're told it can't be that way,
it can't be like that. So actually for somebody to
be curious about your experience and be open and accepting
and empathic about that experience, you know, it can be
absolutely life changing. That then helps to support the mental health,
the mental health difficulties that arise as a result of autism.
That's a great help. That's a great way to look
at it.
From where I stand. You know, autism in itself is
not a problem. It's fitting into society that makes it
a problem. A mental health problems result from that. So
actually we're helping these children with their mental health.
Absolutely. I could not agree more. Now, I understand that
you've written a book or two.
Well, I've written one. I've written two, but the second
one hasn't been published yet.
Can you give us a little information about the book.
The first one is about mental health, so it uses
stories about woodland animals to explore trauma, anxiety, OCD, loss, shame, attachment.
The idea is that it helps educate but helps sort
of improve understanding. And I think through understanding then we
find compassion and empathy. Also to help big people adults
have conversations with children and young people, because that's so important.
Being able to talk about our mental health is so important.
Yes, the ability to talk about anything like that is very,
very important. Now, tell me about your book. I believe
you said that it's a story driven book. What's one
of the favorite stories that you've seen to get the
most feedback on.
One of the sort of favorite stories, it seems, is
one called Shadow Monster. And the analogy there is they
don't have names, they're just the names of the animals.
So there's a mouse and a badger. The mouse has
a monster in the cellar, and the monster is obviously
a metaphor for anxiety.
I mean, it's really exploring OCD.
Actually, you know it's more than anxiety, but I know
that sort of people working with kids have used it
to explore anxiety and have done some sort of great
work with it, So you know, they're sort of full
of those sorts of metaphors. And in the story, the
journey of the mouse is actually having to face the fear,
so he has to look the monster in the face,
and when he looks the monster in the face, he
can finally see that actually it's not a monster at all.
It's actually a load of brambles that are sort of
down in the cellar that have grown through a small window.
But he has to face it first, and he has
to attack it, and he has to be very brave,
and it just disappears.
I like that. That's really nice. Now, how's the feedback, man,
It's always nice to hear something positive. Have you found
that has helped the kids in the way that you
hoped it would? Yeah?
Yeah, I mean if it's great feedback from parents, but
and also from teachers, you know, working in pastoral roles
or in send roles within schools doing that work as well,
and therapists, some of my own my say that my
own therapists they don't belong to me. That the therapists
that I have working for the charity they use them too,
which is just wonderful. So yeah, I mean, I think
that the distance, you know, having that degree of separation,
making it about animals and sort of having those metaphors
really can help us to engage with something that otherwise
could be too scary, too.
Scary to look.
Yes, I think that's a great idea, just a great
way to put things across in a very subtle way.
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I mean I hope.
So, oh, I'm sure it's working. Well. You mentioned a
second book. What is that one about?
Okay?
So the second book is based on a series of
interviews I did with late identified autistics. In those interviews,
they told me their stories, and out of all the interviews,
themes arose related to autism. And the themes that arose
were loneliness, masking, vulnerability to abuse, sensory sensitivities, and persistent
drive for autonomy PDA, whatever people want.
To call it.
So, actually, what I've done is I've used the similar
sort of idea. So I've written five stories interwoven into
a six, and their stories set in a fantasy world
aimed at teens.
The fantasy world is called Galiteria.
The stories are very much inspired by the lives of
the people that I interviewed, and they very much explore
the themes that came out of those interviews, and it's
sort of I suppose the idea is that when people
read it, they might see themselves, or you know, they
might gain a better understanding of what the felt experiences
of being autistic.
That's great, when is it due to be released October.
I'm hoping.
All right, Yeah, that's good, really good. Now, how do
people find you?
They can google me.
I think I'm probably on quite a few websites, but
they can find me on LinkedIn particularly or Instagram, so
you could look at our websites bounce brighter futures. So
just search that.
I think you said you was on Instagram as well.
What's your name on that one?
Yeah, Hailey Gray and author at Hailey grayam author.
That's great. Now, what would you like to tell the
listeners that you think is really important that they know
about what you're doing and what you're trying to do.
Oh okay, so I'm going to say what I'm trying
to do is try trying to encourage people to think.
I think the world would be a better place if
we were all more thoughtful and if we are more
thoughtful and consider other people's experiences and have empathy and compassion. Yeah,
I think that's that's That's what I'm aiming for, Just
to help to help people just think and be more thoughtful.
That is just a great attitude and philosophy to carry
through life.
Yeah, I mean it's sort of distilling. It down. I suppose,
but I sort.
Of think that you know, there's it's easy, isn't it,
just to say this is right, this is wrong, you know,
take a side, but it's it's about taking some time
to think and be more more thoughtful.
Absolutely, this has been great, good conversation, good information. I
appreciate you taking the time that come on my show.
I am very grateful for the offer to come along.
It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the
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