Mental Health Media Awards – we won!

At the Mental Health Media Awards in November, BBC Bristol’s Surviving Suicide, shown as part of Sport Relief 2008, won the award for Raising Public Awareness.

All the entries were incredibly powerful and the judges had a tough time picking the winners. Ruby Wax did a great job as host – she’s also been an active supporter of Comic Relief for many years, so she was thrilled we won too!

Neil “Twink” Tinning is the Patron of the Comic Relief funded MDF The Bipolar Organisation, and he featured in the Surviving Suicide documentary. He told us that his aim had always been to win an MHM Award.

What really matters to Twink, though, is having helped to raise awareness of a complex mental health issue that is poorly understood, even by professionals. The good news from the MHM Awards is that programme-makers are starting to realise how important a topic mental health is, which will help to fight the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental ill health.