About Me
My name is Tony Gill, I have been associated with mental health since I trained as an RMN and qualified in 1990, culminating in a PhD entitled “The lived Experiences of People with Schizophrenia”, mental health is a passion of mine and something which I feel needs to be addressed more and awareness raised within the general public. The impact of stigma on individuals is huge and often affects them more than the illness itself, so I want to help to change that.
how are we going to do that?
One of the great arenas to do this is through sport, football is a great avenue for the younger people of today as is cricket and athletics. As an active athlete who competed at a high level, I ran for Yorkshire for several years both representing them on the roads and on cross country. I finished 29th out of 40,000 in the Great North Run with a time of 66.11 and have a best time of 2hrs 30 mins for a marathon amongst some of my achievements, so I understand the need to train hard and also the enjoyment I got from competing and taking part.
my experiences
I have also experienced the lows of competitive sport and also the lows in my personal life. My running career was cut short through injury, a fracture of the knee meant it was curtailed at 38 years old, and I was robbed of some good years, and that wasn’t easy, I tried several times to make a comeback but never really succeeded. It was then I ventured into coaching with my daughter who was 8, and have coached ladies football for the past 17 years and have seen a lot of ups and downs with that team.
so why the website?
I have coached girls and ladies football for 16 years starting when my daughter was only 8 years old. I have experienced many areas of concern in relation to their mental wellbeing, often resulting in a lack of confidence and low self-esteem.
I have seen and heard schoolteachers say to girls “I don’t know why you bother playing football, you’re not as good as boys”. This then erodes their confidences and eats away at their self-esteem and often they fade away from football and are lost to the game.
In my time as a coach I have seen girls lost to football, because of many different types of mental health problems such as anorexia nervosa, anxiety, depression and self-harm.