Dr Alex George has been appointed as a youth mental health ambassador to advise the government by Boris Johnson today. Posting the announcement on Twitter, he stated that he will be working to ensure the Government ‘make mental health a priority’, something he has been campaigning for a lot in recent months.
As a medical professional, Alex spent four years working in the Emergency Department as a junior clinical fellow at Lewisham Hospital but announced in November last year he that he was leaving to start GP training. He graduated in 2015 and spent a year at King College Hospital before joining Lewisham Hospital.
While Dr Alex isn’t a mental health expert from a medical standpoint, in a YouTube video posted announcing his decision to leave A&E, he said one of the main reasons he wanted to become a GP was to help patients ‘become healthier and happier’, focusing on ‘prevention’ as oppose to only dealing with emergency cases. (He also couldn’t commit to the training rigours of A&E while maintaining his other projects including his podcast, book and charity work.)
‘General Practice is amazing because it allows you to…treat people as a whole, head to toe, and over a longer period of time,’ he explained. ‘You get to know your regular patients and form relationships with them, you can see the outcome of your interventions.. you get to know their family…there’s an amazing holistic element that fits with what I’m trying to do at the moment.’
Alex’s commitment to helping people ‘head to toe’ is in no doubt a commendable one, clearly shifting his focus to be able to include mental health help in his work as well as his ambassador role. But some might not know that his desire to help improve mental health support is not just clinical, it’s because of his harrowing family history.
Last summer, Dr Alex George’s brother died after battling with mental health issues.
In July last year, the doctor's 19-year-old brother Llŷr ended his own life after struggling with his mental health. ‘I miss being brothers with Llŷr and while I’ve always been a mental health advocate, losing him galvanised the passion I have for it,’ Alex wrote in a piece for The Sun last month. ‘Getting that phone call from my dad to tell me [that his brother was dead] was the most indescribable physical pain I’ve ever felt. There’s nothing like it, so any way I can stop other families going through what we did is worth it.’
Alex explained that he had previously had no idea that his brother was struggling with mental illness saying ‘Not once did Llŷr tell me how he was feeling, I'm a doctor, we were very close, he knew I was a mental health advocate and hugely passionate about it.’
The painful tragedy is what inspired him to contact Boris Johnson in order to have a meeting about ‘support for emotional and mental wellbeing’ in schools, penning a letter on Instagram to the prime minister.
‘My brother passed in the summer and since that happened I was like “we’ve got to make this change”’ he said in a YouTube video announcing his ambassadorship. ‘I spent months and months speaking to all the mental health charities, experts in this fields, psychiatrists, educational leads, very importantly, students who really understand what’s going on.’
According to the children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, mental health services in England do not currently have the capacity to cope with the impact of the pandemic on children’s mental health. Before the latest national lockdown, an NHS study found that one in six children had a probable mental health condition with Longfield warning it is highly likely underlying mental health problems will continue to remain significantly higher because of the pandemic.
Hopefully, with someone like Alex who has a huge following of 1.6million people on Instagram alone, a deep passion for the topic and a clinical understanding of healthcare, he will prove the perfect ambassador for tackling this crisis.
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Dr Alex George On His Campaign For Better Mental Health Support In Schools