Richard Royal

Richard Royal, Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool, has backed calls for better provision of support for local people in mental health crisis. Mind, the mental health charity, is calling for local services to deliver on their promise to improve the support for people who are suicidal, self-harming or in psychosis. Royal is a former Trustee of Mind and a mental health campaigner who has raised over £3,000 for mental health charities through sponsored swims in r

*Featured in Young Minds Magazine* A brave swimmer has taken part in an audacious escape attempt from one of the world’s most notorious prisons to raise money for YoungMinds. Richard Royal swam from Alcatraz Island, home to the ‘inescapable’ famous former federal prison, to the San Francisco mainland. The iconic event is a 2.5k (1.5 miles or 100 continuous lengths of a standard pool) swim in the rough waters which can reach lows of 12c and in parts is over 100 metres deep. Al

In recent weeks there have been renewed calls for social networking sites such as twitter and Ask.fm to provide greater user protection and clamp down on ‘trolls’ – not the creatures under the bridge, but those who purposely create discord, antagonise and upset people online for the sake of their own enjoyment. It follows numerous tragic and disturbing cases involving threats of violence, defacement of memorial pages and several suicides. Some national newspapers have since l

Last week (17/2/13) we saw an apparently landmark ruling, as a scarf-clad student stood outside the courts declared that young people would no longer be forced into slave labour by the evil right-wing Government. Unusual in the circumstances, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of pride when I heard the decision, having been following the full story for a while. Not because the young student, Cait Reilly, had won a victory over a particular scheme, nor because I hate pound shops