JED: "Don't let pride stop you talking about your mental health issues"

“Really it came from a place of frustration that I felt for a while,” JED says. “I was not able to talk to my mates about how they felt and about how I felt, and it just came from one incident that happened a year or so ago. Someone that I didn't really know took their own life in the area and I was thinking at the time that we've really got to open up to each other more and to chat more about how we felt but the fact is that I didn't then do that. It is easier not to. But then a bit later I was going through a bit of a time when I don't know if I was depressed but maybe I was just feeling a bit down and I realised that I hadn’t acted at all on all the resolution of being much more open with myself and with others. And realising that just made me start to think about why it's so difficult to do that. This song tries to answer some of those questions and I'm sure there is not a right answer. Every man is different and every woman is different but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that men are in that mentality where they think they don't want to complain and they don't want to be seen as the victim. The fear for a lot of guys with opening up about their mental health is that people will start feeling sorry for them and that's just not what they want.”

For other men, it is a fear of appearing weak but as JED says it's actually the opposite: “If you start to open up then really you are showing strength. If someone starts to tell me about how they feel, then I will just think ‘Fair play, good for you. You’re showing that you are strong and that you are confident. If you start to talk you are on the way to finding a solution but if you don't talk the chances are you might opt for the wrong solutions. I mean the bad solutions. I mean like drink and drugs and one-night stands and temporary relationships and then that's just a bad cycle that will go from worse to worse. Talking about how you feel is the first step towards improving your mental state. You need to accept perhaps that you've got a problem and then once you have accepted that you can start trying to find the proper solutions.”

Jed is delighted with the response from his mates to the track: “They're saying that it's a track where I've been really open and honest and the response has been that this is a song that really stands out. I've been writing poems and music from the age of 11, mostly very bad ones! But now I am 23 and I would say that I'm semi-professional. It’s only really in the past couple of years that I've been trying to release music. Before that it was almost in secret or at least I wasn't trying to put it out and people didn't really know about it.”

But he's been in Brighton for four years now and is finding that it's a really productive place to be as a musician. “I'm originally from Devon and in Devon if I said I was a musician people would say to me ‘Yeah, but what you really want to do?’ whereas in Brighton being a musician is enough in itself.”