Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello, this is Pearl Lam Podcast and today I’ve invited a dear friend whom I’ve known for, for decades, actually, Suzi Godson. Suzi, can you briefly tell the audience who you are, what you have been doing and not just about sex.

Suzi Godson: So I am currently Co-Founder and Co-CEO of the Tellmi Mental Health Service for young people. Prior to that and, oh, I’m also currently the Times Sex and Relationship columnist and I’ve been doing that for 20 years. And I started as a graphic designer, and you were my first client when I left the Royal College of Art.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hey, in my first gallery! You are the person who did the branding for my gallery. I mean, each of those catalogues is beautiful. People didn’t know maybe. You know, I started with a gallery in 1993. It was a pop up show. It didn’t have physical space, but I have beautiful catalogues designed by Suzi Godson. And each of the branding of the gallery is striped, so each catalogue comes up with the different stripes.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, it was amazing. We played with printing in, in such an amazing way, using special colours and foils and golds and silvers. But also, I don’t know if you remember, it was the early days of the Internet.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, yes, I remember.

Suzi Godson: And we used to upload files from London to a university in the States so that you could download the files in Hong Kong.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And then that was in the 90s where you’d… I mean today they download everything. I remember I have a staff there downloading like the whole night, download the whole catalogue. But it was faster than any courier.

Suzi Godson: Yeah!

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It was, it was really amazing. And the exhibition which I’ve curated for the French Year in China, which the exhibition is a French influence in Chinese Art La France Mandarin. You did the, the whole book and the whole catalogue. That was the last of the last we worked together.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And at that time you have become a sex columnist already. And I thought, what the what, what? Suzi, for me, Suzi, you’re so talented to be a graphic designer. And at that time I remember that you said, okay, I’m going to do a PhD in graphics. I said, what? PhD in graphics? You crazy. I remember I used to come to your house and your daughter Scarlett will be sitting there. We have so much fun. We did, I mean, I think we.

Suzi Godson: We did some really amazing things. I don’t know if you remember, but we, we were some of the first people to use like really, really fine laser cutting to do. To do photographic images but laser cut out of paper.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But we were trying to explore and pushing back and boundaries in every way.

Suzi Godson: And one of the other amazing projects we did for G’s Club, we did the crockery. Do you remember that? Yes. Really early three dimensional graphics programmes. Designing this incredible crockery which then got manufactured. It’s so beautiful.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And at the time we were working with Noriko, the Japanese ceramics. I mean the porcelain. So you were doing design and we were doing. It was quite fun.

Suzi Godson: That was amazing.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. We have done so many projects together.

Suzi Godson: The trouble was it was really difficult to continue that there wasn’t any other clients that worked like that. Yeah, I was like running a studio in London and I was working for companies like Saatchi and Saatchi and Sony and they were so boring. I mean, honestly, in comparison, it was just. And that I just thought, oh, I can’t be bothered.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But, but at the time it’s really because since the first catalogue you gave me that confidence. I just led you to do freehand. You can do whatever as long as you.

Suzi Godson: It was so fortunate. I mean, I was straight out of the Royal College. I was, you know, just full of ideas and I. All I wanted to do was just experiment and to have a client that allows you to do that. And the problem with graphic design is it’s a service industry where you are only ever as creative as your client. And I never had a client that was as creative as you. Again. And so as crazy as me.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Right.

Suzi Godson: So I, so I changed direction.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And also. And also I think at the time it was easy. It was Hong Kong printing. Yeah, we don’t have the limitation of the printing here because if I would have printed it would be so expensive. But because we have the Hong Kong printing and later on it was China, it was, you know, it’s easier that we can experiment all and all different things.

Suzi Godson: We did crazy things. I remember in some. Finding a factory in the middle of nowhere in England to print digital billboards that were the size of 15 buildings to wrap around the club in Shanghai. And standing there while this laser printer went across the floor of the factory printing. I mean, we really. And also I think because we were a bit naive, we just thought anything was possible.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, we were naive because we didn’t know the boundaries because we don’t know how much we can, you know, how difficult everything is and how challenging everything is.

Suzi Godson: And now I think now if you, if you attempted to do any of that stuff, first of all, you know, if you work with a big company, like, the cost would just be extortionate and there would be so many meetings and meeting and meetings and we just got on with it.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, it’s just you, me and Patrice, three of us. And. Okay, just do it.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, if you think it’s great, do.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It, do it, do it.

Suzi Godson: It was so good.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s so. I mean, that was the time. Because I want something different and I respect your creativities and. And we just click.

Suzi Godson: I feel, I feel sad. My daughter Scarlett is a graphic designer. So it’s not far from the tree and she has, you know, she is. She is really an incredible designer, but she works very specifically with people that will allow her to do, you know, the work that she wants to do. It’s very difficult because it’s become so mainstream. There’s so much bad work. There’s so much lowest common denominator stuff.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And also money, you know, budget. Budget is a limit.

Suzi Godson: It is. I mean, and people are very worried about AI I think AI is an amazing tool and I think if it’s. If you use it well and creatively.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But AI must be helping a lot of graphic designs, right?

Suzi Godson: They’re very anxious about it. They’re very worried that it will take their job. And because it is incredibly good, you can do an awful lot, but it still can’t come up with an idea. So if, if you can use it to mould your idea, you can use it very effectively. But if you, if you just, you know, ask it to make you a catalogue, it will just be incredibly boring.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I always wanted to ask you, from 90s to 2000, early 2000, you really started writing  sex columns. How did it all happen?

Suzi Godson: So what happened was I, when I got a bit tired of graphic design, I started, I made a book with some friends. We got together and we wrote a book called Women Unlimited. And it was an illustrated, designed, beautifully designed book which told women how to do basically everything from having a kid, getting divorced, repairing a car, having sex. And it was, we sold it to Penguin and they published it and it was quite successful. But every time we used to go to a newsround or to do media on it, the chapter on sex was in the middle of the book and there would be a crack down the spine because the only chapter anybody ever read was a chapter on sex. And then myself and my friend got given a lot of money to write a book about sex. And at that point I got imposter syndrome. I thought, what am I doing? So then I went to study psychology and so I ended up getting a PhD in psychology. That book was translated into 15 languages. The sex book was. And then I got a column in The Independent on Sunday that was the first ever sex column in a broadsheet newspaper. And after the first one got published we got taken to the press complaints committee because people. Oh really? People were outraged. Anyway, we won the case. Outraged, outraged that you would have a column about sex in a national broadsheet.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And then I moved that ridiculous, you know, today.

Suzi Godson: But that is a long time ago, you know, that’s like 20 odd years ago. Yeah, but you know, when you do things for the first time, you of all people should know that you never. It’s never plain sailing, is it? You’re always going to.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But I don’t care about judgement. No limits. That must be why you all follow.

Suzi Godson: That’s why we get on so well. And then I moved to the Times and I’ve been doing that for 20 years.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And so when you first writing as, I mean in an entire graph, a column, is it a Q and A, people sending you questions or you actually write?

Suzi Godson: No, no, I get sent the questions and in fact what happens at the Times is they get letters in from people and people, people never write a three sentence question. They write 400 paragraphs and then in the Times they edit it down to a simple question and then they send that to me and I don’t get involved in any of that. But because I’ve been there so long, I’ve seen how it changed with the different editors. I’ve had so many editors in that time and some of them are quite racy and some of them are incredibly conservative and that determines what kind of questions I get asked.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, so from Independent, how many years before you moved to Times?

Suzi Godson: I think I was only at the Independent for a few years, like two or three years. And then I moved to the Times.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And then Times invited you to join, so you gave up in an Independent.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because at times the readership is much bigger.

Suzi Godson: Yes, in a nutshell.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And they pay you better, of course.

Suzi Godson: And so. Yeah, and I started, actually, when I started, I wrote the column in collaboration with the Times doctor who was a doctor called Dr. Thomas Stutterford. And he had been the times doctor for 27 years, but then he retired, so that just carried on on my own.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So is sex important?

Suzi Godson: Obviously.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): What is it? What is  the difference between sex, lust and love?

Suzi Godson: Well, actually, I don’t think you can take love out of the equation ever, I think.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But don’t tell me Tinder has anything about love.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, no, no, absolutely not. But I mean, if we’re talking the difference between casual sex, which can be fueled by lust, or it can be fueled by desperation, let’s face it, desperation.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes.

Suzi Godson: But if you want to have a relationship, you can’t have a relationship without the, the combination of love and trust and commitment and emotional connection and understanding. And I think that the temptation to take sex out on its own and put it under the microscope, it. It’s sort of nothing without all of the other stuff. And I think that’s why porn is just so soul destroying because, you know, it’s. It’s in the absence of anything other than sex, you know, it’s. It’s boring. There’s only so many orifices. There’s only so much you could do.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Sex, religion, remember, you know, good old days. I mean, it’s not far, far go. I mean, I mean, not many years ago. I mean, the whole Western morality. I’m not talking about Chinese. Let’s talk about Chinese later on. Okay? Western morality is controlled by religion. I mean, Christianity and sex. Sex is fornication, sin.

Suzi Godson: I mean, I grew up in Ireland, Catholic, you know, I mean, it’s.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, my God, is that going to.

Suzi Godson: Become a sex journalist? Yeah, I think, I think religion has done so much damage. But, you know, we’ll leave that, we leave that out of the equation. I think that, you know, thankfully things have changed, but there’s always a crisis that impacts how we think about sex. So in the 80s, we had AIDS, HIV, we had massive advertising campaigns with glaciers and sinking ships and, you know, people being terrified, you know, not really understanding safe sex. We had the whole of the impact of that on the gay community. We’ve had MeToo massive impact on consent. Now you have Andrew Tate. So actually if, even if you take religion away, there’s always external factors that impact how we think about sex.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Actually, actually when we talk about sex, the liberation of sex only started in the 60s when there was an invention of the pill.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Without the pill you wouldn’t have the sexual liberation. Right. So do you think that sex actually equate to women’s power? Because I, I see that because this freedom of having sex, the freedom actually take women out of this, these boundaries and give them that self confidence. I also push.

Suzi Godson: I wish that was true, but I think there is an awful lot of double standards around it. You know, I think men can be players but, but yeah, women will be.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I mean, judge on a woman being.

Suzi Godson: That still stands today. And actually I think Gen Z are, are even more conservative about sex. You know, they’re having, they’re having sex later, they’re having less sex. You know, they’re, they’re very obsessed with consent. They’re, you know, they’re, they’re in terms of sexuality, they’re quite kind of fluid on the one hand, but also confused. So there’s, there’s a lot of changes in that area. But they’re, they are, I would say on the whole more conservative.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Is there a reason why?

Suzi Godson: Well, you see the reason because the.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Parents are so liberated about sex, so, so the children do.

Suzi Godson: I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true. I think there’s a lot of helicopter parenting. I think that, you know, young people are exposed to 24 hour rolling news. The world is going to end. You know, MeToo movement, there’s so many, there’s so much information being thrown at them and they’re still young and their brains are still forming and they’re not quite sure what to make of it. And so their natural instinct is to kind of do nothing and just wait and see. So I think that, you know, there’s, I mean, and you look at underage pregnancy has, has really been tackled very effectively. But that’s also partly because young people aren’t having as much sex. So the government takes credit for awareness campaigns. But there is actually a big shift in that generation and we have. The birth rate is falling.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes.

Suzi Godson: Which is quite worrying.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): The birth rate is falling in and in all the major countries.

Suzi Godson: But yeah, I mean, so I think, I think it’s confusing and you can see even from what I’ve just said, how it’s, you know, working in the area of sex and relationships led me very naturally towards young people’s mental health. I kept getting emails directly to me from young people who were like, I can’t come out of the closet, I can’t tell my parents I’m gay, I’m 19 and I’ve never actually kissed anyone. These young people who felt that they were like the only people in the world that were in this situation. And so for years and years I was thinking, if only I could get them to talk to each other, they could tell each other that they’re completely normal, that there’s millions of people like them, that they’re not the only one in the world. But I’m not a tech, I’m not a developer. So I met my partner Shoshtin and told her what I wanted to do. I wanted to create an app where young people could talk to each other safely and share with problems and support each other. And so we built Tellmi.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s nice. Tellmi. Am I. I love that. Tell me more about how it. I mean, you start with a sex columnist. As a sex columnist and you come up with books, right?

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So what are the books that you come. You. First is the sex book. Second one is.

Suzi Godson: Well, they’ve done a book of my columns which is actually quite amusing because it was. They were taken from a time when I had quite a racy editor.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Your younger days, my dear.

Suzi Godson: And I’ve done a book called the Body Bible which is all about female body image. And that I did with a photographer called Harriet Logan. And we took photographs of women of all shapes and sizes and it was phenomenal because they were, most of them were naked. And so we took photographs of, you know, an 80 year old woman who’d had a mastectomy in the early days of mastectomy or a 25 year old girl who’d had a breast reduction. We had like. So we were able to show every single aspect of the female body. And it’s beautiful, you know, it was a really amazing book. And then I did a few cookbooks, weirdly.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Cookbooks. From sex to cookbooks.

Suzi Godson: Yeah. No, working with a chef, but designing them. And then, then I also designed books for the old Ivy and Caprice restaurants.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, I remember, I remember that.

Suzi Godson: They were rather beautiful as well. Yeah. So, yeah, I’ve been busy.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, and how about writing books?

Suzi Godson: Yeah, no, no, I mean, I wrote, I wrote all of them. I wrote and researched them. And I, I’m really into doing research. I do, we do a lot of research through Tellmi now. Done some really big projects with looking at suicide and self harm, a big project with 2000 autistic young people.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So how did you connect sex and mental health and how did it come to younger people? Because your children, your daughters were younger and therefore.

Suzi Godson: No, not.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Well, how did this evolve?

Suzi Godson: I guess I was, I guess I was aware, looking at my daughters growing up, you know, that things, things could be difficult for them and for their friends. But it was really primarily through young people writing to me at the Times who had issues and who felt like they were the only person in the world with that particular issue. And I knew for a fact that there was millions of people out there with exactly the same issue. And I just, I desperately wanted to be able to connect them. So I didn’t set out to do something in mental health. I set out to do something that allowed people to safely communicate about the kinds of things that they wouldn’t be able to talk about. So all the taboo things like sexuality, like sexual development, like feeling left out, wondering about gender, all of these things, these quite difficult issues that they feel very isolated about. I felt that actually if you could just connect the people who all shared those issues that they would be able to support each other and that that would be a really useful way of helping.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because I find out today, even for gender wise, it’s much more complicated than my time because you have nonbinary, you have this, this.

Suzi Godson: I just kind of think you have to just let people be whatever they want to be.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I absolutely agree.

Suzi Godson: You know, all you can do is support people. It’s, you know, people don’t just wake up in the morning and decide that they want to be gay or trans. It’s normally surrounded by a huge amount of trauma and soul searching and shame and stigma and embarrassment and who are we to judge, you know, really? So I feel that it’s just really important to create, you know, an area for so many of those young people. They have no one to turn to, they can’t talk to their parents. And so allowing them to talk to each other and to come together in groups, which is historically what, you know, gay pride was all about. What the Terrence Higgins Trust did, what, you know, it’s traditionally, there has always been specialist groups that support people who are struggling with specific challenges in health. That’s really common, you know, cancer research or Macmillan or any of those, but less so in areas around mental health or sexuality. And so all I’ve done is take that and make it digital.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, but then, I mean, I always question why today, the younger, the young people, I mean, mental health, this work, mental health has become such a big thing. I mean it’s just pop out the last 10 years, 10, 15 years. Could you understand why? Or forever. We have that, but we never make, we never talk about it, we never put it, you know, we never aware of it. Or is it we are exaggerating all that?

Suzi Godson: Well, it is incredibly complicated. I mean, historically people with mental health issues have been treated incredibly badly. They’ve either been institutionalized or marginalised, you know, all of that. And so people didn’t talk about it. And you know, if you go back to people coming back from the Second World War who had been, who had PTSD, who had been absolutely traumatised, there wasn’t any help. And so they just, they just bottled it all up. And so historically it’s not something that people have felt okay talking about. Now it’s gone completely the other way. And we have adopted the language of mental health. So we casually say we’re depressed or we’re anxious because we feel those things, but they’re not a clinical diagnosis. And there’s a very big difference between routinely feeling a bit down in the dumps and actually requiring a diagnosis of depression. I think there is issues around over prescribing with antidepressants. I mean there’s level of prescribing is off the charts. And that is because, you know, you get 10 minutes in a GP appointment and they want, everybody wants a solution, everybody wants a quick fix. And the reality is, you know, it’s not necessarily the best solution, certainly not for young people. But there’s no money, there’s no systems in place to provide alternative forms of support.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But I find out a lot of doctors just prescribe medicine after medicine without really clearly identifying the problem.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, nobody has time to go for root cause analysis and even things like CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy, which has been rolled out on the nhs, but the reason it’s been rolled out so widely is because they did a massive study with a very eminent economist who showed that it would save the NHS a lot of money. So it was a money-making decision to choose that.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s always about money.

Suzi Godson: And then, and then it has been implemented badly. So for young people, they might get six sessions, it does nothing and there’s no outcome measures. So you know, it’s, it’s, it’s just not…

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Not, it’s not helpful at all. It’s. No, the support is, is minimal.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So when did you start to Tellmi?

Suzi Godson: So we started in 2017 and basically what we’ve built is native apps and a web app where young people can talk to each other about any topic. We have about 200 topics and they can pick a topic, anything from, you know, sexuality to autism, click on that topic and they’re in a feed talking to other age banded young people anonymously about whatever they want. But everything is pre moderated by humans. So a human checks risk assessors and topic tags every single post and reply and anything high risk gets sent to a counsellor. We’ve got in house counsellors all day, every day, in house moderators all day every day. And it’s just a safe system where they have 365 day support. They can talk about anything they need help with, get advice. We’ve got a big directory of all sorts of resources. It’s really simple but it’s very, very, very effective. And we’ve been independently evaluated by University College London and they found statistically significant evidence that using Tellmi improves mental health.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So when you have this idea to set up, Tellmi that you actually con, I mean consult or consult with a medical board or, or, or you feel this because you are, you know, you feel that these young people need communication.

Suzi Godson: We, we, we followed a method called the Lean Startup. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Lean Startup basically means that you just build it, try it, fix it, iterate, you know, try it now. We built a really simple MVP and we tested it with 16 year olds in three different schools and they hacked it to death. And, and then we learned and we built. But we knew from the way they used it that it would get used. We were completely altruistic. We didn’t have a funding model, we didn’t know how we were ever going to make any money. But that was like 2018, 2019. By 2020 we had 20,000 users and we’d had investment. We went into Covid and suddenly we came out, we had 40,000. Jesus. And we were like, what do we do? So then we started selling to the NHS and so now we’re not nationwide by any means and selling to the NHS is very difficult and they operate at, it’s glacial, trying to get decisions made. But we’re in about six different regions and we’re now serving adults as well. And we’ve had a lot of grant funding as well to do our research, because obviously we’re generating unbelievable data on what’s happening with people and it’s, it’s incredibly exciting.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But your, but your age group is from 11 to 25.

Suzi Godson: It was 11 to 25. In fact, it was 11 to 18, then we moved it 11 to 18 and then we moved it to 25 and now we’re commissioned as an adult all age service.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hold on, 11 years old has mental problem?

Suzi Godson: Oh, God, yeah. 11, yep. But Tellmi’s age banded, so 11 year olds are only ever talking to 11, 12 and 13 year olds and the things that they talk about are issues like bullying or problems with friends or, you know, I’ve had a fight with my mum or so they’re, they, they are talking about different kinds of things. But, you know, the self harming is really, really prevalent in 11 year olds and also they’re at that transition to secondary school, which is a very difficult time. So, yeah, it’s horrible to think that kids of 11, 12 and 13 are dealing with these issues, but it’s, you know, it is happening. So we need to get that support to them.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): How are you seeing that, you know, now mental health, this issue is, everybody’s talking about it, newspapers writing about it. Do you actually feel that with more support this mental health issue could be controlled?

Suzi Godson: Yeah, because all of this is, you know, we have a crisis but nobody, there is nobody, nobody’s spending any money on early intervention. You’ve got to pick things up before they reach crisis point and that simply isn’t happening.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I’m sorry. I mean, England, I mean uk, is cutting course budget on everything.

Suzi Godson: Exactly. So. And also what I find amazing is there’s all this talk about the mental health crisis and the problems and the fact that there’s, you know, I mean, it’s incredible. A million children are referred to child and adolescent mental health services. You have to be really severely ill. A million? Yeah. 350,000 of them get turned away once they’re referred. Another 350,000 are still waiting a year later to be even spoken to. So it’s just appalling. I mean, it’s actually just dreadful. So what we’re trying to do is provide support that they can just download and use straight away. So there’s no barriers, there’s no treatment thresholds, there’s no waiting list, nothing. They can just, if the NHS will fund it in a region, they can have it immediately. And that I think is really important because, you know, this relatively small, the suicide rate in under 18. So however, it is the leading cause of death in young people. And for every suicide, there’s another 20 suicide attempts. And if you think about the cost of that to the nhs, I mean, it’s a, it’s a false economy.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Such young age.

Suzi Godson: I know.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Wow, this is, this is frightening.

Suzi Godson: It is actually frightening. I really didn’t set out to be, to be doing this, you know, I set out to sort of solve a relatively simple problem, which I thought I could do, which was to help young people to talk to each other safely.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s ready for you to do. To talk about sex.

Suzi Godson: And sex is a big issue. So allowing them, where else can they talk safely about sex? Can they ask those really difficult questions? Tellmi allows them to get help, proper support with things that they can’t ask anybody else about. Once you talk about things, it’s much easier. You feel much better almost immediately. So we have about 20 staff, but I am about to set up a charitable foundation because I do believe that we can bring in philanthropic funding to help support. Like we’re supporting children who are living in care, children who are young carers, children who are in just really. Who are really the least advantaged children in society and they’re not in regions where it’s funded by the NHS. So I’m setting up a charitable foundation so that we can fund those kids.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): That is very important. If we talk about like 11, 12 years old, they want to kill themselves. That is very sad. And especially when you’re. When UK population is really minimising, dwindling.

Suzi Godson: So but we, it’s. I’ve got a nice story. We do a podcast as well because I felt that it was really important to allow, to hear what it’s like for these young people because actually we read a lot in the papers, but we never really get their stories or hear their voices. So we’ve got a podcast called the Tell Me About It podcast. And in episode two I interview somebody called Thomas who basically we saved his life. When he was 15 years old, he found Tellmi. He’d been waiting 18 months for help. He was suicidal and within five months the community had supported him. He was eating because he hadn’t been eating. He wasn’t self harming anymore. And now he then came and worked as an intern for us. He’s gone to university studying media and he’s now producing my podcast for me. Whoa, that’s so great.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): A beautiful story. Yeah, that’s a beautiful story.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I very touched when you. Okay, what does your podcast do?

Suzi Godson: I just literally interview all those young people and they, you know, they all have.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Do they share their problems?

Suzi Godson: Yeah, they’re, they’re very open. I’m just about to do one with a young person who’s 16 and living in a residential care home. We’ve done podcasts with people who’ve been sectioned, people talking about coming out for the first time, people who’ve been suicidal. Like, it’s, you know, it’s actually quite fun. It sounds really depressing, but when you hear these young people and the challenges they go through, you realise that the media has such a sort of surface approach to what’s going on. You know, this dismissal that, you know, kids are just being harmed by social media and like it’s a wakeup call listening.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But the social media is very pressure. I mean it gives a lot of pressure to all these kids, but these kids are addicted to social media.

Suzi Godson: It’s a sort of a double-edged sword because for some it’s a lifesaver. For the ones who are really isolated, they’ve done repeated studies and they have not yet been able to identify the link. A definite causal link between, you know, smartphones and poor mental health. There’s an awful lot of research, like Jonathan Haidt’s book the Anxious Generation has got all sorts of research that he purports shows that it’s really, really damaging. But the BBC just ran a massive study and they can’t because the smartphone itself is used for so many different things. They use it to do their homework, they use it to take photographs, they use it to watch the news, to read books, to do puzzles. You know, it’s like, what is the component? And obviously like social, social media, there’s, you know, it’s, it creates all sorts of issues around social comparison and, and it’s, and it is problematic.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): It is problematic.

Suzi Godson: That is problematic.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.

Suzi Godson: Tiktok is the worst.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, but it’s, yeah, but, but sometimes you switch on. You see, the Tiktok kids is so addictive.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, well, it’s like they want to.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Know what people is doing, they want to know what is hype, what is not.

Suzi Godson: But it’s quite funny because a lot of old people are now using it. Like my, my husband just got Instagram about three months ago and now just he’s constantly looking at dog videos.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, really, Dog video?

Suzi Godson: Yeah, dog rescue, dog videos. I mean it, it’s, you know, it.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Does because my friends, they compare dark video, whatever cute. They send it, send it to me.

Suzi Godson: But it’s designed to be addictive. I mean it’s absolutely very cynically designed to be addictive and.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But addictive to certain age is one thing for younger people I think.

Suzi Godson: I mean I think it’s a problem for everybody. You know, they now are doing experiments with where they see later language development in babies because their mothers are on the phone the whole time, they’re not talking to them anymore. Really seriously. I’m doing a lot of co creation work which is like I get small groups together and I work intensively with them designing things. Because part of what’s different about how we work is we work with the young people to get them to design the solutions. Because what do I know, like they’re the ones with the issues. But that process itself actually meeting weekly doing something structured like design work with kids who’ve got really big issues is incredibly positive. Like the impact on their mental health is amazing. It really builds their confidence and wow.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): What a big change. Yeah, yeah, it’s a big change.

Suzi Godson: But you know what? It’s not that big of a change. It’s still designing solutions, it’s still design. It’s actually, you know, there’s no way.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, but it’s more contact.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, but there’s no way I would have been able to do any of this if I didn’t have a design background. And actually I think that that’s what differentiates what we’re doing is because we haven’t come, you know, like lots of people set up a charity, they haven’t got a clue about branding, about design, about communication, about how to present something in a way that it would appeal to.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Don’t you think that if these young people, if they find passion, all those mental health problems will be much. I think mental health would be resolved.

Suzi Godson: It often improves at around the age of 24. And you know what happens at 24? You start living your life, you start, you’re an adult, you’re independent, you’re agentic. And so they do see a big improvement in mental health after the age of 24 when they finish college, uni, all that exam stress, all that competitiveness.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, but then when you start working, if you have focus on your work, you won’t think about so many problems.

Suzi Godson: When, when people are doing stuff that they love, they.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, of course they feel better.

Suzi Godson: Yeah, for sure.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Passion really help.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because most of the people, they don’t even know what is their passion. That’s a fundamentally big problem. I mean I know people who doesn’t even know what they really like to do.

Suzi Godson: I think that’s true. I Think I feel all they know.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Is they have to make money.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.:

Pearl Lam (林明珠): They want to have a big house, you know, glamorously. But at the end, you ask them, what is your passion? And usually they say to me, don’t, please don’t put pressure me. I get. Say it’s sad because, I don’t know.

Suzi Godson: I feel really lucky that I had that kind of drive and curiosity to kind of, you know, as you say, when we started out working together, you know, it was like, oh, my God, let’s do this, let’s do this. And I’ve. I’ve sort of continued to be a.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): But it’s good because we ache each other, you know, push you.

Suzi Godson: Yes, yes.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Let’s do it. Do it, do it.

Suzi Godson: Yeah. Well, we should work together again.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, we should. Yeah.

Suzi Godson: Come and do some stuff with me. I think. Love it.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Love to.

Suzi Godson: It’s really meaningful. It’s really purposeful. And you’re saving. Saving people. It’s amazing.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): I love to do that. Yeah. I think. I think now you’re going through a very meaningful path.

Suzi Godson: I am. I am, yeah. I am. And, And.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And all your daughters must be so proud of you.

Suzi Godson: Yeah. I’ve set the bar quite high for them.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So funny. I would love to see your youngest one.

Suzi Godson: Would it? Yeah. Come for dinner.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, I would love to. The youngest one is studying where she’s going.

Suzi Godson: She. She was at St. Martin’s but she’s going to move to Goldsmith.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): So this is the one who wants to be a singer.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And how about the twins?

Suzi Godson: The twins are kind of working in politics.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Politics. Suzy, it’s so nice for you to come here today. We catch up.

Suzi Godson: Yeah.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): We have a good talk. And now I know that you are doing even more crazy things than before. Thank you so much for coming.

Suzi Godson: Thank you for having me.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Thank you joining.

Suzi Godson: It was fun. Bye.