Roman Kemp: Our Silent Emergency review – “Please stay, don’t go”
BBC documentary Roman Kemp: Our Silent Emergency explores the mental health and suicide crisis affecting young men across the country. Leaving his headphones in the Capital FM studio, radio host Kemp presents this documentary not as a broadcaster, but as someone who has lost a friend to suicide. Our Silent Emergency sets out to uncover why his friend couldn’t ask for help, and why his death wasn’t an anomaly.
In early August of last year, Kemp headed to the Capital FM radio station for his morning show. On his way in, he noted his best friend and producer, Joe Lyons, absence and assumed he had overslept. While Kemp was still on air, the Executive Producer entered the booth with bad news. Simply asking, “is he gone?”, deep down Kemp felt he already knew the answer.
Kemp and Lyons’ story first started seven years ago in London’s Trafalgar Square, where the duo met at Kemp’s first broadcasting gig. Lyons was the producer, and one of the first people Kemp met on the job. Over the years, working together, an inseparable bond was formed, only to be broken apart by Lyons’ struggles with mental health.
In wrestling with the heartbreak and tragedy of his best friend’s death, Kemp discovered some heart wrenching truths about the male mental health crisis in the UK that led to his making of this documentary: On the same day Lyon died, seven other young men died from suicide too.
Kemp travels up and down the country, trying to uncover how we came to this mental health crisis. In Nottingham, he meets the call centre staff of a mental health emergency service partnership between the police and NHS. One officer is dealing with a 16-year-old caller who, “doesn’t want to be here anymore and that he wants to die”. The centre is manic, and Kemp explains that more people than ever have experienced mental health issues during the pandemic. “There’s a suicide risk from a 13-year-old just coming in,” says one female operator. The call centre has had phone-ins from people as young as 11.
In Belfast, the shocking truth of how young some sufferers are becomes clear. Kemp meets a group of young school boys whose best friend Karl took his own life two months into lockdown. He was their “main man,” the “class clown,” and fuelled by a “happy energy”. He was 15-years-old.
The documentary explores the ‘silent’ aspect of this mental health emergency well. In Edinburgh, 19 year-old Fergus sits on a park bench with Kemp explaining how he replied to a text from his mum on the family WhatsApp group saying “I’m fine, how’s everyone else?”, before making an attempt on his life two hours later.
Kemp candidly describes his own experiences with suicidal emotions throughout the documentary too. Starting the segment making protein oats in his flat, he takes his vitamin D tablet and anti-depression medication on camera. He recounts the peak of his own struggles with mental health the year before Lyons died where he “just got caught out by everything”. He called his mum, who thankfully came to his aid. It is only now he shares how close he came that day to going to the station and jumping in front of a train. It’s Kemp’s film, but it also speaks for the three in four men who feel they cannot confide in those close to them, the one in five who have suicidal thoughts and to the one in three who have lost someone to suicide and now are subject to the same emotions.
Kemp concludes his journey for answers where it all began, in the Lyons’ family home. In between shots of photographs of Lyons as a child, his mum explains how she misses his hugs, his fridge raids, and his enquiries over what’s for tea that evening. “I just miss him really,” she says before making a plea to anyone struggling; “please stay, don’t go.”
Kemp’s documentary has been hailed as a must-watch, and it is. But, ultimately, watching is only half the battle. We must talk about it too.