We meet Mark Leader, father of Joshua Van Leader, whose 'Inspire to Inspire' exhibition at Moda in Quarry Hill formed part of the Baton of Hope suicide prevention tour.
00:00There are many people like Joshua out there who are suffering and they need help and it's very difficult to get help and I would encourage everyone to be kind and be sympathetic when people are struggling. Be a light that never goes out. We are all in this together. Long live all the magic we have made. And those are three sayings that are in Joshua's poetry books.
00:24The Leeds Leg of the Baton of Hope Tour on World Suicide Prevention Day saw 84 baton bearers all bereaved or affected by suicide traverse the city. One of the stops was the Joshua Van Lieder Inspire to Inspire exhibition at Moda in Quarry Hill, running until the 30th of September.
00:42Joshua was a Leeds United Academy footballer who went on to play semi-professionally in America and Australia before studying at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
00:52A series of health challenges led to his suicide in 2022 at the age of 31. Joshua's dad Mark is the project lead at his son's exhibition.
01:02Joshua had a pectus excavatum. He had a slight concave chest and he felt as though that was hampering his breathing.
01:09So he rushed into an operation in America and the operation didn't go well.
01:15They brought his ribcage out, put a bar in and it just didn't go well at all.
01:21For his constant pain he was having afterwards, they put him on a drug called Oxycontin, which is an opioid.
01:28Back in 2017 the side effects weren't all that well known. They're well known now and what it did to Joshua, it took him into a very, very deep and dark depression.
01:41Joshua came home at that point a very different person to when he left.
01:46His mum encouraged him to paint, to channel all of his negative emotion into painting.
01:52He spent the next five years creating an amazing fine art collection, which you can see behind me.
02:00And this fine art collection is about the ocean and Josh spent a lot of time at Filey Bay, at the brig at Filey Bay.
02:10It was just his, where he felt great and it's where everything about the ocean, it helped him with his mental health.
02:18In parallel to that, he did three volumes of poetry books called Somewhere Between the Sand and the Stardust.
02:27As Josh got to the end of his life, he really focused on helping people and people who were struggling with their mental health.
02:37So after Joshua passed, he wanted us to make sure people saw his art.
02:44Every kind of person can come into this space, they can just have a conversation and they're comfortable.
02:53There's still a lot of stigma associated with suicide and it is wrong.
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