A Morning Chat With John Rattray

Sat in a soundproof booth at 9am John Rattray generously gave up some of his morning to discuss Why So Sad's collaboration with Nike SB.

Why So Sad's mission to open up the dialogue surrounding mental health utilising skateboarding has gone from strength-to-strength, and this latest collaboration will hopefully open it up further.

For those who aren't aware of John Rattray’s professional skateboarding career spanning from early Blueprint to (my personal favourite) Zero era, we’ve compiled his parts on a blog here.

**The following conversation discusses some topics that some readers may find distressing, trigger warnings for Suicide, Alcoholism and Depression.**

Follow the mission - https://www.thepredatorybird.com/category/why-so-sad/

Hi John, where are you?

I'm just at the Nike head office working on the last parts of the Why So Sad collection.

The shoes are out soon, what's left to do?

We're finalising a landing page to have the entire backstory of the shoe and 'Why So Sad' kind of summarised, which will hopefully be pretty digestible. People will be able to scan a QR code on the box and literally land on that page, that will be finished by the end of this week. The first rollout will have a Q&A interview with me talking about the backstory of it as well as a Q&A with Chris Jones. Chris came up to the Glasgow event too.

There's going to be a 15-page comic by Jon Horner which is heading out to shops too.

Yes, we love Jon! We've worked together before.

I love that about the skateboard industry, you can go from skate shop stuff to bigger projects like this. I’ve worked with him quite a lot over the years with the Why So Sad mission. His work is always on point, fast and clever, and as you know - it will be kind of pointing back to the story. There will be other relevant information too, we'll have a list of all the organisations that Nike and Converse support plus shouting out more of the community impact side of things, including the Ben Raemers' Foundation, The Centre For Healing And Justice Through Sport, The Crisis Text Line and a couple of others.

So what’s your overall goal with the collaboration?

With Why So Sad, I have this anecdote that 'If I had a quid for every time I heard "skateboarding saved my life...", I'd have quite a lot of quids.' My point has always been that that's great but if you continue the therapeutic process, the next questions are 'why does it do that? what is it saving you from? what are you escaping from?' Then you do the follow-up work to understand yourself and where your emotional responses come from. What happened to you as a kid when your brain was developing? Were there problematic situations which affect responses? Learning how skateboarding and activity in general can help someone, it's critical to find out why. I've read the game changing work that's been done over the past few years on this subject. It’s the “Oh this is why my emotions can get so fucking crazy sometimes…”, for me it was growing up from the ages of 3-13 in a house with a terminal alcoholic, and that had a really severe impact on my stress response and how it operates as an adult.

Understanding that and noticing those responses gives you the agency to manage it, so the point of the project is to ask the question ‘you have crazy emotions, why are they happening?', and take that question seriously. Instead of saying 'let's skate, then go get wasted', it's 'lets skate and then sit down and have a panel discussion about the mechanisms of suicidal ideation, neuroscience and what we've learned about mental health over the last 30 years since the development of the ACE study in the early 90s.'

It feels to me like the shoes are just a byproduct of what you are trying to achieve, is there any truth to that?

Exactly, when the team asked if can they do this project, at first I was thinking it's a big yes. I think the community support on these Nike projects are an awesome part of what they do, the Skate Like A Girl shoe is a great example. Mental health and suicidal ideation can be a heavy subject, the whole point of Why So Sad is to find a light hearted way of crossing into that subject, I hope that comes across in what people have seen so far.

Getting to the point of being asked to do the project, I said 'Yes' because it gets a really talented team of folks to rally around a subject that we can shine light on, have the conversations, learn, and show people that this subject of mental health and the mechanisms of suicidal ideations isn’t as scary as it is. Mental health has had a bad history, in the 90’s it was still One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and straight jackets, but we are getting past the stigmas through some of the work. I’m here shouting look at this, it's fascinating and it's not scary, there's some groundbreaking work which we can all learn from.

The other thing is that I wasn't properly diagnosed with suffering from depression until I was 39 years old, there was a moment of knowing and saying to myself 'this is what it is...depression and it has been there my whole life, as a teenager, my twenties and my late 30's, why did nobody tell me that before now?'.

I was given a concrete term to investigate and low and behold, here's the work I found. So, let's show it to everyone, let's point to the work.

If you don’t mind me asking, was there a deciding moment that led you to seek help or even a diagnosis?

It was a confluence of factors. It was still 2017, I was still struggling with my own sense of self-identity, of who am I beyond being a professional skateboarder. I hadn't landed on solid ground in terms of confidence in life after skating. I was still grieving the death of my sister, when someone close to you dies by suicide, it tears you apart, so that had still been going on. I’d moved 6000 miles away from my roots, setting up a small family unit in a different country, alongside financial stress. There were also questions over what my professional life might look like in the future and that was in the back of my head, there was so much uncertainty. My stress responses went out of control, I had no understanding of what was happening and when that starts to get chronic then your brain starts surfacing these ideas that maybe you're just damaged forever now and you're done, so it's time to self-destruct.

That stuff all started coming in to my head, that's when my wife was like - 'let's please go to the clinic', I answered their questions which led to ‘so, you now take these pills.' (that's because they just treat symptoms in isolation). There's really amazing work by certain organisations that look holistically at different factors across your life. From that, taking some action in itself helps you take note and gives you some agency of what's happening to your brain

‘Lost connections' by Johann Hari is just a really good summary of his own learning journey looking at what depression is and how it works, what causes it, some biological factors and a bunch of circumstantial stuff that conspire around you to get you into a bad place emotionally.

Then I read 'Waking Up Alive' by Richard Heckler, the book is a collection of case studies, for context he was a counsellor in the San Francisco Bay Area, he worked with a bunch of people that had attempted to die by suicide and not managed it, so they woke up alive. He was a councillor who worked with patients in 1994, themes that showed up in all the cases were some combination of alienation, forms of disconnection from social contact, extreme family dysfunction, or the other one is some form of traumatic loss, and that was a year before doctors in a preventative care unit at Kaiser developed what became known as the Adverse Childhood Experience study. The study was really broad and a statistically significant survey that figured out there are a bunch of factors that can happen to you growing up, adverse experiences and trauma when you're a kid developing can affect you, this was a year before what is now known as neuroscience. When I went back to present my feelings to the family doctor and talk about how I thought I was doing a bit better now, she gave me the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) questionnaire. That was the first time I'd ever seen it and the story of how I got here, knowing all of this you don’t have to fight in the dark anymore.

Do you want to touch more on the actual footwear side of things? I feel like that will get covered elsewhere badly by sneaker bloggers anyway haha.

We’re trying to make a little behind the design video for the colourways on the Bruin and Dunk, they're both basically coloured after the patches and stickers that we've made over the years. Mau the colour designer is really great, he can match Pantones just by looking at them. We also used some of Jon Horner's art for details which ties back to the campaign, and then we made the swoosh wear away, which has been done a few times but it goes from a blue swoosh to a yellow swoosh which I call 'the process', recognising you are in a bad way, taking action, taking yourself out of stressful situations and doing the work to figure out how to find a baseline of happiness.

The Dunk has a translucent outsole, but that's just because I got psyched watching a sneakerhead on youtube who called the sole unit the Heisenberg Ice, so forever I wanted the ice on the shoe haha. The Bruin is rad, it's designed on the new Bruin High which was developed for and by Women and Non-Binary skaters. It's a democratic colourway, a blue Dunk with contrasting stitching, it'll go nice with a pair of jeans... you can edit that to go nice with some fire drip with big boys.

The Sad Plant programme went down amazingly, now you're on the Sad Grab mission, what's next?

I love this one because it's only really called a Sad Grab in certain pockets of the UK. It was the 'melancholy' of course, then it got shortened to the melon grab. I love when I tell the story to the kids today because it's not named after the fruit, it’s about an emotional subject which you can have fun with and talk about. I recently added in the Mayday, a request for help, it's important to learn to put away the machismo and ask for help. Sometimes you actually do need to help each other and you'll be surprised how much people are willing to help if you ask.

As a team we've taken part in the Suicide Prevention Training provided by Living Works Start through the Ben Raemers' Foundation. We definitely came out of it feeling more confident in talking about suicide. How have you felt through training programmes and how did the participants of your event in Glasgow come away...?

Personally I've done the 'Living Works Suicidal Prevention' training, and I've done the mental health first-aid course for adults and adolescents too. I found myself using the skills in few circumstances and with someone who was actively having suicidal ideation.

I was able to have the confidence to ask a question ‘Do you have suicidal thoughts? Is that something that is happening to you?'. It happens and it's not something that you intentionally think in your thoughts automatically. Most of the time you can use an executive function to make clear rational decisions but when you're under chronic stress that sort of thinking will breakdown and you need to act on this purely automatic thing and go through that.

I went through the coursework avenues, I had conversations and found out about the Scottish Mental Health Association, and that there is someone who is called 'The Suicidal Prevention Manager' for Scotland, and we managed to have them sit right there at a skatepark and talk about mental health.

I think it gives people, at least I hope it gives people confidence to have the conversation and to be able to speak up without fear or just keep going. We learn more every time we do these events, Chris Jones came up for that get together in the rain in Glasgow and I'm hoping to do one in Portland, then we will re-gather our energy and look what to do next.

Next time you find yourself in the UK we'd be keen to do something alongside Why So Sad and yourself.

Yes, let's do that.