There are some truly terrifying numbers in a new survey on behalf of the End Violence Against Women Coalition [PDF document]. The study, of around 4,000 Britons, found that:

• 33% people think rape isn’t rape if there isn’t physical violence;
• A third of men think rape isn’t rape if the woman had flirted during a date;
• 24% don’t think rape is rape if you’re in a long term relationship;
• 11% believe that the more sexual partners a woman has had, the less harm she suffers if she’s raped
• 40% don’t think it’s rape to stealthily remove a condom during sex;
• 6% think it isn’t rape if the victim is asleep or too drunk to consent.

Attitudes were significantly worse among the over-65s: more than 1/3 thought non-consensual sex wasn’t rape if the person is your wife or partner, compared to 16% of under-24s; 42% think it’s okay to keep going if the woman changes her mind compared to 22% of under-49s.

That matters. As the Coalition’s report explains:

The whole document makes for important but thoroughly depressing reading. We need to be better than this.

This is heartbreaking. Sculptor Gillian Genser has been slowly poisoned by the shells she used in her artworks.

In 2015, I was diagnosed with heavy-metal poisoning. Doctors found high levels of arsenic and lead in my blood, the result of chronic exposure. The water where the mussels grew was likely contaminated from industrial waste, and the mussel shells I’d been working with for decades were toxic. Metals can be absorbed through consumption, air or skin. I’d been exposed in every way.

Genser’s work is very beautiful, I think, and she says that her poisoning makes it even more relevant.

When we talk about environmental damage, we speak of declines in populations. Numbers and species. But I’ve experienced the suffering of so many creatures trapped in their polluted habitats. I now hope their voices can be heard—that my art might create a sense of awe, a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world.

It’s world mental health day today, which has the worthy goal of trying to end the stigma around mental illness. But we also need to ensure that the help people ask for is actually there – and while a lot of that is about funding, it also means education. Some of that education is needed within the health service as well as outside of it.

One of my friends recently took the big step of seeing his GP about his mental health, and was spoken to like a criminal: he was effectively told that if he thought his GP was an easy mark and that he’d walk out of there with a prescription for drugs, he had another think coming.

I’ve encountered similar cluelessness. Qualified mental health professionals have told me that the solution to my depression was to “get a wee part-time job” and  to remember that “there are brown babies in Africa that have it a lot worse than you do.”

Such people are rare, I know, but when you consider the effort it can take to stand up in the first place, and in the case of actual counselling the long waits to see anybody, it’s another obstacle that can prevent people getting the help we’re urging them to ask for.

This piece made me cry.

Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light.

The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much like picking a flower — and then runs to me with empty hands.

“Here is some light,” she says, matter-of-factly.

The death of Scott Hutchison has lead to a lot of discussion about mental health on social media, which is good and important. But what talking doesn’t do is fix an underfunded, overwhelmed health service.

So you’re sad, and you talk to your friends, and you make an appointment with your GP. That’s all good.

Now what?

If your GP takes you seriously, and some don’t, you wait. You wait for months, sometimes years – my own mental health was tied in with the gender stuff and I’m currently 19 months into that system without any treatment; the various general mental health services have long waiting lists too.

And when the wait is over, sometimes you still don’t get the help you need.

The drugs didn’t work. Your counsellor is incompetent, tells you there are black babies in Africa who have worse lives (that happened to me), tells you they’re not going to record that you’ve been seriously considering suicide because it makes everything more complicated (that too), signs you off as sane and healthy because your six sessions are up and there’s no availability for any more. You’re not any better, but boxes have been ticked.

And my experiences have been better than many people’s.

It’s crucial that people aren’t scared to ask for help. But it’s crucial that when they do, the help is there. All too often, it isn’t.

As Stephen Butchard points out, Scott Hutchison wrote very beautiful music that sometimes talked about his mental health issues, and he did so for two decades. But those issues still killed him.

Talk is cheap, and doesn’t fix the cracks people are falling through.

As I’ve written before, we need to do better, be better.

This photo made me cry.

It’s #Project84 from the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which aims to reduce the number of men who kill themselves. 84 is the number of men in the UK who kill themselves every week, and there are 84 of these sculptures on the London skyline. It’s stark and beautiful in a horrifying way.

We hear a lot about toxic masculinity these days, and sometimes it’s interpreted as “men are toxic”. They aren’t. But the stereotypes of masculinity – boys don’t cry, men can’t show weakness or talk about their feelings etc – can be toxic to men if it prevents them seeking and getting the help they need.

Women are much more likely to suffer from depression and related mental illnesses, but men are much more likely to kill themselves or die slowly through self-destructive behaviour.

As CALM puts it:

Every two hours a man in the UK takes his own life. Male suicide and mental health is a big issue that can’t be ignored any longer. It’s unacceptable that so many men are dying from suicide on a daily basis, yet so few people are talking about it.

These men are our fathers and our sons, our lovers and our brothers, our friends. For all their sakes we need to do better, to be better.

If you’re worried about somebody, there’s good advice here.

And if you’re worried about yourself, help is here.