Natasha Devon


Natasha Jade Devon is a writer and campaigner. She travels schools and colleges throughout the UK and the world, including Bangkok, The Hague, Shanghai, Kathmandu, Montreux and Taipei, delivering classes and conducting research with teenagers, teachers and parents on mental health, body image and social equality. Additionally, she is involved in campus wellbeing programmes in a number of British universities including Aberystwyth University and CU London, and is a trustee for student mental health charity Student Minds. Devon had a weekly column in the Times Educational Supplement for four years, between 2015 and 2019. She resigned suddenly in ‘solidarity with the trans community’ in May 2019 after the magazine published a front page article recommending a resource to teachers Devon branded ‘transphobic’. Natasha currently has a monthly online column for the UK edition of Grazia Magazine. She has worked closely with a number of uk charities and organisations including Body Gossip and Mental Health First Aid England. She is a patron for No Panic, a charity which gives support to people living with anxiety. In August 2015, the Department for Education appointed Devon as its first ever mental health champion for schools but axed the role in May 2016. Devon continues to give regular evidence to the Health and Education Select Committees and is involved in political campaigning.

Campaigning

Devon's personal experience of mental health issues began as a girl, when her panic attacks were misdiagnosed as asthma. Later, aged 17, she developed an eating disorder which she describes as 'a coping strategy for anxiety'. She studied English at Aberystwyth University.
She recovered from bulimia in 2006 and later co-founded the charity Body Gossip with former school friend Ruth Rogers. At the same time, she began visiting schools to deliver presentations and collect anecdotal evidence from pupils, teachers and parents.
In 2010, she wrote an article about her experience of bulimia in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. After this, she was given a monthly column 'Natasha Devon Wants a Word', for the publication which ran until 2016.

Mental Health Media Charter

In 2017 Natasha launched the Mental Health Media Charter. This is a set of 7 simple guidelines for ensuring imagery and language used in mental health reporting is responsible, genuinely educational and stigma-reducing. The Charter was put together with the help of the Samaritans, Mental Health First Aid England and Beat. It has been endorsed by Girguiding, the Coalition for Men & Boys & the Labour Campaign for Mental Health.

Where's Your Head At

In May 2018 Devon launched Where’s Your Head At with Mental Health First Aid England and Bauer Media. The campaign calls for a change in the law so that provision for mental health first aid would be mandatory in all British workplaces. The change.org petition gained more than 200k signatures and was delivered by Natasha to Downing Street on 8 October 2018. It was debated in parliament in January 2019.

Mental health champion for schools

On 30 August 2015, the Department for Education appointed Devon as its first ever mental health champion for schools,as part of a wider £1.25bn drive to improve care. Announcing the decision, Education and Childcare Minister Sam Gyimah said: "Natasha is an inspiration to many young people and I'm delighted to have her on board as our first mental health champion. I know that together we can make a real difference in encouraging more young people to talk openly about mental health". Shortly afterwards, Devon wrote in The Daily Telegraph of her initial caution in accepting the role, adding:
"But then I thought – Why have they picked me? Anyone who's ever watched me on the news knows I'm notorious for being a left-leaning 'gob on a stick'. Surely, if it was tokenism, they'd have selected someone less likely to challenge them? When, during our first meeting the Minister told me that the Government had realised the scale of the problem, they knew they had a responsibility to do something about it and they wanted someone with real experience within the field to advise them, I knew I'd made the right decision".

However, in May 2016 it was announced that Devon's role was to be axed.She was told that her position was discontinued for organisational purposes, to make way for a new interdepartmental role that would be salaried. The decision came days after she had criticised the government's testing regime in schools at the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference, where she had said: "Time and time again over recent years, young people – and the people who teach them – have spoken out about how a rigorous culture of testing and academic pressure is detrimental to their mental health. At one end of the scale we've got four-year-olds being tested, at the other end of the scale we've got teenagers leaving school and facing the prospect of leaving university with record amounts of debt. Anxiety is the fastest growing illness in under-21s. These things are not a coincidence." The BBC reported that the DfE denied that Devon was being silenced because of her criticism, quoting the department as saying that an 'independent NHS task force report' published in February 2016 had 'recommended that a cross-government mental health champion be created. For this reason we have had to reconsider the department's own role' and that Devon's position was being axed to avoid 'confusion'. Devon emphasised that while she had carried out her role unpaid to maintain her independence of the government, the new appointee would be salaried and could "be paid effectively to toe the party line".
In September 2016, Devon obtained internal DfE emails using a Freedom of Information request. These indicated that despite the department's denials that she was sacked for making public criticisms of government policy, DfE officials were discussing her removal on these grounds months before her position was terminated.

TV and radio

In 2012, Devon was one of the mentors on the Channel 4 TV series Gok's Teens: The Naked Truth. She has also appeared on the BBC, Sky News and ITV as an expert on body image, and on the BBC's Newsnight programme. Other media appearances include Newsround, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, BBC Radio London, and BBC iWonder's Why do I earn less than a man? Between 2011 and 2016 Natasha was a regular newspaper reviewer for Sky News' Sunrise. She still occasionally appears on the show.
Along with Dr Keon West of Goldsmiths University, Natasha co-presented Naked Beach, an experiment to improve body image through exposure to a range of diverse naked bodies. Series 1 aired on channel 4 in May 2019.

Publications

Devon has written regular columns for publications including Cosmopolitan and TES,. She has also been published in The Daily Telegraph, the Huffington Post, The Independent and The Guardian.

Books

Books authored and co-authored by Devon include:

Awards

In 2012, Devon was Cosmopolitan's 'Ultimate Woman of the Year' and the following year was recognised by Ernst & Young as one of their top 50 Social Entrepreneurs.
Devon was appointed MBE in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of her "services to young people".
In 2016 Natasha was made a Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.