Jonny Benjamin
Jonny Benjamin is an award-winning mental health campaigner, film producer, public speaker, writer and vlogger from London. In the Queen’s 2017 New Year Honors List, Prince William awarded Jonny an MBE for his services to mental health and suicide prevention.
At the age of twenty, Jonny was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar, and later began making films on YouTube about the condition that have since been watched by hundreds of thousands of people. In 2013 Jonny presented the BBC Three documentary It's a Mad World and then went on to produce acclaimed Channel 4 documentary The Stranger on the Bridge with Postcard Productions, sharing his quest to find the man who, in 2008, prevented him from taking his own life one January day on Waterloo Bridge.
Jonny speaks publicly about living with mental illness, in articles and interviews on TV, radio and in print around the world to help educate and break stigma. He works with a range of major charities to raise awareness about mental health and suicide prevention and in 2017 he ran the London Marathon in aid of charity Heads Together.
In 2016 Jonny launched ThinkWell, a mental health programme for schools, which has been introduced in secondary schools across the UK with huge success. He is now developing a mental health workshop for primary schools.
He is the author of The Stranger on the Bridge and The Book of Hope.