{"id":651722,"date":"2026-06-22T06:33:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T06:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/651722\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T06:33:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T06:33:15","slug":"pen-y-fan-climb-helped-swindon-army-veteran-rebuild-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/651722\/","title":{"rendered":"Pen y Fan climb helped Swindon army veteran rebuild life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Based in Bulford, Rackham served in the army between 2007 and 2012, which included a tour of Afghanistan in 2011.<\/p>\n

He told BBC Radio Bristol while he had a few counselling sessions after leaving the military, he struggled with his mental health and later tried to take his own life.<\/p>\n

Describing his head as “spinning”, Rackham said at the time he was “struggling”.<\/p>\n

“No one knew what was going on inside my head,” he said.<\/p>\n

According to the Office for National Statistics, external<\/a>, there were 6,190 suicides registered in England and Wales in 2024, around three quarters of them were men.<\/p>\n

Andy Barton, from Andy’s Man Club, a male anti-suicide charity, said there continues to be a “stigma” when it comes to men talking about low moods.<\/p>\n

“Men say they are showing weakness if they do talk to people outside the groups, and lots of people think they are a burden on somebody if they do,” he said.<\/p>\n

Rackham said opening up to people was something he had struggled with, especially as he wanted “to be that hard man”.<\/p>\n

“When you’re a scaffolder you don’t want to bother anyone…in reality you need to actually talk to people,” he said.<\/p>\n

“My mate rang me up after he found out [that he tried to take his own life] and said he’d rather I cried on his shoulder than him cry at my funeral,” he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Based in Bulford, Rackham served in the army between 2007 and 2012, which included a tour of Afghanistan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-651722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}