The "Youth in Turmoil" image story 

In  2020 there were 5,224 adult suicides registered in England and Wales one of those being my Son Preston Matthew Lee Harris ! One too many, and i feel his / my story needs to be out there for everyone  to see and hopefully appreciate that suicide can happen to anyone,at anytime some good will come from this living nightmare i am in !

Preston was born in Brighton, UK on 24th August 1994, he was cremated in Brighton UK on 24th August 2020 his 26th birthday !

Due to the funeral being subject to  Covid19 restrictions  the video of the funeral service at the crematorium is  here and Funeral / 26th Birthday

Id been a single parent dad with him since he was 13months old, he was my life !  He had never been diagnosed with any mental health issues and was fit and well

The contributing reason for his actions was being in a toxic relationship with a girl called Casey Randall.  He met her in November 2019,  He was only with her for 10 months, that is the short amount of time it took with her continuously putting him down and talking to and treating him like shit, for him to believe the only way to escape that was to kill himself !|

For this reason i believe his story needs to be out there in the hope that someone else reading this story will take a different route to the one Preston sadly took.

After he died i had no idea of how to do this, then through a drawing that his friend (Stephen PH) did (a person sat with their head in hands, in turmoil, but from that figure flowers, life and positivity are growing from within), came a spray paint stencil and from that i have done several hundred a3 and a4 canvasses, all different but all with the same meaning and objective. 

I had never done a painting before this and i do not consider myself an artist !

A selection of these paintings are in the gallery section and are all available for sale for a mere £5 plus postage,  they all come with the knowledge of what that picture means.  My hope is that if they are hanging on someones wall and a youth asks about the picture then the meaning of it can be relayed and maybe just maybe whoever has asked could say "i feel like that" and that could be the first time ever that that person has spoken those words out loud,  and it may stop them from drinking a bottle of vodka and killing themselves believing as Preston did that is their only option  !!

i will never know if that happens but there is a chance, i hope so anyway  

i believe the image of a 'Youth  in Turmoil'  should and will be globally recognized for  its meaning and for mental health issues  especially  the under 30's

The Image Stencil

6 months later Stephen PH sent me a Whatsapp picture.  I asked him about it and he said to cut out the red sections  and what is left is a spray paint stencil of the "Youth in Turmoil  ! As I’m not an artist and hadn’t spray painted anything before except for bicycles this was something new and within the hour I had made a stencil and done my first “graff” !!

From that came lots of variations of the image. When he was 5 years old he brought home a painted handprint from school which obviously I kept with all his other school work, a stencil was made of that too ! With a mix of the “image” and his hand and morse code for "suicide" 100’s of canvases have been  made