{"id":374461,"date":"2025-08-26T08:18:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T08:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/374461\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T08:18:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T08:18:19","slug":"it-was-a-reveal-fathers-grief-leads-to-book-about-mental-wellbeing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/374461\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;It was a reveal&#8221; &#8211; father&#8217;s grief leads to book about mental wellbeing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>LAS VEGAS (KSNV) \u2014 After Reggie Burton  lost his son to suicide, he put his pain into breaking down what he calls the stigma around mental health challenges.<\/p>\n<p>First, he created the non-profit, the <a href=\"https:\/\/averyburtonfoundation.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"https:\/\/averyburtonfoundation.org\/\" class=\"themeColorForLinks\" rel=\"noopener\">Avery Burton Foundation<\/a>, which is also a partner of our Mental Health Matters Series.<\/p>\n<p>Now, he&#8217;s written a book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Becoming-Mental-Health-Champion-Advocacy\/dp\/B0FKSVKYC8\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Becoming-Mental-Health-Champion-Advocacy\/dp\/B0FKSVKYC8\" class=\"themeColorForLinks\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8216;Becoming A Mental Health Champion.&#8217;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Marie Mortera spoke to Burton in this interview, which has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n<p>RB: Ultimately,  most of us have gone through challenges, loss, divorce. We call these events transitions and I think what these  transitons do is take us through these journeys we don&#8217;t want to go (including) isolation but what it did for me, it was a reveal:  lean into grief, acknowledge it happened, and my son isn&#8217;t here and now what? And what became the Avery Burton Foundation and scholarship and opened the doors to conversations about mental health.<\/p>\n<p>MM: Mental health advocacy for men and fathers is one of those things you talk about in the book. Are those tools different from other groups of people?<\/p>\n<p>RB: Maybe (you were) raised to be stoic, keep up your chin and keep it all in and your head held high and we don&#8217;t talk about these things. I want to address that as stigma and that stigma we don&#8217;t have to conform to that. We can take another road and explore how we can be different and raise my children different from how I was raised.<\/p>\n<p>MM: You also talk about the role of the athlete. Avery was a phenomenal athlete how does athleticism weave through the book?<\/p>\n<p>RB: In the journey to the Stanley Cup, there was head coach Bruce Cassidy about winning and this phrase, &#8216;Winning Hurts,&#8217; and I started thinking about that more deeply after the celebrations and champagne was spilled everywhere because there is a cost in winning, physically and mentally, and the Raiders coach, Pete Carroll wrote a book, and it has similar leadership traits of embracing the pain of winning.<\/p>\n<p>MM: May I bring Avery into the conversation? What would he say about this book?<\/p>\n<p>RB: I think Avery would be over the moon, so excited to see how much progress we&#8217;ve made over these 7 to 8 years, and a lot of it has to do with the intentionality of how we&#8217;re moving and we&#8217;re being intentional about telling these stories on Mental Health Matters. You never know how it&#8217;s going to impact someone and I think that&#8217;s the most beautiful thing of what we&#8217;re doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAS VEGAS (KSNV) \u2014 After Reggie Burton lost his son to suicide, he put his pain into breaking&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[7480,97969,6342,3444,77,89520,19903,218,22473,37850,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-374461","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-advocacy","9":"tag-athlete","10":"tag-book","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-foundation","14":"tag-grief","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-stigma","17":"tag-transition","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115094087833110725","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}