Jonathan Bellamy spoke with author Rachael Newham about her experiences: how she has survived two attempts on her life, through to launching a mental health charity and releasing her first book.

Rachael: The aim of Think Twice is to educate the Church around mental health issues. We do that via the website and online stuff, but we also offer training.

In our training it's not just about looking at the mental health issues and what happens with them, we look at a number of different conditions and how practically we can help as the Church, but also what we can draw on scripturally. How can we use scripture when we're supporting someone with anxiety? How can we use it to help them rather than just giving those sticking plaster verses that we've all heard? What's the theology behind it and how can that inform our pastoral care?

Jon: Excellent. What's the web address?

Rachael: It's www.thinktwiceinfo.org.

Jon: You've recently written a book, 'Learning to Breathe - My Journey with Mental Illness', which is how we discovered you. What led you to the point of writing the book and where did the title come from?

Rachael: I started writing it in my gap year, between school and university.

I was working in admin and I wanted to try and make sense of what had happened in the preceding years. I wrote a very angst-ridden version.

I've had asthma chronically for my whole life and breathing is not something you think about; we don't learn to breathe, you just do it until you have a problem with it. I found there was a real parallel there with our mental health. It's not something we think about until there's a problem with it, so that's where the title came from.

Three years ago I went back to it and wanted to weave the story I'd written, an updated version of it, with the insights that I'd discovered through my work and through my degree.

Jon: For you personally, did writing that book add something to you in the journey of this?

Rachael: It was difficult, but it was very special, because I was able to look back and see where God had moved and I'd missed Him the first time round. I was able to see how He'd moved and healed me in ways that I almost hadn't realised in day-to-day life.

Jon: What does life look like for you now?

Rachael: At the moment I've got a new-born baby, so it's a cycle of caring for him. But when I go back to work it's travelling round the country, speaking and writing.

We're at a different place in mental health now, particularly in the Church where we're saying we know there's an awareness of mental health issues, but our next step is to say how can we understand them better? How can we understand what it looks like for people to go through mental illness?