Alice Cairns speaks to Tom Chapman, the barber who saves lives while cutting hair...
Could a visit to the barber save your life? Perhaps, if the barber in question was Tom Chapman.
Tom is everything you’d want your hairdresser to be: a dab hand with a razor, a master of the mullet, and an expert in barber’s chair small talk. But he also has another string to his bow: he’s the founder of the Lions Barber Collective, a charity that supports those in times of crisis, and which has equipped hair professionals in salons across South West London, Surrey, and surrounding areas with potentially life-saving skills.
Given this impressive resumé, it comes as some surprise to me to learn that Tom wouldn’t have become a hairdresser at all if it hadn’t been for a timely intervention from his parents. “I was fairly academic, so I’d always planned to go to university. That’s just what you’re expected to do, isn’t it? But then one evening, my parents sat me down and asked me ‘why are you going off to study Ancient History, when you cut and colour and dye your own hair all the time? You should be a hairdresser!’ That had never occurred to me before, honestly.”
But the more Tom thought about it, the more hairdressing made sense. Come September, when his peers travelled to universities across the country, Tom began his training at his local Tony & Guy.
Ten years later, in 2011, he was a qualified barber and had opened up his own salon, helped along by his lifelong talent for listening. “I can be a bit of a social chameleon, evolving to suit whoever is sat in my chair. So many different people come to visit the barber in the course of one day: they could be doctors, policemen, or drug dealers. Very few jobs allow you to meet people from so many different walks of life, so it helps that I’ve always been a people person.”
Then everything changed. In 2014, Tom had a quick chat with an old friend, 27-year-old Alex Goddard. A few days later, Tom was scrolling through social media when he discovered that Alex had tragically taken his own life, jumping from a local multi-story car park.
“I just kept thinking that I’d spoken to him a few days before, and I’d had no idea that he was struggling. That opened up so many questions I’d never asked before – so many ‘whys’ and ‘what ifs’. I felt like I needed to do something about it, but I didn’t know what.”
Twelve months later, Tom was working with a group of hair professionals to raise money for charity. When the discussion turned to where they should donate their money, the group listed plenty of worthy causes. Nothing felt quite right until someone mentioned the name of a suicide prevention charity.
Sophie van Veen
“That was a huge eye-opener for me,” Tom explains. “I hadn’t known these charities existed. I’d been affected by suicide so recently, and yet I’d had no idea that it was something that you could raise money for.” And after that, everything clicked into place.
Tom realised that he could do more than simply donate to a charity. He – and other hair professionals like him – had a unique and hitherto untapped potential to help people like his friend Alex.
“As hair professionals, we see our clients regularly, but not all the time – so we have that little bit of distance that allows us to recognise a change in behaviour. Barbers are what I call a ‘familiar stranger’.
Our relationships with our clients can be very intimate: we have the license to touch people’s hair, face, neck. We’re trusted to make them look good – and to wield sharp implements around their face. That’s a fairly unique position to be in.”
Then there was the added fact that Tom’s clients were male. In the UK, men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women – a chilling statistic that’s often attributed to rigid gender roles and weak social ties.
“Men are very bad at talking. On top of that, they don’t tend to have a good relationship with medical professionals, and they’re generally very good at pretending to be OK – because when they do open up and talk about their problems, the response isn’t positive. People aren’t always comfortable with men showing that vulnerable side of themselves.”
And so The Lion Barber Collective was born. It’s a group of barbers and hairdressers who come together to raise awareness about suicide prevention, delivering seminars, workshops, and training to help other hair professionals to support their clients in times of crisis.
“The idea was to make our training very easy and accessible. We teach barbers to recognise the signs that someone is struggling; to ask direct questions; to listen well, with empathy and without judgement; and to help their clients to find the help they need.
“This is not about turning barbers into therapists. It’s not about diagnosing or prescribing. It’s about making sure that as a hairdresser, you know about the resources that are available to people so that you can bridge the gap between the communities you serve and the professional help that is on offer.”
And it didn’t take long before Tom’s initiative began to pay off.
One, very personal, success story has always stayed with him – a testament to the lifesaving power of talking.
“The first time I realised that I was making a difference was when a friend of mine – Paul – sat in my chair and told me about some things that he was going through. I just listened, and then I told him about Lions Barber Collective.
Later, I found out that he’d planned to take his own life – but then he thought about the conversation we’d had.
That one conversation was enough to get him back in his car, back to his parents’ house, and on his road to recovery. Paul is still alive today, with a house, a wife, and a little boy.”
Tom isn’t one to rest on his laurels. When we speak, he’s in the middle of his ‘Mullet Over Together Campaign’, encouraging men to rock a mullet to raise awareness about mental health.
The Collective has also opened its first salon on London’s Carnaby Street, a nonprofit in which all proceeds (beyond the staff’s wages) are put back into Lions training programmes.
On top of that, Tom is planning the first-ever ‘Collective Pride Awards’, which will celebrate those in the hair and beauty industry who go above and beyond to serve their communities: “We’ve been celebrating the creative side of the hair and beauty industry for so long, but we don’t stop to recognise those who are caring for and supporting their clients and colleagues. Hopefully, in 10-20 years' time, the whole hair industry will have the skills to make a difference.”
Above all, it’s Tom’s firm belief that we need to change the way we talk about mental health.
He points out that everyone knows how to keep physically healthy (whether we act on that knowledge or not), and that physical health problems are viewed on a scale, ranging from a slight headache to a life-threatening condition.
“But with mental health, we often see it as this all or nothing thing that’s made up of diagnosable terms: depression, anxiety, bipolar, PTSD. If we haven’t been diagnosed with one of those conditions, then we think of ‘mental health problems’ as something that other people have. But we’ve all experienced intense emotions, we’ve all been let down, lost, or felt the need to love and belong. We’ve all had good times and bad times – and that’s because all of us have minds that we need to keep healthy. That’s mental health. I think it’s so important that we recognise that and look after ourselves.”
Find a Lion:
The Ham Barbers 414A Richmond Road | Kingston, Gould Barbers Escot Road, Sunbury-on-Thames | Reidys Barber Shop 3 The Façade, Holmesdale Rd, Reigate | The Golden Scissors 1A Meadowbrook Rd, Dorking.
Discover more at thelionsbarbercollective.com
