The mental health and autism charity helping young people | Zaynab Sohawon

Zaynab Sohawon is a mental health advocate and charity founder. She has a moving personal story which she is open about, and through her lived experiences is on a mission to help and protect young people through mental health challenges. 

I met with Zaynab, a Human Neuroscience undergraduate at the University of Birmingham, to find out more about her charity Emotion Dysregulation in Autism (E-DA), how her past experience is shaping her future and advice for anyone considering setting up their own charity. Our interview is featured in a Career Talk podcast and we feature highlights of the interview within this blog.

Zaynab: Emotion Dysregulation in Autism is a youth mental charity which helps autistic young people between 12-25 and we help through two main ways. One is through our social action workshops where we raise awareness of health inequalities in youth mental health and autism - we are actually working with the University of Birmingham right now running these types of workshops. 

The other service we offer is psychologically informed peer support. 

Now those are really big words but all it really means is that we have young people who have had experience with autism or mental health needs, and they share their stories and deliver wellbeing skills to young people who are currently going through it.

The charity is very personally motivated, I have a really strong connection to the cause. I guess the 'why' behind the charity starting up is because I have my own lived experience, 

I'm autistic and when I was a teenager I was sectioned for four years in psychiatric secure units, I was really poorly and was restrained for hours at a time. But for me the main problem was the emotion dysregulation caused by my Autism.

Listen to the full podcast interview with Zaynab Sohawon:

I had bad behaviours...self-harming and was really struggling with my mood and by 13 I was diagnosed and by 14 was in Inpatient [care]. It was really tough to be in wards for such long times.

"I made a vow to myself to be the person to others that my past self needed"

Now. I'm doing really well I am a youth mental health advocate, a speaker. In September 2022, I went to Copenhagen to speak at an International Youth Mental Health Conference and I had to give a posy of flowers to the Crown Prince of Denmark and I had to curtsy to her and I was really nervous. I had a short film made about me too about being a care leaver.

[Soon after] I started a series of workshops with some mental health clinicians
about how a lot of the time young people from marginalised communities and ethnic minorities often do not seek help and they don't have the same access to services that many young people do, so we ran 'black table talks'. 

I have worked with a lot of different organisations namely The Royal College of Psychiatry, The Mental Health and Wellbeing show, the British Medical Association (BMA), The British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorders.... co-authored a few books too!

Zaynab's partnered with the Institute for Mental Health to apply for Enhancing
Research Cultures Funding, and together they were successfully awarded £50,000 which is being used to fund an exiting project in conjunction with the University of Birmingham. 

The charity will be running mental health and autism training workshops to police centres, places of worship and Birmingham Children's Trust to empower people in under-represented communities.

Event News:

Zaynab's charity E-DA is running a community event during the Easter Holidays on 3rd April 2023 for young people with lived experience of autism/mental illness in the West Midlands.

#EDA-RISE Youth Mental Health and Autism Charity Social Action Event

Monday 3rd April 2023 | 9:15am - 2:30pm
The Exchange, Birmingham city centre

For full information, please visit the Event Page here.

A special thanks to Zaynab Sohawon
Introduced by Bob Lee