Patrick Foster

You really weren't sleeping.

No, exactly.

So it's mad.

Yeah, there's kind of three parts to what I do now.

I mean, I came out of rehab and I had a burning desire to share my story with people, not because I think I'm some sort of hero who's going to change the world, because actually I'm not proud of anything I did or who I used to be, but because I don't want one person to go through what I did.

And if people can benefit or learn from my experience, the mistakes I made,

for the greater good of themselves, then that's great.

I'm able to give back having taken a lot away.

So I work with schools and young people and then in organizations and businesses too, because particularly in the kind of corporate sector, I think that mental health, we've come a long way and it's much more talked about, but addiction has fallen behind and it isn't talked about enough and yet it's,

It's so rife.

Then I do a sort of mentoring, often mentoring for individuals that might be struggling in the early days of their recovery and wanting to sort of rebuild their lives or going through difficulty and hopefully help.

by using my experience to encourage them to do things that might make a difference and to be there in a very sort of non-judgmental capacity.

And then I'm actually just in the process of launching an app, which is a sort of tech startup.

designed or aimed at particularly young people and parents around financial risk um particularly looking at sort of gambling gaming crypto trading and it's a cool story because two young guys who were at one of my school talks a few years ago um it had a real impact on them and they kind of saw a bit of a gap in the sense that they recognized that loads of of their mates

as they were going through the latter days of school days and and then into university were kind of doing all these things and and not knowing what they were doing or or the impact that it might be having and and thought do you know what um we need to do something about it so they can go in there and and kind of implement what they're doing track their behaviors monitor the

spend time, impact that it might be having and then as an educational tool for parents who are probably quite naive to some of the things that are going on and then also for affected others who might be really worried about someone else but not know what to do, some advice and then a big community aspect where you can talk to other people who

might be doing similar things or feeling similar things and get advice, whether they're sort of struggling with it, recovering from it or further down the line.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons we wanted to do it this way is because it was aligned with kind of what I do, which is very much in the education and prevention space.

Because ultimately, we did think about a kind of

digital tool for people that were really struggling and in the throes of an addiction.