State of Mind: Kyle Amor

St Helens’ prop Kyle Amor says the work of State of Mind over the past six years has been fantastic, and wants to ensure that the message is not diluted.

Round 18 is the State of Mind themed Super League round for 2017, while St Helens will also be hosting a special one-off awareness campaign around the upcoming Salford game in Round 19.

This year’s State of Mind theme looks at the pressures of loss – be it a relationship, a job, income, a home or a bereavement, and how people can deal with it.

Amor admitted he was worried about the potential for players to use mental health as an excuse in an inappropriate situation, when perhaps it wasn’t the case.

He said: “The whole of society now accepts that it’s okay for blokes to say how they feel and if they have got issues, then those avenues are more accessible and easy to find, compared to say five years ago.

“Blokes wouldn’t know where to turn and they’d try and put on a front, so I think in that sense State of Mind has done what it’s set out to do really.

“As long as people don’t take the mickey out of it, otherwise you just end up diluting the root cause of what they’re doing.”

For the Cumbrian forward, moving from Whitehaven to take a shot at Super League with Leeds was a big decision earlier in his life.

“I had a bit of it. You don’t usually leave Whitehaven because it takes you an hour to get to the motorway, so you don’t leave unless you have to!

“If you got to Penrith, you felt like you were on holiday, so for me for me and my wife, our daughter was six-months-old, to uproot and do the Super League thing as a 21-year-old was totally different to anything and it happened really quickly.

“There were good days and hard days. You might have a hard week or a hard month, or a hard six months.

“Is that depression? No I don’t think so. When you’re starving, you’re not starving, you’re hungry. It’s about mental fitness.

“If people genuinely need the support then it is absolutely fantastic.”