Welcome to JasonPegler.com

Jason Pegler is the Owner of Chipmunkapublishing the mental health publisher. Publishing over 825 titles since 2001. He is the author of “A Can of Madness”, “Curing Madness”, and “The Ultimate Guide To Well Being”.

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“I am often asked about mental health books. A great resource is Chipmunkapublishing.”
Stephen Fry

“My name is Jason Pegler and I originally founded Chipmunkapublishing to give a voice to writers with mental illness around the world.
Through our range of more than 800 books by more than 600 authors, we raise awareness of the stigma surrounding mental health problems by encouraging society to listen.
We want to reduce the humiliation that people with “mental illness” feel. By giving people with mental illness a voice, we give them the opportunity to lead better lives and inspire others going through similar experiences.
We are dedicated to unearthing new talent and helping those who may have gone unheard tell their stories.
Most of our publications are written by people with mental health issues, but we also give a voice to family members of people with mental health issues and many other disabilities. Titles include autobiographies and memoirs, fiction, poetry, film scripts, plays, books of lyrics, anthologies, stories written by carers, self-help books, academic works and much, much more. We publish books on many different mental health and disability related subjects such as bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, aspergers syndrome, autism, self harm, victims of abuse, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, addictions and others.”

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About Jason Pegler

Jason Pegler is the world leader in mental health empowerment. He is the CEO of Chipmunkapublishing.

He is also the author of several books including “A Can of Madness”,  and “The Home Study Course Unlimited Confidence – Smashes the fear of mental illness”. Jason has appeared on National and International BBC Radio and Television over 150 times, in most of the national newspapers, national media in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Wales, ireland and Jerusalem. He has also appeared in several hundred mental health, social enterprise, disability and personal development publications around the world.  Jason also wrote Mental Health Publishing and Empowerment which features 20 chipmunka authors.

In 2002 Jason Pegler set up Chipmunkapublishing The Mental Health Publisher, as a social enterprise, to give a voice to mental health service users that had not had a real voice before. In 1992 at 17 years of age Jason spent 6 months in a mental institution in Gloucester and was told he had manic depression the day he left.

Jason won the New Statesman’s Young Social Entrepreneur of The Year in 2005. In 2008 Jason was a semi finalist in Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Jason is a Social Entrepreneur, Public Speaker, Writer and Publisher.

Jason the most inspirational mental health empowerment speaker in the world. He uses his own mental health experiences as a positive force, and set up Chipmunkapublishing to enable people to become empowered. They can empower themselves by confronting their mental illness and therefore taking the first steps to recovery. Jason has had an interesting life, from being the captain of his school chess team, Gloucester U16 rugby player and an Oxbridge candidate to writing the renowned autobiography “A Can of Madness”, published in 2002.

This led to promotional and publishing opportunities in the mental health sector as well as national and international media coverage. Since researhing the mental health empowerment market in 2001 Jason has become a force in the world mental health movement creating the world’s most recognised mental health publishing brand Chipmunkapublishing. Jason is a leading thinker and activist in the world of mental health empowerment. Jason ground-breaking autobiography on living with manic depression “A Can of Madness” has been given a favourable review in the Times Literary Supplement. He regards leadership by example. mentoring others, mental health promotion and public speaking as his fortes. He has been featured in hundreds of blogs, newspapers, periodicals, magazines worldwide. He regularly appears on national television, radio and documentaries discussing mental health issues. Jason is inspired by the bravery and success of Chipmunkapublishing authors.

“We need to build on the work on the great work that social entrepreneurs like Jason Pegler are doing”
David Cameron - Prime Minister of the UK

His expertise is mental health. When he was seventeen years of age he spent six months in a psychiatric ward in Coney Hill mental hospital in Gloucester in the United Kingdom. After six weeks of mania where he thought he had taken 5 billion Ecstasy tablets to create world peace, Jason’s first realisation that he was actually not well and in a mental hospital. He had a vision. He knew that one day he would have to gather enough strength to tell the world how he felt. By doing this he could stop the pain and humiliation that he and others with a mental illness felt. His immediate thought was that his experiences and feelings needed to be documented at some stage on the largest platform possible. Then and only then would other people understand and therefore empathise with the "loonies" in Coney Hill and other places. It took Jason four manic episodes before he was bold enough to change his thought processes and act on his vision. Jason graduated from Manchester University with a 2:1 in Classical Studies in 1998 before writing his autobiography on living with manic depression (1998 – 2002) “A Can of Madness”, and setting up Chipmunkapublishing with co-founder Andrew Latchford. It was Andrew Latchford’s idea to set the company up. Little did they know how much work there was to do.

Released on April 13th 2002 with help from the British Government’s Mind Millennium Award Programme “A Can of Madness” was immediately recognised as a ground breaking text and compared favourably to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation and Kay Redfield Jamieson’s An Unquiet Mind. It also became an underground text symptomatic of challenging the ecstasy generation about its own “mental illness” and continues to spread its influence literary and mental health fields.

In October 2002 Chipmunkapublishing launched its second author Dolly Sen who was inspired to write her autobiography The World Is Full of Laughter after reading A Can of Madness.

Jason Pegler knows from the frequent letters, emails and phone calls he and other Chipmunkapublishing authors have received that their mental health publishing is making a positive impact in society

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Vision: Words from the CEO Jason Pegler:

My goal in life is to help others and make the world a better place. Chipmunkapublishing is a platform to allow people to tell the truth about how people with mental health issues are treated by society, the mental health system, the state and the status quo. I want others to follow in my footsteps and help Chipmunkapublishing break down the taboo on mental health once and for all. By telling the truths about their mental health issues, sufferers are able to deal with the humiliation and carers are able to see how best to help their loved ones. Writing and reading books about mental health users is a cathartic process that is crucial for the reduction of stigma and discrimination and for the improved state of mind for service users. The books also help give insight to mental health staff as they reveal how their patient’s feel and are a morale booster for staff showing that people do get better".

The objectives of Chipmunkapublishing are to reduce the humiliation and isolation that people with mental health issues feel. Then and only then will we have normalised mental health so that in fifty years someone with a mental illness will not have to feel humiliated for being mentally ill. At the age of seventeen I was diagnosed with manic depression and my world was turned upside down. After living in a mental hospital in a manic state I suddenly realised that I was not playing football manager the computer game. It took me months to realise that a nuclear war was not going on and that I was not God.

The moment I realised I had a mental illness I had an epiphany, a mission and a dream.

My mission was telling the whole world about the humiliation and guilt that i had for having had all those idiotic manic thoughts. Celebrating my madness was the only way I could psychoanalyse myself and become better. I saw my story as a Hollywood movie not for my own ego but because being in a psychiatric ward changed me as a person. It made me more sensitive, I wanted to help people and stop another seventeen year old from going through the same pain that I went through. Until I was living in a mental hospital I wasn’t aware what is was like for people who lived in places like that and experienced ‘mental illness’.

For me then Hollywood was the greatest medium to change the way people thought about people with mental illness. That was in 1993. By the time i was researching setting up Chipmunkapublishing in 2001 we had the internet as the most powerful medium. For the first time in history people are producers and not just consumers of information.

The moment i came down from mania a frisson went through my body that i had to help everyone else in the ward. This is a natural feeling for anyone who goes through this kind of pain. If you doubt it just ask them. It was immediately evident that the stigma in society was the cause of the humiliation that these people were going through. People are alienated when they are not understood. This is how the status quo sometimes operates.

The Mental Health Movement is still in its infancy even though ‘mental illness’ has been around since the beginning of time. People who are different have always been alienated but do not always have to be. In fact it contravenes civil liberties to lock people up for doing nothing wrong. People need help when they are alienated and their identities are not fundamentally flawed if they behave differently. The status quo throughout history has fed us with propaganda telling people they are ‘mentally ill’ as a form of social control and then clouding the real voice of those who suffer.

I set up Chipmunkapublishing to give a voice to the mentally ill. The plight of the mentally ill improves with every generation in the sense that we are not put in prison with murderers anymore. Yet the likelihood is that global mental illness and their definitions will always be on the increase in our life times. Mental health is becoming part of the social norm and with this the influence of the patient and the mental health artist will increase. We are in a transitional period in history where people who are ‘mentally ill’ must publicly be given the opportunity to shape their own futures. There must be no hidden agenda’s but an open arm policy calling for humanitarian treatment across mental health services and in society.

For me the role of the mental health patient is very similar to that of the civil rights activists in the 1960s. For charities, the media and governments to campaign for the mentally ill without having patients dictate the terms is irrational and ethically wrong. If Martin Luther King JNR was a white man talking about black people’s experiences then no-one would have listened to him. Sure white people supported black people and black power but Martin Luther King JNR led the way. The same is true with the history of the ‘the mentally ill’. Mental health service users and mental health artists have to lead the way.

I am interested in improving the way people think about mental health and to treat it as normal.  People can be encouraged to be more empathetic or get pro actively involved. The reality is that we are all human beings and all vulnerable and experience ‘mental distress’. To label people with a mental illness and tell them they will be ill for the rest of their lives often induces fear and lowers self esteem.

Help us to help more people and donate your energy, time or money to becoming a supporter of Chipmunkapublishing. Creating a brand that people empathise with is the best way to stop the rising mental health stigma and abuse. Remember we feel empathy and we feel your pain and/or indifference otherwise we would not dedicate our lives to giving a voice to mental health writers.

I would like to thank the following people for inspiring my own personal development. In no particular order:

Anthony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, Steve Chandler, Zig Ziglar, Eckhart Tolle, Daniel Goleman, Susan Jeffers, Robert Kiyosaki, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.