“It had shamed me for having poor mental health”

Rich Lehmann almost didn’t agree to this interview. The former leader of Kent County Council’s Green and Independent group spent months reluctant to speak publicly about the mental health crisis that saw him step back from frontline politics and ultimately leave the Green Party. After a lengthy back and forth, he agreed to speak in the hope that sharing his experience might encourage others to take mental health seriously, particularly in the often unforgiving world of local politics...

Born in Sidcup, Rich grew up in Medway before settling in Faversham with his wife in 2006. He went on to serve the rural area surrounding the town as both a county and borough councillor, becoming leader of Kent County Council’s Green and Independent group after the 2021 elections.

Following the 2025 local elections, Rich took time away from the council. He stepped down as group leader and eventually left the Green Party. I met him at his home in Faversham to talk about the events that led to those decisions, and why he believes it’s important to speak openly about mental health.

Rich first joined the Green Party in 2014, while living in Medway, during the Rochester and Strood by-election. “It was because of the rise of UKIP and other elements that came along with that, i.e. Britain First.”

Appearing on a ballot for the first time in 2015 for Watling Ward in Medway, where he lived at the time, Rich acknowledges he stood as a paper candidate to give residents the opportunity to vote Green. “I got a reasonable number of votes.”

He briefly left the Greens in 2017 with a view to joining Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, a move he ultimately never made. “I hoped the party would actually get behind him, but it was clear fairly quickly that that wasn’t going to happen and there was no point in me joining the Labour Party.”

Rich moved back to Faversham and became involved with Plastic Free Faversham. “I put all of my efforts into that for a couple of years until the end of 2019, when the general election reinvigorated my interest in politics.” He rejoined the Greens in December 2019, with the party’s local election success in Swale helping persuade him to stand for Kent County Council in 2021. It proved to be “a very intense campaign over the course of about nine or ten months.”

From 2022, Rich became more heavily involved with the Green Party, putting himself forward as co-chair at the Kent Greens AGM. As his confidence grew, he became leader of the Green and Independent group at Kent County Council in October that year.

“I felt that I really wanted to be delivering the speeches at full council meetings and managing the group, because it felt like we were five councillors, rather than a group.” The Greens are not a whipped party, so the role was largely about “coordinating the group, deciding who sits on which committee and chairing the group meetings that we had every fortnight.”

That group included two independent councillors, Mike Baldock and Peter Harmon, who died in 2024.

Initially planning to continue his work as a professional photographer to supplement his council income, Rich soon found he didn’t have the mental bandwidth to do “two very different things.” He successfully stood for Swale Borough Council, finding that taking on another council role meant his head would be “in the same space the whole time and it’s a lot easier to manage your day-to-day business when it’s all council work.”

“I first considered the fact that I might be neurodivergent because I was struggling with my workload, and the people I was telling didn’t seem to comprehend why I was struggling as much as I was.” Rich received an adult ADHD diagnosis after being elected to Swale Borough Council in August 2023.

Rich stood down as co-chair of Kent Greens in 2024 as he continued to struggle with the different roles. “My co-chair was excellent and took on the bulk of the work we were doing together.”

I ask where the breakdown in relationships that ultimately led him to leave the Green Party began. Sitting opposite me with his eyes closed, Rich takes a deep breath. “That’s a really tough question to answer because it was a slow, gradual process.”

When Swale Borough Council changed its bin collection contractor, it was a difficult period for Rich. As chair of the Environment Committee, representing a ward badly affected by missed collections, he was receiving more than 500 emails a month. With his workload effectively more than doubling and needing to attend hours of extra meetings, Rich went to colleagues in the Swale Greens and asked for help.

“I’m frustrated with myself in a way because I used the term, ‘I need your permission’ to stand down as chair of the environment committee.” Instead, Rich says, he was talked into staying.

A key incident came five days before last year’s KCC elections, when Rich received a message from a member of the Swale Greens committee saying everyone was upset with him for having talked a potential candidate into standing down.

This came as a shock. Rich says he had received a message from the potential candidate at the time saying they were choosing not to stand for personal reasons. He assumed the committee had been told, “but it transpired that this information hadn’t been communicated.”

Rich says he later became aware that a member of the committee was telling people “the candidate had stood down because I’d bullied them.” He believes this stemmed from a meeting in which he had argued against standing in a seat held by fellow group member Mike Baldock. “At that meeting I had put forward arguments, others had put forward arguments in favour of standing. I had accepted those arguments, and the candidate had been selected.”

A further meeting was cancelled, the candidate stood down, and Rich thought that was the end of the matter until he heard the accusation. “This is where it gets very messy.”

A couple of weeks after the election, Rich attended a meeting with a member of the national Green Party staff and two people from Swale Greens who had made the accusation. “I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I thought maybe they genuinely felt that it looked like I’d bullied the candidate, and I hoped that we could get it resolved.”

Rich came away believing they were not interested in resolving the issues. “One of them went on to state that it was the only seat that the Greens in Kent hadn’t contested at the KCC elections, which was completely not true.” He points out there were seats elsewhere in Kent, including Thanet, that the Greens had not contested, “under similar circumstances, where we had stood aside in favour of an independent candidate.”

During the online meeting, Rich says he was also accused of making a volunteer cry. He says he found this particularly disorienting because the details included events at the vote count. “If they had remembered the events correctly, they would have known that I knew it wasn’t true.”

I’m not saying it was their intention to gaslight me, but the effect it had knocked me sideways

Already feeling stressed and burnt out from the local election campaign, Rich says he began questioning his own recollection of events. "I'm not saying it was their intention to gaslight me, but the effect it had knocked me sideways”.  

“I finally spoke to the volunteer I was accused of having made cry. She was clear that this wasn’t the case.” Rich says the volunteer told him that “she had found me frustrating to work with, but she also said that she’d never become emotional about that and couldn’t understand why someone had said that.”

Rich says he first told local Green colleagues in April 2024 that he had started to feel suicidal and “that I needed to rest and recover.” Instead, he says, he was talked into staying. “I don’t know how much it’s ADHD and how much it’s low self-esteem, but you can easily be talked into agreeing to something.”

“I'd been working 60-70 hour weeks consistently for three, four months and unfortunately at that time it was when the KCC election campaign was due to ramp up, and I wasn't as helpful as I wanted to have been in terms of helping get that campaign up and running” 

In October 2024, Rich missed a meeting due to stress. There was a vote on housing that went against the way the Greens wanted it to go, though his attendance would not have changed the outcome. “I was aware that some members within the local branch were frustrated that I hadn’t been at that meeting despite it being made clear that I was struggling with my mental health.”

Part of the problem with low self-esteem is that you agree with them, even though it’s to your own huge detriment

The situation escalated when, Rich says, a party member shared criticism of him from a political opponent on social media. After asking for opposition posts not to be shared, he used the expression “I’m on the brink.” He says this prompted a phone call from a member of the committee, who asked him not to talk about his mental health because he needed to inspire people. “Part of the problem with low self-esteem is that you agree with them, even though it’s to your own huge detriment.”

“It was the wrong thing to have said, and not a healthy attitude to have towards mental health. It wasn't so much that I was no longer feeling able to share that I had poor mental health. It was that it had shamed me for having poor mental health.” 

Rich says one member of the branch wrote to him in July 2025 “which pretty much said, ‘don’t blame everything on your diagnosis’”. He felt there was a perception that he was using his diagnosis as an excuse, when in reality he was finding work increasingly difficult to cope with.

Rich carried on as leader of the Green and Independent group at KCC. But without clear answers, he says, his mental health continued to spiral. At the end of June last year he took a leave of absence from both councils to try to recover. “That leave of absence continued far longer than I expected.” As he couldn’t attend meetings, Mark Hood, who had been covering the role in an interim capacity, took over as group leader from the end of September.

“The national Green Party have been almost entirely ineffective in any meaningful way.”

Rich says the member of Green Party staff who attended the meeting told him it wasn’t appropriate for them to be involved further and instead signposted him to the party’s complaints email address. “I found this particularly disappointing because I had let them know that I was feeling incredibly anxious about the meeting.”

After receiving no further response from Green Party staff, he submitted a formal complaint in late July. He says he did not receive a response until after leaving the party in December. By late October, he had escalated the matter to the chief executive, “who forwarded my concerns. I had an email from someone telling me that the head of governance would be in touch. That email was in early November.”

“I was in such a state that I left the party, because I didn’t know how much longer that was going to continue.” By this point, Rich says he was in the midst of a mental health crisis, spending his time ruminating, trying to work out what he had done and why nobody was helping him. He struggled to comprehend why some people felt justified in making the accusations, and why others believed them.

“People that know me personally know that I'm not a bully and it just...” 

Unable to find any resolution, Rich says he became “consistently fearful that if one unfounded bullying accusation had been believed by people, then what was to stop another one coming forward if I was pushing for this to be resolved too aggressively. It was a dark time.”

Rich believes there was a perception that, had his mental health been better, he would have reacted differently and moved on without seeking a resolution. “There was a hope that I would simply get better and be able to see that the accusations weren’t that bad.”

“That misunderstands why there are laws against bullying in the workplace, because it can do an incredible amount of harm if you're a victim of that. No actual investigation has taken place, so… I shouldn’t call it bullying. I felt it was bullying. False accusations were made against me.” 

Rich compares what he was going through to a version of hell in which he endlessly replayed events, trying to work out what he had done wrong. At one point he began having suicidal thoughts and, by mid-September, was asking about referring himself for psychiatric help because he felt he was “losing grip on my ability to understand my thoughts.”

If missing enough meetings would have triggered a by-election, why didn’t Rich simply step away? “I wanted to carry on being a councillor,” he says. “I didn’t want to stop.”

He concedes the role has always been outside his comfort zone, but says he enjoys helping people. “Most of the jobs I’ve done have been customer service, even when I was a wedding photographer. That role was incredibly important to me in terms of making sure the customer is happy.”

You have these glimmers of getting better. It always feels tantalisingly close.

Rich believes his desire to help people is also rooted in low self-esteem, but says he finds the role fulfilling and didn’t want to give it up. “You have these glimmers of getting better. It always feels tantalisingly close to the point at which you would be able to fully return to work.”

Counselling outside the Green Party has helped, Rich says. “That was going well and helping me understand some of the things about myself.” He is still rebuilding his self-confidence and has resumed working as a photographer.

Asked what advice he would give someone receiving an adult diagnosis of neurodivergence, Rich doesn’t hesitate. “I think what is really helpful is having counselling. That was incredibly valuable for me, even though I got the diagnosis eight months before I started counselling. Having counselling with someone with specialist experience was incredibly valuable in terms of being able to share my experiences and have them reflected back to me in a way which made things make far more sense.”

Looking back, Rich wishes he had been able to read more about ADHD and neurodivergence. “My wife did a lot of reading about it when I got the diagnosis, but because I was working so hard, I didn’t have the chance to do that until I was off work on my leave of absence.”

Even then, he says, he struggled to take much of it in. “Certainly, it was validating to read at that time and understand that what I felt and what I experienced was normal.”

As for whether he will continue as a councillor, Rich is waiting to see what local government reorganisation means for Kent’s political boundaries. While he suspects he will not stand again, he says the role has been “an incredible privilege.”

He acknowledges he may be more emotionally fragile than many people in local politics, but believes that can also be a strength. “It’s unfortunate that local politics is an environment which is not suited to people who care deeply, because those people can play a vital role in terms of making good decisions.”

Rich hopes that by speaking publicly about what he has been through, some of the shame he says he has carried since being asked not to talk about his mental health “will be lifted to some degree.”

Following his departure from the party, Rich submitted a complaint to the national Green Party after waiting four months for a response to his original complaint. In April, the party informed Rich that staff had done the right thing by signposting him to the complaint’s email address, but he had left the party before they could reach out to him. He has not received any further communication from them.