A British adventurer, Kit Birks, is entering the final days of an extraordinary 5,000-mile walk from the Arctic Circle in Norway to the Greek island of Gavdos, a journey she is using to raise money and awareness for suicide prevention. She described the venture to Sky News, framing the long route across Europe as a way to turn her own painful past into something that might help other people.
The walk began in the far north, in the Arctic Circle in Norway, and has now carried her all the way south to Gavdos, one of the most remote points of Europe. With the finish finally within reach, she said the effort had always been about much more than the distance, using each stretch of the route to draw attention to mental illness and to the support she believes people in crisis urgently need.
Her own struggle began early. She told Sky News she had battled mental illness from a very young age, from around 11 or 12, and that it took several forms over the years that followed. What started as depression widened into insomnia and eating disorders, difficulties that shaped much of her youth and went on to dominate her early adult life as well.
Those difficulties later deepened into addiction. For about a decade she was a drug addict and eventually ended up homeless, and she said she tried to take her own life on more than one occasion during that period. It was, by her own account, a long stretch of her life defined by crisis, instability and a sense that there was no way out.
The turning point came on the second of June 2022, when she found what she described as the rooms of recovery. Only a few days before speaking to Sky News she had marked four years clean and sober, a milestone she presented as the foundation for everything that has followed since, including the walk she is now close to completing.
In those four years she was also diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar, and she said the diagnoses finally helped things make sense after years of confusion. Coming to understand what she had been living with, she explained, allowed her to reframe her own story as something that could push her forward rather than something that had to hold her back.
Now, she said, she wants to use her second shot at living to help others understand that there is hope and that it is possible to find a way back. By speaking openly and without shame about her experiences, she said the walk was ultimately about raising awareness, and money, for suicide prevention, and about becoming the kind of voice she wishes she had been able to hear when she was growing up.