Many people are afraid to reveal that they are vulnerable to depression. 

They don’t feel able to tell others that they are, or have been, depressed.  They keep one part of themselves hidden and secret.  They often suffer in isolation for many years.  

I think it’s hard to see a way of changing this, because it’s so complicated and sensitive. 

But I do feel it’s great when public figures admit their vulnerabilities, especially their mental health vulnerability.  Celebrities are heroes, and role models.  They might well have a love-hate relationship with such exposure…

Good news:

This weekend two celebrities spoke about their severe depression in the Sunday Independent:

Colin Farrell (filmstar) & Michael (Mickey) Graham (Boyzone).

 

I was particularly stuck by what Michael Graham said in his interview with Niamh Horan:

"I don’t know if this was my surrender, but I just remember one day I cried and cried like I never had before and I just couldn’t stop.

"I was at home and my stress levels had been building and building and I was fighting and fighting them inside myself. I had been saying to my wife a couple of weeks beforehand that I was really uptight and stressed. I could feel this rising [anxiety] happening inside me and I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that the anxiousness was overtaking me and the panic attacks were beginning to return which I hadn’t had since I was a kid.

"So I began to get really frightened and wondering when everything I had ever learned [about controlling my emotions] would come into play. That day, I’m telling you, I just cried and cried and cried for hours and hours and hours on end. My wife was hugely supportive, but that was a moment of surrender and from then on I began to understand completely how this [depression] works."

"Was it a nervous breakdown?" I [Niamh Horan] ask.

"Yeah, you can call it what you want. You can put whatever label you want on it but really it is an emotional overload. [People don’t like the words ‘nervous breakdown’] because that means there’s something wrong with you," he says.

But he adds, "My wife thought it was the bravest thing I ever did. I broke a barrier and she thought it was courageous and the manliest thing she’d ever seen me do."

The whole interview is well worth reading. 

He says he kept his depression hidden from others…

"I would keep ignoring it but it would keep coming back, knocking on my window. But nobody else would have known because I was socially conditioned to keep it well hidden," he explains.

Why is this worth talking about?

If we could make it easier for people to talk about how they’re feeling emotionally on the rack, we’d shorten the depression and reduce the risk of suicide.