Category: Mental health
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An appreciation of the winding road.
Yes, I’ve had multiple periods of time where my mental health was quite bad. Yes, I have hit the very bottom more than once. Yes, I have struggled to manage it in the past. Yes, I have had to take medication for a number of years, and I may need to for many more.It is…
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Good riddance?
1999 Green Day’s Time of Your Life was released a year or two before I finished high school, so naturally it was played a few million times by my year level as we approached our fork stuck in the road. Our adolescence coincided with the years of Seinfeld, the show about nothing and everything at the same…
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So-ober it
In the July issue of The Westsider, in a piece entitled ‘A brief history of my former life as an occasionally-but-very drunk dickhead’, I promised the next issue would carry a follow-up, on the very easy and very hard aspects of quitting drinking. Keen observers will know that didn’t happen. You see, I am quite…
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Running for mental health
It’s been six years since I did a run of any note. Six years… and during that time I’ve reached the end of the rope and managed to pull myself back, to once again smile. But not everyone is that lucky… Imagine a growing number of men, trained in mental health first aid, who can…
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A brief history of my former life as an occasionally-but-very drunk dickhead
The day I write this piece marks four years since I last had an alcoholic drink. Alcohol of any kind – I don’t even use rum when I make rum balls. Four years and no drinking. I needed to become a non-drinker, and I did. It was embarrassingly easy for me to stop, because I…
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Like father, like son? No. Not at all.
27 March this year was the last ‘coming-of-age’ milestone of my father’s suicide. He took his own life twenty-one years ago, in 1998. Ordinarily I’m overcome with a sense of dread in the weeks before this annual milestone, but this year, I wasn’t.
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It’s about time all Aussie Dads were screened for depression, too
In announcing an expansion of its mental health program, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) said the men “will be automatically offered a comprehensive mental health assessment and sign-posted to professional support if needed.” Australia should go even further.
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Dear diary, let’s have another look at this life…
American writer Jessamyn West, author of The Friendly Persuasion, said, “People who keep journals have life twice”. It’s hyperbole, but appeals to those of us who want to live a life worth remembering. To live a life twice! How grand. Journaling is something I’ve done off and on from the time I could write as a young boy. My…
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How my father’s suicide helped me to become a ‘real man’
It was Saturday, March 28, 1998, when I received the news that would cast a shadow over the rest of my life. I was 16 years old, and nothing would ever be ‘normal’ as I knew it, again. My dad had killed himself and now, 20 years on, I still have a father-shaped hole in…
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I had to walk away from my marriage and job to be a better dad
Married with a young family and a great job, JC Clapham thought he had ticked all the boxes for a good life. Then he nearly lost it all, and himself. On paper, I had the perfect life. Married with three kids, a seemingly great job that paid very well, a mortgage in the suburbs, and…