“THERE WAS A little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

This nursery rhyme paints an excellent picture of how mental health behaves. A 2024 survey found one-in-four Irish adults will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime. The medical definition of such an event is characterised as “a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation or behaviour.”

In layman’s terms, your headspace glitches, making it very difficult or impossible to function.

I am living proof of that very statistic.

Sometimes I can feel a dose of the blues sneaking up on me. Other times, I wake up and it’s there; a heavy weight sitting on my chest, accompanied by a racing mind and an impending sense of doom.

Mentally difficult times have been referred to as the black dog of depression. Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin, musician and Voice of Ireland coach, personified his as “Jeffrey.” I don’t have a moniker for my unwelcome friend. I just say I’m in the horrors or I’m having a broken day. A good bad spell for me can linger for 24 hours and on days like this, I do only what is absolutely necessary and have major cuddle time with my dog.

Getting help

Throughout my teens, a constant flux of what I called “melancholic moments” persisted. Over the years they became more debilitating, particularly during the winter months. Time passed and post-natal depression visited twice. During my fourth pregnancy, I discovered what antenatal ill health felt like. A window of brief respite in my early 40s was most welcome, but sure enough, that closed too.

Placing the blame for this on low iron levels and convinced my thyroid was out of whack, I made an appointment with my GP. An obligatory blood test declared I was (on paper) as healthy as a racehorse. So why was I in bits all of the time? What was wrong with me?

Further probing, a couple of well-placed, extremely pertinent questions and thirty minutes later, I emerged from the surgery clutching a sodden lump of tissues, a script for an antidepressant and grappling with a diagnosis of depression.

Prior to that day I had no real lived experience of what the expression “the kindness of strangers” truly meant. My wonderful GP and the understanding pharmacist who took the time to step out from behind the counter to check in on me changed all of that.

I also realised a subliminal worry about whether or not I would be taken seriously had taken hold. When you are deep in the trenches of a mental health episode, it is less than helpful to be tasked with explanations or evidence of proof. We don’t all take to our beds when we are mentally unwell. Simmering rage and extreme irritability topped my list of symptoms.

Within three weeks of starting medication, I could feel the filthy grip of apathy loosening its hold. Slowly but surely, life became joyous again.

A year later, I had a relapse.

I have spent enough time in the company of medical professionals to feel comfortable using the words ‘relapse’ and ‘in recovery’. I also have a full working knowledge of what they mean. Because, you see, those terms are not just used to describe individuals with addiction struggles. They also apply to those of us battling with our inner demons.

The last number of years have been good. Really good. I attribute the quality of my much-improved mental health to that single adjustment of medication 48 months ago. I am delighted with my post-menopausal condition (or Second Spring, as it is known in Asian cultures) and I am over subscribed to what gives me great comfort.

Don’t mess with success

But then I went and spoiled it all by attempting to fix something that wasn’t broken.

I decided it was time to wean myself off the support that was keeping my brain’s chemical imbalance in check. Guidelines on how to do so had been given considerable airtime with my doctor and so I was fully versed in the correct and proper protocol. Research suggests one of the most effective ways to combat winter blues, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), is exposure to natural sunlight. It is said a mere ten minutes outdoors as early as your day allows can be beneficial. Going for a walk, getting adequate sleep, eating well and ensuring you have something nice to look forward to are documented methods for helping with low mood.

Despite observing similar advisory suggestions, within a few days of coming off my meds, I began to notice a mental decline.

Physically I had sufficient amounts of energy, but my mental state of affairs did not. A lack of motivation, lingering fatigue and my old buddy low mood showed up to a party they had not been invited to.

I am a regular at my local coffee shop and after the morning school run, I sit with the window down, radio playing low and my head out in the fresh air for a very pleasant twenty minutes. On this particular Blue Tuesday, there had been a successful school dispatch in that no-one asked to stay at home or to be collected early. More than half an hour had passed and the coffee was long gone. It was time to go home. But I didn’t want to.

In 2012, Marian Keyes published ‘Saved by Cake’, an account, disguised as a cookbook, outlining how “baking was what she needed” in order to get her through each day.
I had already started on the prep for a tray of chocolate brownies earlier that morning.

That drew me home.

Afterwards, I went on social media and saw a deaf dog who had spent four years in a pound going to his forever home. And I was crying. It was time to have the chats with my doctor again.

A tray of brownies did not save my sanity. But I know my GP will.

There isn’t a family in the land who hasn’t been affected in some way by depression. Everyone deals with their demons and struggles differently. In the same way we’ve all got lungs to help us breathe, brains to process information and limbs to aid us in our movements, we also – every single one of us – have mental health.

Be kind, lads. Be kind.

Gwen Loughman is the gatekeeper of four boys, one husband and a watcher over two dogs.

If you have been affected by any of the issues mentioned in this article, you can reach out for support through the following helplines. These organisations also put people in touch with long-term supports:

• Samaritans 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie
• Text About It - text HELLO to 50808 (mental health issues)
• Aware 1800 80 48 48 (depression, anxiety)
• Pieta House 1800 247 247 or text HELP to 51444 – (suicide, self-harm)
• Teen-Line Ireland 1800 833 634 (for ages 13 to 19)
• Childline 1800 66 66 66 (for under 18s)