In this candid interview, a Hillsborough disaster survivor (Speaker B) recounts the deepening mentalāhealth crisis that led him to contemplate suicide years after the tragedy. He describes feeling like a burden to his family, losing selfāworth as a husband, father, and professional, and being unable to ask for help after a lifetime of giving it to others. He attributes the burden belief to selfāimposed pressure to appear perfect and to keeping his emotions hidden. The conversation explores how he struggled to identify a supportive community beyond his immediate family, the role of wearing a āmaskā at work and home, and the broader stigma that prevents men from expressing emotional pain. He reflects on the concept of resilience, warning that repeatedly ābouncing backā from the same issue is not true resilience but misguided effort, and suggests a shift toward sustainable coping and openness. The interview serves as both a personal testimony and a broader call to recognize and address menās mentalāhealth stigma, encouraging honest dialogue as a potential lifesaver.
Chapters
What caused you to think that the best decision was to not be alive anymore?
I think 3 things. One, I've become a burden, burden on my family, a burden on myself. I've become worthless, worthless as a husband, father, career professional, and helpless. I didn't know how to reach out and ask for help anymore.
Is it you didn't know how to, or you felt you shouldn't or couldn't, or?
Probably be both. The fact that I didn't know how to. How do you ask for help when for all your whole life you've been giving help to other people, your family, your work, etc.? So how do you now personally ask for that help back? And I suppose I didn't know who and where to reach out to. I didn't know who my community was. Yes, I get it was my family, but it's probably bigger than that. Is it just my wife? Is it my children? So I didn't know how to or where to reach out for that help and that support.
What caused the burden belief to show up?
Myself. I put the pressure on myself in the fact of keeping things to myself, not sharing. Being that closed book, not being open. So in some respects, the fault, if that's the right word, was not the event of what happened many, many years ago. It was me, by putting the pressure on myself to be that perfect individual day in, day out, both at home and at work as well.
So many years on now, from Hillsborough and the disaster there, and also your own breakdown that turned into a breakthrough. Yeah, yeah. What, looking back, would be your advice to that closed book that didn't want to open up, that didn't understand who their community was?
I sometimes relate it to we put a mask on, but sometimes pretend we're individuals when we're not really. We may put a mask on when we go to work to be that career professional. As soon as we go through the front door of work, we become somebody we're not. Whereas at home, we act and behave differently. And when we put that mask on, it's around, you know, it's pretending to be somebody different, but it should have been a cry for help. Maybe I should have been better in, I suppose, acknowledging and showing my emotions because I then wouldn't have felt that burden. On other people. But we know when it comes to poor mental health, especially men, we're not good at showing our emotional response to events, our emotional response to certain things that happen in life. And, you know, things do happen in life, but you need to probably get a little bit better at becoming a little bit more resilient. But resilience is a massive word. It comes from so many different things, so it's not always that easy to really Pinpointed to certain specifics.
Resilience is often misunderstood as in the ability to bounce back. But the challenge with emotional intelligence is if you're bouncing back from the same issue repeatedly, it's not resilience, it's misguided effort.
It is, and it's also the fact that bouncing back from that same situation, but if you don't face into that situation, how can you continue build up resilience and resilience and resilience on top of it? To really, you know, get through, get through life. And, you know, we talk about, you know, physical health, and when we say physical health, we mention about, you know, looking after ourselves, walking, gym, etc. But when do we talk aboutā when we talk about mental health, we always think about the negative things, not the positive things. And the positive things on mental health, eating resilience is a good example.
