Mental health isn’t an in-vogue fixture on most healthy lifestyle advice columns. You can’t get a personal trainer to dissect your mind’s movements and tell you where you may be going wrong, and, for better or worse, you probably won’t be swayed to join in the latest psychoanalysis fads in glossy magazines.
Yet still, a healthy outlook remains a most pressing concern for people's happiness and wellbeing. According to predictions from the World Health Organisation, depression is set to become the number one global health problem by 2030, with an estimated 300,000 people in Ireland currently suffering from it.
While we as a society maintain an unwavering hope that diseases such as cancer and AIDS will be curably medicated against for future generations, it’s difficult to envisage a similar cure-all scenario for the world population’s mental wellbeing.
That’s where people like John come in.
A local area co-ordinator with Grow, a community mental health support group in Portlaoise, John Farren is tasked with teaching people to cope with, and eventually emerge from, issues such as anxiety, depression, and potential suicidal tendencies.
“Grow provides support for people who are suffering from mental health problems in the community, and to prevent people from experiencing mental health problems. We have people coming to our meetings from right across the board. We’d have young adults, maybe those looking for jobs, those in a difficult economic situation.
“We have people who are in work who are finding things difficult due to various problems in the job, which encompasses people within families, lone parents and people living on their own,” says Dublin native John, who has witnessed the public’s mentality waver in tandem with our turbulent fortunes as a nation in his role over the last seven years.
Although often necessary, John believes that medical treatment for people suffering with depression and other such issues should always be supplemented by community support initiatives, like those that are implemented by Grow, which offers mutual support groups for members as well as mental health education programmes aimed at providing information to the wider community.
“Ireland very much works on the medical model - give somebody a tablet and that’s the end of it. We need the medical model working in conjunction with the recovery model, where people would be sent to various therapies. That’s really what Grow is about, giving people various ways of dealing with their feelings,” says John, who believes that despite the strides made over recent decades, topics such as depression and suicide remain hugely stigmatised in Ireland.
“There’s a huge stigma still. It’s not as bad as it was, but it’s still there. You’d sometimes get people here in Portlaoise who’d rather go to a support group in Portarlington, in case they’d meet anybody from the town here, even though the meetings are absolutely confidential, but people would take those extremes,” he adds.
In a 2012 report titled Pain and distress in rural Ireland researchers from both Teagasc and UCD detailed how men in rural areas experienced difficulties which often stemmed from denial of mental health problems and a negative attitude to help seeking - something that John also encounters in his duties.
“Here in the town, people would be far more ready to come to a support group than they would be in the rural areas - it’s far more difficult to get people in the rural areas. The reason for that is because people know each other, and they usually don’t want to be seen by the neighbours,” he says.
Another demographic shown to be particularly susceptible to feelings of anxiety and depression are our teens, adolescents and young adults.
Over the last number of years, Ireland has consistently ranked among the top five countries for suicide among young people in the EU. That said, latest Central Statistics Office figures released in May indicated that there was a 23 per cent drop in suicides among the 15-24 age group here last year, a situation which is thought to be reflective of the work being done by organisations such as Teenline.
"Teenline Ireland is a helpline for teenagers in need of someone to talk to. If they're having a bad day, they just ring up and want to talk to someone and get something off their chest, from something as small as they missed the bus this morning to 'I don't want to be here anymore'. The smallest problem in the world can turn into the biggest one," says Luke Clerkin, a volunteer and fundraiser who was instrumental in the release of the Never Alone charity single for Teenline Ireland last year.
On top of all the difficulties normally associated with growing up, modern society’s ever-expanding means of communication are posing more and more complications for young people according to Luke, who suffered from deep depression before his involvement in mental health campaigns spurred him into action.
"A lot of older people would ask 'what have you got to be worried about, you're young, you're grand'. They don't see the fact that teenagers these days have it worse than they did. When I was younger we only had Bebo; now there's Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, all this kind of stuff. The cyber world is exploding and teenagers these days are getting bombarded."
However, despite misgivings over the potential negative impacts of social media on a young person’s psyche, Luke is of the belief that it can also be used constructively to encourage “positive peer pressure” to help people to open up rather than suffering in silence.
“Because of the influence Twitter, Facebook and things like that have on young people, if they see celebrities and ‘Facebook famous’ people talking about their own mental health, then they’ll realise there is help out there, “ he says. “I would encourage such behaviour because there’s a line you cross when you fall into mental health illness or depression, and one small thing can help you go back over the line even if it’s just seeing another person open up.”