International Men's Mental Health Week

This week is apparently International Men's Mental Health Week (until tomorrow) yet we have seen very little content on this issue on social media over the past week - I suspect largely because as men we still suffer with the stigma that our emotional and mental health define our masculinity or that talking about our mental health might lead to problems at work or in our career.

I find this troubling because until we start to acknowledge that mental health and emotional health are important to everyone (irrespective of gender) we will never get past it being taboo.

In my early academic years I studied psychology as a double major (with computer science) in an attempt to understand my own trauma and figure out how to exist in a world which both made no sense and had caused me massive trauma.

As a child, I was raped, beaten and abused on a regular basis. My sisters were raped, my mother was beaten and as a family we lived in constant fear. People would come to our house in the middle of the night and bang on the door, scratch at the windows and throw stones to terrorise us (on the instruction of a particularly nasty step father with whom my mother had ended a relationship). At one point we returned home from an aunt's to find our front door kicked in and the house burglarised - another time my sister was kidnapped from school by the same step father and yet another time our dog was stolen and brutally killed.

It didn't even end when we left the town and moved to the other end of the country - we had left behind a hutch of rabbits which a neighbour was going to take in - but we found out when we arrived at our new house that the day we left someone had brutally slaughtered all the rabbits as well.

These events were not isolated incidents - this was my childhood from the age of 3-17. At the age of 7 I started to see child psychologists at the behest of social services after the evidence of my physical abuse were exposed in primary school. I had ADHD (although we didn't call it ADHD then, we called it "behavioural difficulties") and a remarkably high IQ so at the age of 12 social services decided to take me out of my abusive home and put me in a boarding school specifically for gifted children - a school where the abuse would continue and escalate to rape.

The trauma in my childhood resulted in significant issues with my mental health. By the age of 16 I had broken pretty much every bone in my hands from punching flint dashed walls and other self harm. My arms and hands were heavily scarred from the cuts and other self harm as well as other trauma inflicted by others (cigarette burns etc.). I was a mess and clinically depressed.

By the age of 21 I had been institutionalised 5 times for attempted suicide and felt that my life was worthless and that I wanted to die - all the time. For years there was not a day that passed where I didn't contemplate ending it all.

Despite all of this, despite being completely alone (I was estranged from my family at the age of 12) - I somehow managed to push through it. By the time I was 32 I discovered purpose, I discovered the impact of technology on society - the world of privacy became my world.

I still carried all of my trauma, I still suffered from severe depression and emotional distress, I still didn't sleep because of those trauma - but I had something to focus on and I was really good at it.

The last 15 years have only pushed me further and further in my pursuit of purpose and creating a positive impact on the world. I still have the trauma (but now I speak about it in an attempt to help others understand their own trauma), I still have ADHD, I still have the scars and I still cry (frequently). I do sleep a little better (although not a lot) and I am in a long term relationship with a loving wife who accepts my trauma and the impact that has on me, with understanding, support and warmth.

Mental health is not a gender issue - mental health is an everyone issue. But it should not define you - if certainly does not define me. We can grow beyond our trauma, beyond our fears, beyond those environments which would seek to destroy us.

So the point of me writing this post is to celebrate life and our ability to take control of our trauma - to stop it defining us, to stop it destroying our relationships and lives. Find your purpose (we all have one), use that as a focal point to drive you forward - learn to live instead of living each day trying not to die.

#YouGotThis.

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