Brought to you by Time to Change
“If you’re worried about how a friend’s doing, football coach Deian has one piece of simple advice. “It might sound silly, but just asking ‘How are you?’ and ‘How are you really?’"
The last decade has seen a significant change in the way people think and act around topics like mental health and mental illness. Although we still have a long way to go in fully reducing the stigma that can prevent men who are experiencing problems from speaking up about them, it is clear that men as a whole feel increasingly comfortable telling others about their problems and seeking help from their GP.
There is a growing acknowledgement in society that mental health is as important as physical health and that we can all play our part by checking in with others if we are worried about them and being willing to listen and not judge. Read our
5 ways to talk about mental health with a friend article.
But although it is important that men feel able to speak more frankly about their emotions, often the conversations about men’s mental health can ignore the complexities of why they choose not to.
https://twitter.com/JOE_co_uk/status/1046673998149505025
Deian Lye-Vella, 44, is a champion for mental health campaign Time to Change. He has experienced low moods since he was a teenager and has been diagnosed with clinical depression. Five years ago he experienced a depressive episode so severe that he struggled to leave the house.
“My energy levels just disappeared,” he tells JOE. “I found it hard to walk from point A to point B. Socialising became difficult and I just wanted to rest – it’s almost like having the flu without having the flu, you’re tired and withdrawn.”
Faced with one of the lowest moments in his life he decided to confide in his then wife. “I was really honest because I was suicidal at the time,” he says. “But I don’t think she wanted to deal with that.”
His depression was cited as the reason their relationship broke down on the couple’s divorce documents and it left Deian feeling unable to trust other people with his feelings.
“I think you’ve got to have a really good friendship and relationship because for all you know it could change the relationship – there’s always a fear about being perceived a certain way,” he says. “When my ex-wife got me to open up the consequence was she divorced me.”
In the time since then, he has begun working with Time to Change and did this in order to help people who have found themselves in a similar position to him and change public attitudes on what mental illness means. In particular, he feels people who have not experienced mental health problems can struggle to understand what people like him are going through, something that isn’t helped by the language used around it.
“I think the word ‘depression’ can be a problem. Too often people conflate it with feeling a bit down – so they’ll say ‘I’m feeling a bit depressed’ – but they’re talking about a mood rather than a condition,” he says. “People will say ‘why you feeling sad?’ – but just because I have depression doesn’t mean I feel sad all the time. There’s a lot of misinformation at the moment.
"I'd like people to be more aware of what depression is, to explain it’s not always about being blue or having a sad phase and that there are so many different elements to it. I think if people knew more of it then they’d understand why somebody was avoiding contact or not going out, or why they’d stayed in bed for days and days."
He also feels that there are misconceptions about how mental illness can be treated, with people often seeing it as a response to a traumatic event rather than a medical problem. As a former personal trainer and now football coach, too, he thinks that sometimes exercise and healthy eating are seen as quick fixes to a problem that sometimes just needs dealing with through medication and counselling.
"Prior to it happening I was pretty fit, I was in the army reserves and went running every other day, lifting weights and my diet was good, but when it came that all slowed down a lot," he says.
"When you’re in a bad place going out for a run is just difficult, it’s like running when you’re experiencing a temperature or something. I tried running when I was bad and it was horrible, it felt like I was running through treacle the entire time. When you’re in a better place it does help, but if you’re bad it’s not going to happen."
Although Deian still struggles to confide in others about the problems he is going through, he has found comfort in attending support groups that allow people to come together and talk about what they are going through. And not everybody in his life has proved as difficult to open up to as his ex-wife.
"For years I had a really good friend, who was my best man, but I didn’t always tell him what was going on," he says. "It was only in the last year that we were due to go out and I was going to tell him I had a cold – but instead I told him that mentally I wasn’t feeling it and that I wasn’t in a good place. He was fine and it made me think ‘blimey why didn’t I do this before?’"
Which goes to show there are simple things we can all do for friends, family and colleagues if we worried about them, and it starts from simply asking how someone is doing and being open to the response. With that in mind, the one piece of advice Deian would give somebody trying to talk to someone experiencing a low period in their life is simple: "It might sound silly, but just asking ‘how are you?’ and ‘how are you really?’ "
