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Men Need To Let Go of The Stigma Around Mental Health
For the majority of my adult life, I didn’t consider mental health to be a priority. It wasn’t even an afterthought, it was something that rarely entered my mind.
I had little conception of what a mental illness entailed, which meant I would have had no way of spotting the early signs if I had given the issue some thought.
Throughout my youth, I had always been prone to worrying. One of the earliest examples of this I remember is going to the cinema to watch Toy Story 2.
Once we were seated and the doors were shut by the attendants, thoughts started racing through my mind about the doors being locked with everyone inside trapped and unable to escape.
To this day, I have no idea why these thoughts came to mind, just that they did. There was no basis for me to think this way, there was no previous incident that influenced my thinking.
It was just a thought that popped into my brain at that time. As we went back to the cinema in the following years, the thought would occur again on occasion. There was no reason for this and once the film and my catastrophic thinking did not come to pass, I carried on as normal.
Years later, when I was living in Barcelona, I had a panic attack which led me to go to the hospital in the belief I was…
