Mental health remains a key issue in rural Ireland today – and needs to be given voice to ease the stigma that still surrounds the topic, according to one rural-dweller and advocate, who knows the challenges better than most.

Anthony Culleton from Co. Laois, a sawmill operative and active member of Macra na Feirme, recently sat down with AgriLand to discuss mental health, Macra and the importance of “me time” for farmers and rural-dwellers who are flat out following a busy spring.

‘Me time’

“We never set ourselves ‘me time’; even if you had an outlet once or twice a month or something like that, you get out and socialise,” Anthony said, having just come from a community fun run in his local village before the interview.

Commenting on the run, he said: “It’s a great way of making friends and building community spirit which is very important in rural Ireland considering we’re very isolated.”

Highlighting the need for farmers to give themselves a little while to “switch off”, Anthony said: “Even though it’s a vocation they have and they have to be there all the time, they need to set aside that one or two hours at the weekend which is ‘me time’.

Get your mind away for a couple of hours; give yourself that break. The cattle will still get fed – but you have that hour.

“It’s a way of lifting some weight off your shoulders and re-evaluating things and when you come back to your problems later on, they won’t seem as big as when you left.”

‘Mr. P’

Anthony, who is vice chairman and competitions officer of his local branch of Macra, is the reigning Macra na Feirme Mr. Personality for 2018.

Also Read: Laois native takes top prize at Macra’s Mr. Personality Festival

With the 2019 Mr. Personality Festival gearing up to kick off in Kilkennny next weekend, the current “Mr. P” is nearing the end of his term, following a busy year during which he was determined to make his mark as an advocate for mental health, giving a talk at the inaugural ‘Make a Moove’ workshop in January.

He is a familiar face on the “Macra scene”, taking part in a number of competitions and events for both club and county, including: debating; public speaking; indoor soccer; table quizzes; tag rugby; bowling; and Club of the Year.

However, things were not always so upbeat for the Laois native, who is vocal on his own challenges with mental health in the past.

OCD

“For the last eight years I have suffered with OCD – which is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

“To give it some sort of a definition, it’s a mental health anxiety disorder whereby the person gets caught in a series of obsessions which would be intrusive thoughts, images, feelings, that type of thing.

“After being diagnosed with OCD, after only having it for a couple of months, it took over my life. I was virtually unable to leave the house at one point, it got to that point.

It resulted in me having to get checked into St. Patrick’s Mental Health Hospital in Dublin. The first time I went there, I went in thinking ‘there’s no way back from this, your life is over now; this is it’.

Putting it bluntly, Anthony said: “The first time I went into ‘Pat’s’ I was terrified to really commit to it.

“I kind of thought I could tackle mental health and tackle Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) at arm’s length and sort of do what I was comfortable with – but not go into the ‘red zone’.

“But I suppose I was really kidding myself; I knew myself I hadn’t tried as hard as I should have tried.

I thought there was more in me and I didn’t give it because I was too scared and that’s putting it bluntly. I was too scared to challenge my OCD.

Because of this, despite getting back to work and – “perhaps taking on too many responsibilities” – Anthony found himself back in Pat’s for a second stint, three years after his first visit.

“Things again got too much for me; my OCD took over everything, and anxiety.”

This time round, Anthony was determined to get his life back on track, throwing himself into the tasks set down by his doctors.

Summing up how OCD was issuing challenges, using an anecdote on hygiene, the sawmill operator explained that, while a person would normally wash their hands once in the bathroom, someone suffering from OCD might wash their hands 10 times to make sure their hands are completely clean.

In CBT therapy, what you’re doing is you’re retraining your brain to realise that your behaviour that you’ve become accustomed to is not needed, he explained.

“Basically what you’re doing is you’re trying to think up a contradiction to that and you’re going far beyond the norm to show your brain ‘yeah, OK, the norm is the norm for a reason’.

“If you walk into the bathroom, wash your hands once and walk out that’s OK. You don’t need to go in and wash your hands 10 times to do the same thing.

“So what you do is you walk into a public bathroom, walk out and don’t wash your hands – and walk off for a couple of hours to deal with the anxiety.

So you do think ‘Oh god, I’ve so many germs on my hands right now’. And you walk around for a couple of hours and you realise ‘Wait a minute, nothing’s actually happened’.

“So obviously if I go into the bathroom again and just wash my hands once, that’s enough – because I’ve seen not washing my hands at all has no effect either. So I don’t need to do it 10 times; I don’t need to keep doing it.”

However, he noted, it takes a long time to get to that point with multiple attempts needed to first let the anxiety plateau, and then start to reduce.

‘You can fight this’

Describing it as being similar to college work in a 9:00am-4:00pm format, Anthony heaped praise on the doctors he worked with: Dr. Michael McDonagh; Dr. Molly O’Connell, his registrar; and psychotherapist Frank Smyth.

“They’re the three people I credit with putting my life back together – because they tore me apart and put me back together so many times to show me that you’re stronger than you think you are.

“You can fight this; don’t worry about getting knocked back,” he said, adding that the support he received from his family and friends made the problem “so much less daunting”.

“I felt a lot more ready to tackle things after I came out of hospital the second time. I got back into work – but it’s something that, every day, I still struggle with.”

Driving remains a key challenge for Anthony; having once been his way to relax, OCD changed this.

“I don’t like driving at all because it’s always just anxiety; it’s anxiety the whole time. It’s always ‘what if’.

You get to a junction and you’re sitting there for 10 minutes because you’re too afraid to drive out on the road; and there’s someone behind you blaring the horn because they don’t realise what you’re going through in the car.

“Technically, I just get by with driving; it’s the one thing I’m still not happy with,” he admitted.

However, while not ideal, it’s a far cry from the despair he felt four years ago. “It’s still not where I want to be but it’s improving; it’s a fight every day but it’s a fight I’m willing to keep at.”

Anthony noted that he is forever grateful for Macra for “helping me to get back out and live my life again – because it is an amazing social outlet to have so close to home”.

“If someone had offered me four years ago to be Macra’s Mr. Personality, to be a part of Laois Macra and Macra circles in general, I would have taken their hand off.

“I’d encourage anyone, farmer or not, to go down to their local Macra club to see what’s available to them.”

Stigma

Turning to a broader picture, Anthony explained that he went into Pat’s feeling like he was the only person going through an unusual challenge; the key problem he said, was that he didn’t know it is as common as it is, because no one talks about it – something he’s determined to change.

There’s a mental health crisis in this country but the Government doesn’t know about it because people are afraid to talk about it – because there’s still this stigma.

“It needs to be normalised,” he asserted.

“You can never talk enough about mental health and you can never talk enough about your own mental health – especially if it’s not where you need it to be.

“But it doesn’t matter who you talk to – the most important thing is to start talking and to start getting it out of your head and into the open – and then you can start maybe figuring things out a little bit. You can start planning your journey then about how you’re going to recover.

People are too afraid to talk about their mental health and they’re afraid of the stigma and the judgement that they’re going to have from it and stuff like that.

“Don’t feel you’re on your own – because there are thousands in this country that are suffering with OCD specifically and there are tens of thousands more that are suffering with mental health difficulties in general.”

He expressed his hopes that Irish people can soon be at a stage where someone can sit down at a table and talk about their mental health the way they talk about their physical health.

“Don’t feel you have to be qualified to talk about a subject. Just talk about it and have it out in the open and make it a more approachable subject.”

Improvement

Regarding his own fight, things are far from finished, with therapy continuing to help with issues such as driving.

“I’m not sitting here going, ‘I’m cured, I’m over OCD; I’m not – I’ll have to fight with it for every day of my life.

“But there are things that I know aren’t where they can be – they can be improved on and be better. And until I get them to a point where I’m happy with them, I’m not going to stop pushing myself.”