Mental Health Special: Niall Breslin opens up

Dave Grohl was a shoo-in for Celebrity Klutz of the Year until Niall Breslin decided to jump off a Scottish waterfall, resulting in two mangled ankles, assorted ligament ruptures, and his Voice Of Ireland colleague Eoghan McDermott, who was river canyoning with him, worrying that they’d be a judge short for the new series.
Being stung on the head a few weeks later by an irate Bull Wall jellyfishl confirmed Bressie’s inability to leave the house without disaster befalling him.
“They say bad things come in threes, so fuck knows what’s going to happen to me next!” he laughs, a baseball cap covering the livid reminder of that sting. “To paint the picture; I was in Scotland for four days with Eoghan and thought, as I had an Ironman coming up, that I’d use it for a few tough highland cycles. We had a couple of lads over with us to film a piece and they said, ‘Cycling’s a bit boring to shoot, how about we go to an adventure centre?’ So we arrive and the guy there recommends canyoning; ‘It’s a good buzz but you need balls of steel to do some of the jumps.’ McDermott and me were like, ‘Suits us grand.’ We jump off a few small cliffs into deep water – no problems whatsoever – and then come to a slightly bigger cliff where the instructor warns us, ‘Don’t jump out, if you do you’ll go into shallow water. It’s 40- foot there, but only three-foot there.’ What’s the most natural thing to do standing on top of a cliff? It’s to jump out a little bit. As I was in the air I went, ‘Fuck!’ I could see the stones just below the surface and thought at best double leg-break and a month in hospital.
“I know it doesn’t sound like I was particularly lucky, but weighing 16 stone and hitting those rocks as hard as I did I could have been paralysed – or worse. The next jump was a 75-foot abseil and I couldn’t put any pressure on my feet, so we used the abseiling rope to pull ourselves out of the canyon. The alternative was a helicopter rescue job and the unmerciful slagging I’d have got as a result!”
Most people would be content having Leinster rugby player, rock star, producer, TV presenter, studio owner and programme-maker on their CV, but with the little spare time all that leaves Bressie has penned a memoir, Me And My Mate Jeffrey, which has spent two weeks atop the Irish Non-Fiction Chart. Mr. McDermott doesn’t have to worry about his bezzie friend status, with Jeffrey the name Niall’s given to the anxiety and depression he’s battled with since childhood.
“That whole Scottish episode made me realise how far I’ve actually come,” he resumes. “When the injury happened everyone around me went, ‘Oh fuck, we’ve seen this before, he’s going to disappear into a hole.’ In the past I would’ve gone, ‘Fuck this!’, sold my bike and eaten shit for a week. The minute I got back and lay on the couch, my girlfriend Roz (Purcell) said to me: ‘I’m so sorry you can’t do the Ironman.’ I was like, ‘I’m totally doing the Ironman! I’ve no fucking idea how but I’ll think of something.’
“Luckily, I’ve an incredible physio, Mark from Sports MEK who trains the Irish sailors, who went, ‘I’m going down to West Cork and you’re coming with me. There’s no reason why you can’t swim.’ He basically fucked me into Schull Bay and said ‘2k, now!’ I come out of the water and there’s a bike waiting for me. I’m like, ‘You’re fucking joking!’ and he says, ‘Your ligaments go that way, you’ll be fine.There’s no traffic lights in West Cork, just keep going.’ I cycled for an hour seven days after that injury.”
We’ll return to matters Ironman a bit later. While he’d probably have gotten a bigger advance and the Sunday World snapping up the serialisation rights if he had, Bressie had no interest in merely spilling the celebrity beans, even if those celebrities include his Mullingar pal Niall Horan.
“I would have been better off writing a fucking cookbook – and I know nothing about cooking!” he snarls. “It’s important to tell my story but the core fundamental ingredient of Me And My Mate Jeffrey is how the illness and the stigma conspired to control me. Someone said to me yesterday, ‘Jesus Bressie, you’re making out that everyone’s got depression.’ I went, ‘Well actually chief, before you shove your fucking words up your hole, 30% of this country are dealing with mental health issues. It’s the most common illness in Ireland.
If you don’t want to hear me talk about it, don’t fucking listen!’”
Miley Cyrus has vociferously supported LGBT rights whilst at the same time gleefully ridiculing Sinéad O’Connor and Amanda Bynes’ mental health problems. Double standard or what?
“Miley Cyrus saying that with her influence is incredibly naive. At the same time, what you don’t want to do with mental health is get people unbelievably touchy about it; ‘You can’t say that!’ If someone goes, ‘She’s fucking nuts’, you’ve got to listen to the intent. Are they saying that because they have a really negative view of mental health or are they saying it because it’s the language they’ve grown up with? We have, without doubt, become addicted to being offended. If we’re unbelievably touchy about every bit of language we hear we’re never going to normalise the conversation.
“I actually quite like Miley Cyrus,” he continues. “She’s what a pop star needs to be, controversial, but those attacks on Sinéad O’Connor and Amanda Bynes were ill-judged. Societally, mental health is a very convenient scapegoat when somebody gets shot. If you look at the figures, though, you’ll see that you’re more likely to be murdered by someone with no diagnosed mental health issues. Hopefully people who don’t suffer from depression will read the book and understand it a bit better.”
Social media mobs don’t come any more baying than the one that took Rosanna Davison to task over her recent linking of arthritis, autism and schizophrenia to gluten. Comments, incidentally, which she claims were taken out of context.
“If that’s what she said, then it’s completely misguided and wrong. Regardless of how you look at it though – and I haven’t read the book – she was badly bullied. She was abused and torn apart. To me that is toxic behaviour. You express your outrage and move on to the next internet ‘thing’ whereas the person you’re ripping apart has to live with all this viciously negative stuff about them that doesn’t just disappear; it’s out there in cyberspace for ever.”
The excellent Belfast-based NoBullying.com recently told the stories of seven teenage suicides where message board abuse was a major contributing factor.
“I wouldn’t have coped with the panic attacks I suffered every night as a 15 and 16-year-old if there’d been the added pressure of being ripped apart online. A lot of teenagers see these online communities as some kind of peer-to-peer support when oftentimes it can be the opposite. They’re only going to feel more isolated from their peers, though, if you try and keep them off social media.”
Bressie is critical of schools that only address their pupils’ exam-passing academic needs.
“One of the fundamental things we’ve got to do is address our educational system,” he states. “I’m not saying get rid of the Junior Cert and Leaving Cert, but if you’re going to make kids do those exams teach them how to cope with the pressure. If I was able to do the ‘Our Father’ four times a day and the ‘Hail Mary’ every time a priest walked into the fucking classroom then why can’t we do mindfulness in schools? What use is a child who’s getting A’s every week in English, but can’t sleep at night and wants to rip their own skin off with fucking anxiety? Academia is worthless if your living life in a perpetual state of fear.”
Bressie agrees with Minister Aodhán Ó Ríordáin’s recent Hot Press assertion that it’s time for the Catholic Church to butt out of education here.
“I’ve no problem with religion but I do have a problem with it controlling our schools, especially now that we’re becoming so multicultural. A friend of mine’s daughter became both physically and mentally ill because of the French Orals. I asked, ‘Has anyone ever helped you with this?’ and she said, ‘No.’ I showed her some visualisation, meditation and CBT techniques and over a four or five week period she improved. That shouldn’t be my job; it should be in the educational system. The fact of the matter is that a lot of teachers don’t want to do it or feel it’s their responsibility. The government cutting resources left, right and centre doesn’t help, but the people running our schools haven’t got to grips with mental wellness at all.”
Bressie was almost forced to quit the Voice Of Ireland midway through the first season due to the severity of his panic attacks. Did he realise that one of his fellow judges, Dolores O’Riordan, was struggling with bipolar disorder during her tenure with the show?
“I had absolutely no idea. I was quite intimidated by this iconic Irish rock star coming on to the Voice – ‘Shit, what am I going to say to her? – but she was incredibly warm and motherly. Bipolar and other mental health issues are actually quite prevalent in creative industries. There’s an element of not being able to switch your brain off. You’re almost expected to be that shoegazey, melancholic musician but it’s as fucking difficult for them as it is for everyone else. Being at the level Dolores was and disguising your demons just isn’t sustainable.”
Ireland’s collective willingness to address previously taboo subjects is underlined by Niall’s omnipresence these past few weeks on radio and TV.
“I’m noticing that my interviews have switched from being celebrity-driven to social-driven, and that’s a good thing because although I enjoy The Voice – it’s part of my life and I’m in the public eye – I’m not a fan of celebrity- ism. Conor Cusack said something to me last year at Electric Picnic that ultimately lead to me being able to do this; ‘If you talk to a room of 500 people and just one of them’s in a better place afterwards as a result, you’ve succeeded for that day.’ A tweet from somebody after I’ve done a radio show going, ‘You encouraged my daughter to talk to me about her depression, thanks’ is all the reward I need.”
As open and honest as they’ve been with each other, Bressie says he was still nervous as hell handing his girlfriend a copy of the book.
“After being with Roz for maybe two weeks,” he recalls, “I said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you... Some of the days you won’t want to be around me and I won’t want to be around you, but that’s okay.’ She could have gone, ‘Everything will be okay’ or ‘Fuck this, I’m out of here’ but instead Roz said this brilliant, simple thing: ‘Let’s take one day at a time, and today is good.’ Giving her the book, I went, ‘There’s going to be things you won’t want to read but it’s part of the story and I have nothing to hide anymore.’ I’ve got texts from a few loved ones saying, ‘This is so sad’ but what would have been sad is if I hadn’t been able to write it.”
Hitting TV screens early in the New Year is Bressie’s Iron Mind, an RTÉ two-parter in which people with various mental health issues are equipped with the skills to compete in their first endurance event.
“Achieving physical goals has been enormously beneficial to my own mental wellness, so I wanted to share that with them,” he explains. “Their issues range from quite severe anxiety disorders to clinical depression. One of them had suffered a brain injury which they were finding it quite difficult to come back from. There’s a post-natal depression theme too. It’s a very difficult and complex thing for women and their loved ones to deal with and not just ‘the baby blues’.
“We’ve been working with them for about four months now with the Turkey Half Ironman at the end of October the endgame. We did the recruiting through Aware and had two clinical psychologists overseeing the whole thing. We expected maybe 30 people to come forward but ended up with 340, which shows you that they want help.
“It’s the most difficult thing I’ve had to get commissioned because the vision, although very clear in my mind, is hard to convey to sponsors,” Bressie concludes. “There was a danger of it not happening when RTÉ turned around and said, ‘You know what? Don’t worry about a sponsor. We’ll fund this ourselves.’ There’s a willingness to put things on that two or three years ago would have been deemed too heavy and depressing for primetime, which is really healthy.”