100 Voices: David Keenan - On Becoming Familiar with Mental Health: #NowWereTalking

Mental health. What do those words conjure up within me?

I’ll take you back to a time when I was younger and had never before heard those two words together as one. The word mental – used to describe an individual, yes – but mental health as a term for me at the time would have seemed like some prescribed utterance from the mouth of a twisted doctor in a Hitchcock film. I am 17, we are in Dundalk.

Over time, the term became more familiar to me, but still only as a vague brushstroke which was trying to define the indefinable, for no one can see through another’s eyes or live inside another’s mind.

During frequent periods of blackness I would bury myself in a shallow grave of loneliness, isolation and terrifying self-doubt, partly because of a lack of trust in all that claimed to be reality, or at least what I assumed reality should be.

It was during such times that I began to write like, for want of a better term, a madman.

For it was through my wrestling with this shadow self in a creative arena that I discovered that it could be if not eradicated, then dampened, managed, maintained from time to time – the process became cathartic, like the shedding of dead leaves.

It is still present and always will be, for it’s an integral part of who I am, a natural symptom of the human condition and it must not be repressed! All emotions are useful, all emotions can act as guides: we must listen to our bodies and listen closely to our minds!

100 Voices was published in the Hot Press Mental Health Special in conjunction with Lyons Tea and Pieta House as part of the Now We're Talking Campaign. For more please visit hotpress.com/now-were-talking/