This week is Mental Health Awareness week. You might have heard the BBC promoting the Get Creative festival, a UK-wide initiative in partnership with UCL and The Open University, to promote wellness through creative pursuits. Its aim is to encourage us to boost our moods by practising pottery, painting, piano-playing or pretty much anything else creative, suggesting that engaging with the arts is particularly good for our emotions and wellbeing, for which there is some sound scientific research.
In the workplace, on the BBC, on the festival circuit: mental health is big on the agenda these days. As Kevin Braddock says in his new book Everything Begins With Asking For Help, it's impossible to know whether there’s more mental health about or simply more talk of it, and a greater openness and effort to dismantle the stigma around it.
In 2014, aged 42, Braddock, a brilliant journalist and writer, and a contributing editor to Esquire, underwent what his doctors termed a ‘Major Depressive Episode’. He was discovered on the pavement outside a Berlin office block and taken to hospital. Braddock had been in Berlin for five years, and was working as a magazine editor: he was burnt out, depressed, at rock bottom. He was found, saved probably, after typing the words ‘I need help’ into Facebook, where he was immediately inundated by callers and concerned messages from friends. Everything Begins With Asking For Help is Braddock’s story: what happened after, and before, and how those three words put him on the long and bumpy road to recovery. (Its subtitle is An Honest Guide To Depression And Anxiety, From Rock Bottom To Recovery.) It is neither a misery memoir nor a manual for mental health. As its author points out, he’s yet to read a good one of those – and as his wide-ranging bibliography, quotes and references make clear, he’s read deeply and widely around the subject – simply because it’s impossible to offer a one-size fits-all solution. Instead its an honest guide to dealing with depression and anxiety. It's about what Braddock has learned, and what we can all learn too.
He shatters one idea early on, that suicide rates among men are on the rise. The most recent figures from 2018 thankfully show a decline. But, man or woman, if you haven’t suffered from anxiety or depression to some degree or another in your life, you are surely in a very small minority.
In a page titled ‘How full is your plate?’ Braddock lays out where his head was in 2014: ‘a stressful job; a history of depression and anxiety; some perpetual, gnawing questions about the meaning of life and my identity; problems in my relationship; the absence of close family and old friends; an illness (glandular fever); an unhealthy relationship with alcohol’, and you find yourself nodding along in recognition.
Perhaps aspects of Braddock’s character were unsuited to aspects of his job in the media – at one point he describes fleeing a glitzy celebrity party ‘swamped in champagne-infused shame’, where others would have taken being in the same room as A-list pop stars and politicians as an ego-boost, it did his head in – he felt he unable to measure up, that he wasn’t ‘good enough’. Yet it’s through words, his faith in his considerable abilities as a storyteller, that Braddock stumbles towards salvation. He starts writing stuff down, thoughts that eventually led to a self-published magazine, Torchlight and to this book. (The ‘Get Creative’ festival is on to something.) Ideas covered in Everything Begins... include simple physical exercises, listening to and learning from others, practising kindness, meditation, using technology (Braddock is refreshingly clear-sighted and non-preachy about social media, he sees the pros and the cons, and certainly doesn’t deem it an epidemic ruining our collective self-esteem), interacting with nature and a chapter on appreciating your parents that is so well-told and true, I cried. A simple truth of life, Braddock realises: “Being human hurts”.
Everything Begins... is frank and it is compassionate. Braddock gently offers suggestions, he hasn't got the solutions. He lays it all out there (that ‘honest’ in the subtitle). It must have been tough to write.
It's to Braddock's great credit that it's far from tough to read. He's not above poking fun at himself – at one point on the road to recovery, having spent yet another day immersed in the teachings of the great philosophers and keen to share his latest learnings on life with his flatmate, the flatmate kindly suggests he might like to get out more.
Getting out more. Literally and figuratively that's what Everything Begins...offers, 'a general direction of travel' for anyone who’s become stuck, and a wealth of wisdom for anyone else. Everyone should read it.
Everything Begins With Asking For Help: An Honest Guide To Depression And Anxiety, From Rock Bottom To Recovery by Kevin Braddock is published today by Kyle Books, priced £9.99 at Amazon.co.uk
