This article contains detailed content relating to suicide and depression. Some viewers may find it distressing. Reader’s discretion is advised.
This a glimpse into a part of my life that I have yet to share outside my inner circle. I’m not doing it for a charity, praise or anything like that.
I just want to do it with the sole reason of spreading some awareness on mental health and the battles that some people go through.
It’s important I say this is my journey, I’m no expert on the subject and it doesn’t make me anymore different than the next person. However, if it helps one person then I’ll have done what I set out to do.
Regardless if you don’t know me from Adam or you’re my next door neighbour, my name is Darragh Brendan Paul Lyons and I was born on the 27th of January 2002.
I’ve always been tall, I’m now 6’6, lean and I have blonde hair, to me this has always made me stand out, for better or for worse.
I’m from Ballyfin and have played hurling and football with them for as long as I can remember.
I have worked with LaoisToday as a reporter since 2019, something I’ve always enjoyed.
Without taking all day, I thought I’d start from the beginning.
My initial years were filled with me barely surviving at birth due to being severely premature and having to deal with all these potential developmental and growth issues that came with that.
My toddler years saw me go through physio and speech therapies and as a young kid I struggled with controlling my anger which led to many explosions and tantrums as I struggled to express myself. I often turned to sport as a way to calm me down and be myself.
Whatever the exact reasons or combination of different factors, I left Ballyfin National School at the end of Fourth Class.
At the time this was the end of the world and I couldn’t cope and I got emotionally overloaded.
I did understand the positives of me moving but the negatives were all I could focus on. In in any case it led to me, at nine years old, wrapping black tape around my nose and mouth again and again cutting of my oxygen, in an effort to kill myself.
A spark of survival instinct led me to pull it all off before I passed out. I was found covered in blood but it was passed off as a painful nose bleed and life went on.
Despite being anxious and everything else that comes with trying to settle into a new school I actually flourished in Gaelscoil Phortlaoise.
I repeated fourth class and by the time I left in sixth class I was next to fluent in Irish, something I’m immensely proud of to this day. Funny how the worst moment in my life led to some of the best.
Without getting caught up in all the ins and outs of my teenage years I went through all the same things as everyone else does.
Trying to fit in, trying to make friends, going to your first discos, trying to make county squads and struggling with embracing your teen self.
Personally, I hated new situations, I hated socialising but at the same time I didn’t want to be alone or left out.
I was incredibly self conscious about my height and weight. I often didn’t resonate with who I saw in the mirror and referred to myself in the third person a lot.
I was a major overthinker. I would replay the worst possible situations over and over in my head and I developed a trait of self destruction because it was what I felt I deserved, be it in academics, sport or friendships.
I was, and still am, an emotional person. This often comes across on the pitch (often when things go wrong!) but for most of my life it led to me crying myself to sleep because all of my insecurities ate me away.
This led to me often using relationships to feel good about myself and not wanting to be single or alone.
I tried to commit suicide for a second time at the beginning of 2021. I had all these problems with myself underneath and then I didn’t see a way to deal with my emotions arising from a bad situation infront of me.
I used a belt as a noose but the rack in my wardrobe gave way. I even had a note written out but again I didn’t succeed.
Everything just felt too much and I didn’t like the life that I was living. There were some incredible happy days tied in with all of this it wasn’t like everyday was a bad one.
However, all these issues plagued me in the background until the start of 2022 when I couldn’t shake a sadness that was over me for two months or so.
I then had a relationship of two and a half years end, which was largely caused by my own insecurities.
I was also studying a strenuous degree I didn’t love and where I felt out of my depth. I also felt distance from the couple of friends I had made at University and I fell into a deep depression.
It came apparent that I used happiness from my previous partner to cover up all my own problems. I would sometimes have these little break downs but I entered a mindset where it was 24/7 suicidal thoughts.
I couldn’t escape my own head. I simply did not want to be alive, I thought I was broken and I had no hope for myself. I was facing into exams that I couldn’t study for because I couldn’t be alone with my own thoughts.
I couldn’t see or feel happiness but I was kept alive by telling myself that I would just pass my pain onto the people I loved if I did die, so it was better for me to suffer than them.
It was this small spark of survival instinct that had always burned and kept me going that one evening lying in bed in College in Galway, I signed up for counselling which led me to getting an appointment at my College Counselling Department.
I very nearly didn’t go because I told myself I didn’t need it and after the very first session I very nearly didn’t go back.
Not because it wasn’t helpful, but because it was. The idea of getting help and not having the option to commit suicide anymore scared the shit out of me.
I did not want to live a life I hated without the option of leaving it if things got too much. Over my weekly sessions for the next few months I broke myself down and built myself back up again.
I learnt that I wasn’t “ill” or “not right in the head” but that my suicidal thoughts were just my way of coping. Some people drink, gamble or take drugs to escape but mine was if things ever got so bad I could just end it.
I therefore began to slowly incorporate new simple coping mechanisms and began to actively go out of my way to speak positively to myself and treat myself to try build up a positive relationship with myself.
I had to learn how to accept who I was and that it was okay being emotional. I began to focus on the positives and not the negatives.
In the middle of this journey, I underwent the hardest but most rewarding experience of telling my parents this story.
They were always a subconscious support for me but they then became a participating help.
With their help I sought additional guidance from the Department of Psychiatry in the Midlands Regional Hospital after referral from my GP and I was blown away by the quick and efficient counsel that was given to me and my parents and it is really a service that goes under the radar.
I went from weekly sessions where I was considered a high suicide risk to monthly sessions to completing just under a year of counselling in February 2023.
I was lucky counselling worked for me and it was without doubt what sent me on a much better path.
I know I can always go back for a check up if I need to bounce something of someone, which I have done. In a weird way 2022 was both the worst but most important year of my life.
When I had finished counselling in February of 2023 I was living in France and about to experience the best year of my life which saw me visit 10 countries.
I learnt to do what makes me happy. I know there will always be bad days and bumps in the road.
Life will always throw up different things you have to deal with and I’m now capable of dealing with whatever I may encounter.
I now walk into rooms standing as tall as I can and not trying to hide myself away.
I have just completed an honours degree in Biotechnology and will soon graduate with a 2.1, something that really felt impossible for a long time.
I’m hoping to move abroad permanently sometime in the future as languages are really a passion of mine.
I am in the happiest and steadiest days of my life at the moment and I always say it really is hard to be any lower than I was.
I have hope for the future and that certainly wasn’t always the case. Hopefully me telling a bit of my story could make a few more people a little bit more aware that you just never know what someone is dealing with.
With the walls our society puts up between people where we often feel we can’t be vulnerable with each other, particularly in Ireland, it’s important for me to say that you can always talk to someone and for me this was through counselling.
I’d discussed it with friends before but I never sat down and tried to solve my issues and this ended up saving my life.
I also think stories like Red Óg Murphy from Sligo really put things in perspective. Someone who appeared to have a lot going for him but who wasn’t happy with himself or his situation.
I wanted to finish with a quote that I’ve always loved.
Sonder (noun) : The profound feeling of realising that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of this.
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