Men's Mental Health Blog

Writing my story for “Trigger Warning” was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I had already lived it. The trauma, the collapse, the suicidal thinking, the slow climb back. Putting it on paper meant going back into some of the darkest moments of my life and looking at them up close. So why do it? Why drag all that out instead of locking it away and pretending it never happened? Because secrets were killing me. And because I knew other people were carrying their own se

Some wounds do not show up on a scan. After two tours of Afghanistan as a Special Operations Engineer, I came home looking fine and feeling anything but. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder does not announce itself. It moves in slowly. The nightmares. The flashbacks that arrive in a supermarket aisle. The guilt about the mates who did not come home, and the strange shame of being the one who did. For a long time I did what a lot of veterans do. I blamed everything except what had

What to do when someone confides in you, and how to achieve the best possible outcome from those difficult conversations... I vividly remember the first time I confided in one of my mates in a state of serious distress. This happened many moons ago when I was still in the Army and had recently returned from my second tour to Afghanistan. I had been home for some 6-8 months and my world was imploding. Things were no longer making any sense. I was so lost, confused, frustrated,