WATCH: Cork student hopes video about his mental health can help others

Fri, 11 Feb, 2022 - 08:21

Seán Downey

BEING young can be a difficult time. Trust me, I know.

When I was 18, I thought I had overcome the hardest parts of life. Growing up in foster care, I couldn’t wait to be independent.

Don’t get me wrong, foster care helped shape my life for the better, I was just excited to face the world.

I was excited to start actively pursuing what I saw as my dream, and I had all the confidence in the world to take on any obstacle that stood in my way.

Then, when I reached 22, life looked a little different to how I had imagined it would be

I had pictured adulthood as a world where I was free to express myself without any constraints and anyone standing in my way.

What I didn’t picture was the anxiety, the sadness and the uncertainty adulthood brought with it.

I also definitely didn’t envisage a global pandemic!

Growing up for me was a rollercoaster. When I was 12, turning 13, I was luckily enough to find a foster family and I spent the rest of my teenage years with them in Midleton.

Throughout that time, I started to express myself through various forms of media. It was a way to keep my brain happy and it was a way to distract myself from my situation. It was my release.

I lost that passion to create when I became an adult. Talking about mental health can be quite stigmatised, and so when my life issues became about mental health and not foster care, I turned to drinking instead.

Next month, I’ll turn a year sober. Now that’s a positive, right? Right.

But then I was alone with my thoughts. I was unable to escape from the lack of motivation, feelings of self-doubt and thoughts of worthlessness that I had been running from for years. I struggled to deal with them.

Davy Fitzgerald confronts Sean Downey in Davy's Toughest Team.

People may be aware of a TV series I did last year, Davy’s Toughest Team, in which GAA coach Davy Fitzgerald attempted to motivate seven men aged between 18 and 22 with various challenges.

My journey on that show detailed my struggles with ADHD, and while I was honestly being as open as I could then, I was actively hiding my drinking problem, and so as a result I didn’t really talk about my mental health all that much.

I hid it from the public and I wore this mask.

The last few months have been the most difficult in my life. Online college, lockdowns, getting Covid... it’s been tough.

And I’ve worn this mask and hid what I’ve been going through from everyone around me.

But I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take this lonely feeling. That’s when I decided to try to pick up the camera again, to try to express myself again.

I had actively been trying to create something personal over the past year but every time I started projects, I got overwhelmed with feelings of doubt and worthlessness. I felt nobody would want to listen, nobody would care.

I felt lonely, I felt like that ten-year old boy again.

I had felt this increasingly more over the last two or three months. This sense of worthlessness. This lack of belonging and lack of motivation. But nobody knew. I needed to do something about it, for my own sake.

My eight-minute YouTube video, entitled Inside My Mind (My Mental Health), is the product of just that.

It was the first time I’d ever really shown just how I felt. It was the first time I’d ever spoken about my mental health so openly in such detail.

Creating the video for me was a form of therapy. Although a difficult process, both physically and mentally, it genuinely helped me.

It put me back into the mindset of that 18-year-old who felt he could take on the world. It made me happy again.

Now I’m hoping my video can help others in similar situations. I’m hoping that through being so open and honest, it will encourage others to do the same.

I have received numerous messages from the people who have watched it, saying they have found it relatable and comforting.

It shows me this video can have an impact.

I’m hoping to further its reach, and possibly reach people, especially young people, all over the country who may be in similar situations.

If you have time, give it a watch.

It would mean a lot to me,

You can see the video here