Book review: Memoirs describe same mental health battle, but oceans apart

Tina Neylon looks at two similar but also very different contributions to the discourse on mental health and depression — one a memoir by a Dublin footballer, the other by a young man from Novia Scotia in Canada

Both memoirs are vivid accounts of the challenges faced by two young men to their mental health and their roads to recovery.

THESE two books have a lot in common, although their authors have very different backgrounds and live on opposite sides of the Atlantic — one in Dublin, the other in Canada.

What they share is how young they were when they first started to feel alienated from ‘normal’ life, their searing honesty about their deteriorating mental health and how they eventually learned to cope and to enjoy life again.