Rugby star ‘lost will to live’ after divorce

Former rugby legend Gerry McLoughlin has revealed he contemplated taking his own life after the break-up of his marriage.

The Limerick mayor and rugby star said: “I had emigrated to Wales and I found myself divorced after 30 years of being happily married.

“You feel yourself a failure and 10 years ago I felt myself as being looked on as a failure and you did not know where to turn to with a new change in your life and how do you cope with it. I didn’t know how to cope with it, and being a man I was probably too proud to mention it to anybody.

“I didn’t realise I was going through depression. I lost my memory, a pile of things were happening which I didn’t realise until later on. It lasted three or four months. I couldn’t get off the couch, I couldn’t go for a cycle, when I couldn’t go for a shower. It was a very depressing time and you didn’t want to be burdening yourself with your problems.”

Mr McLoughlin was speaking as he welcomed suicide bereavement counselling organisation Console to the city.

Ciaran Austin of Console said the highest rate of female self-harm in the country requiring hospital treatment is in Limerick.

“The suicide and self- harm statistics in Limerick are a continued cause for concern. The highest rate of female self-harm in the country requiring a hospital visit was in Limerick, at 416 per 100,000,” he said.

“The rate of deliberate self-harm among men in Limerick was more than twice the national average.”

Mr McLoughlin told how he had come from the brink with the help of prayer and meditation.

“I enjoyed life and I never thought I would end up in the throes of depression. To me this was something that happened in a totally different world.

“It happened after a change in my life circumstances and not being able to cope with it. Being on my own did not help either. I was suicidal and lost my will to live for a period of three or four months. I was five years not being myself, when I lost my ambition.”

He advised those who may be struggling to contact agencies such as Console and “to get out and talk”.

Physical therapist Ger Hartmann who works with some of the world’s top athletes, spoke of how he witnessed a close friend take his own life in Limerick.

“You read about suicide, but when you touch it, feel it, smell it as I did it was like putting a dagger through me.

“I have lost nine friends through suicide, three of them were class mates in primary school. It is an extraordinary number of friends to lose.”

Mr Hartmann said in 2003, he found British athlete Kelly Holmes, in a room at their French training camp having cut her hands with a razor.

He said she was very depressed at the time trying to cope with injuries.

She was very low, he said, and he did not know what the outcome would have been had she not got help to cope with her depression.

In the 2004 Athens Olympics, Holmes took the gold in both the women’s 800m and 1500m.

Holmes has openly discussed her self-harming and also wrote about it in her autobiography.