Confronting mental illness: Awareness is the roadmap to recovery

LAST Sunday, in an event that in so many ways transcended sport, Cork camogie captain Ashling Thompson captained her county team to win the All Ireland title decisively. Even though Galway supporters — and even some neutrals — might have preferred a different conclusion anyone who knows the personal journey successfully negotiated by Thompson will recognise that her sport was a just a conduit to redemption.

They will recognise that the real, lasting victory in her life was overcoming her own depression and the suicide of a partner. Her real prize is the uplifting example she offers to so many more people travelling along that difficult, hard and too often lonely road. She did not suffer in silence or alone and now has reached heights many of her contemporaries must envy. By communicating her difficulties she overcame them. For the hundreds of thousands of Irish people touched by the terrible and debilitating darkness of depression, and for the tens of thousands more challenged to their very marrow by the suicide of a loved one, Thompson must be a cause for celebration and hope.

Camogie was, as she has said herself on many occasions, her helpmate along the road to recovering her life — “I’ve hit rock bottom and come back through sport,” she said in an interview with this newspaper last July. That she has done so, so very publicly, that she has done so while shouldering responsibilities many would shirk, must inspire those fighting their own demons to believe that recovery and a full, renewed life are indeed possible. She is not by any means the only person, or GAA figure even, to make their battle with depression public in an effort to help others but the impact she has made is not diminished for that.