Sort Your Head Out: Mental health without all the bollocks

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When I landed my first job in journalism I told myself that the best way to succeed was to never stop. When I finished at the office I would go home and write down ideas, do bits of research, read other newspapers and magazines obsessively. I was a product of Thatcherism – totally in thrall to my own productivity. I didn’t just want a steady job that paid the bills. I wanted to create great things constantly and be defined by them. And I also wanted to get totally shitfaced every weekend (plus sometimes on a Thursday). And while being posh or rich doesn’t protect you from mental illness, being working class definitely puts you more at risk.

In 2018 I had a complete nightmare, losing my radio show and TV show within a couple of months of each other. Shortly afterwards, my production company descended into a state of financial pandemonium and all sorts of professional and deeply personal conflict ensued. I was miserable, exhausted and scared of the future. I had been sober for three years and, despite the prevailing chaos, I wasn’t once tempted to throw myself off the wagon. I figured however bad things seemed, my mental health would be a great deal worse with a hangover. Mind you, this was the first big test I had faced since I quit drink. In other words, we shouldn’t be blaming working-class lads for not wanting to get involved in the soft and cuddly language of mental health.We can all make a change by being more open with our mates: honest conversations show us all we are not alone in our feelings, and we don’t need to feel so ashamed. Liked the look of this one and Sam Delaney (Journalist, podcaster, editor) looks like someone to investigate more. I wanted to write and talk about it in exactly the same way that I’d written about football or music in the lad mags, or that I’d talked about football on TalkSport for years. I wanted to apply the same tone, the same humour to sort of normalise it and disarm blokes who would ordinarily feel very awkward around that kind of chat.” The Lad Mag Years And you are allowed to feel exhausted, miserable, anxious because it happens to everyone. The important thing is recognise that. Don’t feel guilty. Because you should know that however together, your peers look, they are going through it too, whether they tell you or not.”

Thankfully, more positive role models are emerging who are showing you can be successful AND vulnerable. It’s a real shame because since I learned to be more open about my feelings, I have been amazed by the amount of support I have received. The book is very episodic and comes across slightly repetitive. I imagine a lot of the text may have started off life as a blog. It has a very bloggy feel about it. Chapter 18 is typical starting;

I mean, like a lot less than a picture that looked like it was taken on a long lens and was slightly blurred through a bush of a celebrity being caught kissing the wrong person on holiday by the pool. That shifts a million copies, but having the same celebrity with makeup on in a photo shoot in a studio might sell less than half a million copies. In the 90s, the lads mag ruled supreme – with Loaded the daddy of them all. They were publications aimed at hedonistic young men. Sam left university and set foot in that world: He recently qualified at Level 2 in counselling skills and became an ambassador for the mental health charity, CALM.

Keeping it all inside was what nearly dragged Sam under. Then he began to open up and share his story with others. Soon his life started to get better and better. Now, he's written this book to help you do the same. Living in insecure housing and ­experiencing money worries puts you into a constant state of fight or flight,” says writer, broadcaster and former government mental health tsar, Natasha Devon MBE. Eventually, there was a collapse. There always is. Since then, I have rebuilt my life in a simpler way that is easier to manage.

Sam Delaney as a Dad

Sam’s writing has appeared across the national press for many years, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, The Mirror and many more. So it was the scandal and the mischievousness that shifted copies. And the celebrities knew that as well as we did. In a past life, he was a lad mag writer and, from 2009-2011, was the editor-in-chief of Heat magazine. He later became editor in chief of Comedy Central UK. Because if it looked like if it looked contrived, like an interview of a celebrity, with a nice photo shoot on the cover where she’s been shot in a studio and it’s obviously all endorsed, it sold a lot less. Sort Your Head Out” is Sam Delaney’s attempt to draft a no-nonsense guide to men’s mental health. He does so less through recourse to medical or academic research, but largely by drawing on his own experience of crushing anxiety, alcoholism, and drug addiction. In doing so, Delaney has written a self-help guide free of earnest psychobabble that seeks to connect with a group often overlooked in the discourse on mental health: working class men.

Irreverent and accessible discussions about politics, current affairs and various social issues, as well as the inanities of life, mental health and other shit. Each episode we aim to have a subject up for discussion as a starting point, before veering off course and chatting about whatever’s on our minds. Sometimes we bring guests on to facilitate the discussion, to offer a different perspective or to discuss their work.

Mental Health Trigger

My writing has appeared in The Guardian, Observer, The Sunday Times, Independent, Daily Telegraph, NME, Q, Grazia, Cosmopolitan, the New Statesman and numerous others. We try to cover interesting topics and often serious subjects, but in a way that is easy to follow and understand, and it doesn’t get overly tedious and up itself. We don’t take ourselves all that seriously and don’t like the tone to remain too serious or heavy for long. Like many podcasts, it’s all about having a good chat and a laugh. But when he reached his thirties, work, relationships and fatherhood started to take their toll. Like so many blokes who seemed to be totally fine, he often felt like a complete failure whose life was out of control; anxiety and depression had secretly plagued him for years. Turning to drink and drugs only made things worse. Sam knew he needed help - the problem was that he thought self-help was for hippies, sobriety was for weirdos and therapy was for neurotics.