The [peer support group] were a bunch of men who range from I suppose you’d say just retired to – I think I’m about the oldest one there at the moment – but we’ve uh, we all have a desire to talk and I think one of the greatest things in [peer support group]is the trust that runs between the guys. To begin with it’s a lot of leg pulling goes on, there’s a lot of ribaldry goes on, but as the time comes we get – we sit and talk to one another quite openly and being able to share things with and I’ve picked up two or three guys within the [peer support group] who are suffering themselves. One of them has been and seen his doctor and has been diagnosed. He started complaining to me about his wife, how she had drifted away from him and how his children were playing up. I just said to him, Uh, well you know what your problem is, don’t you? You. Startled look on his face, then very quietly I said, Go and see your GP. Promise?’ He has, and he has depression.

So [peer support group] I can help them as they helped me ’cause I get a lot of fun being with other men of basically the same age group. We do woodwork and metal work and anything, you know, it’s [sighs] – we built the place. We were given a – they call it a sow’s ear and we had to turn it into a silk purse. That was very helpful.

But I went and they didn’t abuse me like my father, they didn’t nag me like my mother, they understood and they said, Yes, we’ve had these types of symptoms and behaviours and yes it’s uh – we call this – called depression and, it’ll take time to get well, just keep coming back and that’s your practical task. Which I did, I went back the next week and the next week and it took me probably six weeks to even start to feel safe and comfortable enough to even talk about personal issues, which is quite good. I started to trust these people who I had never met before.

They affirmed, my self esteem improved as I started changing and demonstrating this stuff, they just didn’t affirm me because I was there, they affirmed me when they saw me change. To act differently, speak differently, talk about what I was doing, oh, you’ve got a job now, that’s fantastic Ron and, you know, you might feel anxious but keep doing it. So they did that grad – slowly, gradually and those support groups supported me but they didn’t do things for me. I still had to do the work, I still had to work with myself, it’s an ordinary thing, but they would affirm me.

I didn’t want to have a conversation about how wonderful it was to be a mother. So my mother’s group was actually full of women who really didn’t want to be mothers which is quite ironic really. And so we would bond over red wine and moaning over our children not sleeping. So that was quite fun, you know, I quite enjoyed their – but there’s only so much of that you can do without sending yourselves mad. So we’d probably only meet once a month, I guess, but I mean that was great, they were very, very honest about what they were going through. While my, the work colleague I’d mentioned before, he mother’s group weren’t like that, so she – her experience was quite – so it was interesting comparing the two.

In some ways mine helped in the sense that I could still be – I could at least be honest with somebody, but I didn’t want to join – I mean, I had met other women with babies and they were saying come to play group and I just – if they were in la la land, as I called it, about, you know, how wonderful it was to be a mother of a small baby then I didn’t want to know about it.

When I came out [place name] Council was running a pilot program of postnatal depression support group run with [NGO name] and a qualified psychologist. So there were 10 of us, I think, and we met on a weekly basis for an hour and a half to talk about, you know, what was happening for us and how we were coping.

They taught us some cognitive behaviour therapies. And we kept – I think that was a 12 week program, or 14 week program, and we kept it going. We employed the psychologist that had been part of the pilot, we kept her going for another 12 weeks I think after that and, just – that got most of us over the hump.

I went to, I joined an organisation called the [organisation name]. They have a 24 hour helpline that you can ring. I think I did ring them once or twice and the people on the other end of that are all bereaved parents as well so they know exactly what you’re going through – or to a large extent. They were very helpful and I would recommend them to anyone who loses a child.

They also have a, I’ve forgotten what they call it but we all gather around and there’s a facilitator and you talk about your loss and your grief. I went to one of those with the Road Trauma Unit and I couldn’t handle it. It was probably within six months maybe of [older son] dying. it’s supposed to be a support network and there were people in that particular night I went, it was a cold rainy night.

Some people had lost their child you know, some time ago, some that had lost recently and everybody wants to tell their story and at that time I was still in that, I don’t want to listen to anyone else, I just want to talk about mine, because that’s all you can deal with. You can’t, I didn’t have the resources, the strength to listen to other people’s loss. I was barely coping with my own. So I remember you know, I had tears listening, because you go around the table, around the room one by one. Although there weren’t many people there, I just couldn’t handle it. So I didn’t go back.

Then I tried, they have the same scenario with a facilitator at [organisation name] and I went to one of those probably about 18 months, two years after [older son] died. I was in a better place emotionally to handle that. And there was a lady there who had just recently lost her son – he had been disabled in an accident like three years before or something but he’d just died. And I remember looking at her and thinking, She’s in shock’ and she’s – it was a mirror and it was like, gosh that’s what I was like you know, two years ago or 18 months ago.

And I wanted to, I wanted to reach out and help her. I wanted to shake her, I wanted to tell her all the things that people had probably told me but I realised also she wasn’t ready to hear it because I wasn’t ready to hear it back then.

The last psychiatrist I went to, I had been seeing him on and off for some two and a half years. And eventually he said he thought I had one of those 10 per cent depressions which are different to the bulk of 90 per cent. He said there are, one is a very general one – easily identified et cetera. He said, then there is yours which doesn’t respond to any treatment. He said I think that’s what you’ve got and he said, all I can suggest is that you go and join the [organisation name]

Yes. The only trouble with that was, with me blind I can’t drive. They’re over at [hospital name] to buggery, right? Over there, and I – too far to travel. It’s three changes of transport. So I never got round to doing that.