Building a better understanding: trauma and mental health for men

The following article is part of INSP’s Changing the Narrative series. It has been written as the result of the new journalism training academy, established in 2025 by INSP to provide people with direct experience of homelessness and poverty the opportunity to learn about journalism and the media, and to enhance their storytelling and written abilities. The training academy has two ambitions: to challenge media and public misconceptions about homelessness; and to tackle the lack of representation and diversity in newsrooms.

In late summer 2016, I was on my way from work when I got a phone call from my sister. I could sense that there was something wrong from the tone in her voice - she was about to tell me that my mum had cancer.

The news was terrible, but I already had a gut feeling that everything was going to change for me and our family. It was a bad, bad time - my sister Kirsty also found out that she had cancer, and three of my best friends passed away during that period.

I ended up splitting up with my then-partner and moved back to Cardiff, where I’m from originally. I thought everything was going okay for me, but eventually I began to realise that things were far from fine as my drinking got increasingly out of hand - I was drinking heavily to hide the pain I was in. After a year of uncertainty and turmoil, I decided that I needed to leave Cardiff. I wanted to have a break from everyone to try to sort myself out, so I went to London to stay with some friends. Staying with them long term wasn’t possible, so I found a homeless charity and we talked over my options. After talking to me about why I ended up homeless, they put in contact with a homeless charity called Emmaus in Gloucestershire.

Emmaus asked me to come and visit, which I willingly did. While there I was offered, and accepted, a place with them in their supported accommodation. It was time of change. While all of this was going on, I found out that my brother and sister had reported me as missing - I’d come off social media and didn’t realise they were so worried. I was also suffering with my mental health at the time, problems that I knew were getting worse, but I just could not admit that I needed to get help. Once again, I felt that if I moved on, it might help. So, in 2019, I decided to ask Emmaus if they had any places in Scotland, and they did, so I moved north. While I was at Glasgow Emmaus, I started to receive cognitive behavioural therapy to get some support for my mental health, and that helped a lot.

Things were more positive at that time, and that helped me make the decision, just before my 50th birthday, to reconnect with my family after being away from them for so long. I even decided to move back to Emmaus Wales to be near my family, and to try to settle down and have a normal life. But truthfully, at the back of my mind, I knew I still wasn't right. I still found it hard to try to deal with my pain, partly because no-one knew how I was really feeling. And no-one knew because I found it hard to talk about my feelings; even talking to my family was difficult.

Fast forward to 2024, and once again I was finding it very hard to cope with everything because of how I was feeling. Living in a shared house was not helping, Sso once again I packed a bag and headed back to London. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or why I was doing it because my head was so mixed up. I was trying to deal with a lot of emotions from past traumas that I had never really talked to anyone about. I found it very hard to talk about how some experiences had affected me over the years, and how they had affected my family. I had never really talked about what I had been through.

But at last, I’m beginning to talk. I’m back in Glasgow, and I’ve been able to get more counselling, which is helping me understand and process what I have been through. For the first time, I’ve been able to talk about being abused as a child. I’ve begun to understand that the trauma caused by that abuse is what has affected my mental health so badly over the years. I realise now that I’ve been wearing a mask for so many years; a mask that I put on to present myself as a happy-go-lucky guy just going through life, when the reality was that I was falling apart.

The counselling I’m having now is giving me a better understanding of how I’ve managed to survive everything I’ve been through. My hope for the future is to try to help others by sharing my own experiences - maybe that might encourage a better understanding of what mental health means to other men.