A NORTHSIDE athlete who hopes to be competing for Ireland at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea has teamed up with a mental health charity to share his remarkable story of hope.
Seven years ago Brendan Doyle, from Dublin 9, was working as a Garda when he was called to a routine incident that ended up in a terrifying ordeal and turned his life upside down.
“On a late spring day in May, a colleague and I were called to a domestic abuse incident at a house in Dublin,” he recalls.
“Arriving to find an aggressive man and a frightened, injured woman, I did what any Garda would do and attempted to apprehend the suspect.
“During the incident that ensued, I sustained massive injuries to my hand which still leaves me without function in my baby finger and thumb, and a lifetime of skin grafts and corrective surgery ahead.”
But it wasn’t the physical injuries that affected Brendan the most – it was the unexpected mental trauma that really floored him.
“It started with night terrors,” he says. “I would relive what happened that night, waking up and grabbing my hand thinking it had been wounded all over again.
“Depression followed. I just got into a dark place where I struggled to keep on going. The lowest point for me was not when I thought about ending it all, but when I got to a point where I thought this would be the most logical step.
“For me, it stopped being scary and simply seemed a better solution than what I was going through.”
It was after what Brendan describes as his “deepest, darkest moment”, just before he was about to take a step into doing something permanent, that he made a deal with himself that saved his life.
“I decided I would make one last and real effort to break this cycle that I was living in,” he explains.
Brendan went back to the one thing he’d always loved – sport. An athlete all his life, Brendan was talent spotted by the Irish Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association aged just 16, and has competed at European and World events in the past.
He started training again and after a while, he was back to racing. He then made another life-changing decision to leave the gardaí.
“My happiness meant more than any job,” he says.
“Being as close as I was to losing it all, I knew I needed to take the step to ensure a happy future.”
Brendan has swapped the handcuffs for a toboggan and is now training to get to the Winter Olympics games in Skeleton, a winter sport that involves racing down a bobsleigh track head first, at speeds of over 145kph.
“I now understand how fragile life is, and I’m going to do this,” he adds.
“I want people to see that depression is tough but it’s not the end. If I can not only work through it, but go to represent my country at the Olympics in such a mentally demanding sport such as Skeleton, anyone can come out the other side.”
Brendan, who lives in Beaumont, is now working with MyMind to raise awareness around mental health, fight stigma and put wellbeing within everyone’s reach.
“The reason I’m so excited to work with MyMind is that when I was going through my depression and panic attacks, I had so many reasons not to go talk to someone,” he says.
“I needed a GP note to get a referral to a counsellor. It was just too expensive and honestly, I didn’t have the drive to go.
“MyMind makes getting help simple. All you need to do is pick up the phone to call or click online to book and get the help you need.
“If there is anyone out there reading this, going through their own troubles, I urge you to take the step and contact MyMind.
“I was so lucky to get through my ordeal and I want to do all I can to ensure that others don’t have to struggle as I did.”
www.mymind.org
