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Mental Health

Sean Plunket: How my job at Magic Talk helped save my life

OPINION: I had been thinking a lot about talking about this because I think back literally to just a year maybe, and a couple of weeks ago.

Where I was at, you know, it was as dark as I got in my life and literally I felt, because of the way my brain was working, and had been working in a decline that it had probably taken a year and a half or two years.

It involves all the everyday challenges that people have; financial challenges, romantic challenges, work challenges, employment challenges and I just ran out of gas.

I started slipping and sliding.

Literally down to figuring out who would take care of my dog and everything and how I would work it out.

Something changed and I'm going to share with you what changed actually because I think it is important in the context of the conversations that we have.

What changed was a job and I started believing in myself again and that job was here at Magic Talk.

I haven't even told the people who gave me the job that probably in some ways it saved my life.

Re-engaging and feeling that I had some worth as a broadcaster, I wasn't washed up or useless and I wasn't universally hated or rejected.

That I wasn't too old, I wasn't too pale and I wasn't too stale.

It has lifted me up and I'll look at myself now a year on after what has still been an incredibly difficult personal year.

I suppose in a mental sense on a journey towards some greater sense of well-being. Man, I've learnt some stuff in the past two and a half years and in the last year.

I haven't sought a whole lot, or had available to me, a whole lot of counselling. I haven't taken any drugs, I haven't been to see a mental health professional, I had just decided that I was either going to live or I was going to die.

So when I hear people who are reaching out to others and trying to help them, and I had a family who really helped me, some very close friends who really helped me, some people without even knowing it just by treating me as normal, allowing me to re-engage in society helped me.

I just feel for people and I particularly feel for people who I know might be heading into what is meant to be the happy time of the year nowhere near happy.

I ask you to be as compassionate to them, as patient with them as possible because they need you.

I've lost a couple of people I know, a couple of them very close to me, this year to suicide.

I have been wondering for the last month or so whether or not I should share that with you people at any time.

I didn't plan to do this today but it came up and I was thinking about Dee and how frustrated I feel at that so I just want to share that with you.

I want to say to you that the best thing you can give anyone for a present is time and understanding.

You don't need to wrap that up in a bow and put it under a Christmas tree, just being there for them and just listening and telling them they are part of the world and someone cares about them.

It is a very, very valuable gift that only human beings and caring human beings can give each other.

Sean Plunket is the host of Magic Afternoons on Magic talk. 

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