– In an exclusive interview, CALM patron David Baddiel talks to Rachel Clare, editor of the CALMzine at the London CALM launch event in Topman, Nov 2011. David tells us exactly how depression can hit a bloke, and how we can learn to start talking about it.
“It’s not a question of pulling yourself together. Pulling yourself is something you can do if you feel a bit sad. But [depression] has almost NO relationship to feeling ‘a bit sad’. It has more relationship to a physical illness. So you wouldn’t say to someone with pneumonia, pull yourself together. You’d try and give them something that got them to a place of health. Young men in particular don’t understand that that’s what they might have. Making it clear that depression is an illness might make it easier for men to talk about it, because they can talk about having an illness, but they can’t talk about feeling bad.”
