REPORTING ON MENTAL health issues is a sensitive task – laying bare one’s own experience of depression or a loved one’s suicide is brave beyond compare.

A combination of both of these, as featured on TheJournal.ie in the past 12 months, has been highlighted and praised today by Headline Ireland. The national media monitoring programme for mental health and suicide reporting dedicated its Voice award for the reporting of lived experience of mental health challenges to TheJournal.ie. 

While we are delighted to receive the award from the organisation, which is celebrating 10 years in operation, we dedicate it to all of our users, interviewees and contributors who have shared their stories with us.

Thank you for your trust in us to represent your experience with dignity and respect.

We thought the most appropriate tribute would be to remind you of some of the articles which hit a nerve with our audience and brought mental health discussion to the fore:

• ‘I really hope we don’t run out of time’: Desperate parents share stories of children’s suicide attempts
• ‘The first time I was admitted, albeit voluntarily, I was terrified’
• ‘People have a right to know’ how often murder-suicides are happening, says bereaved wife and mother
• ‘Stigma – When a doctor can say to you when filling out a sick cert: “Will I just put depression, or…?”‘
• ‘When I was told my brother had died by suicide, I crumbled to the floor and howled’
• ‘Nobody’s ashamed to say they broke their leg, but there’s still a shame to linked to mental illness’
• ‘I used to hold everything back. My shyness triggered depression and nearly killed me’
• ‘I can see it in them’: Success for suicide prevention service run by Irish taxi drivers
• ‘The hallucinations were 100% real to me’
• Do Wexford’s first junior councillors have the answer to mental health issues?
• ‘In my head, I didn’t deserve to be helped’
• ‘My son wants to be dead. He is ten years of age’
• ‘I became labelled as my mental illness. I was ridiculed and excluded’
• Teenager spent 14 days in adult psychiatric ward room ‘barely bigger than the bed’
• ‘Death comes to us all’: This new play wants people to talk about their grief
• ‘Back then people wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole because they thought you were f***ing crazy’
• ‘I phoned my mother at 4.30am. I couldn’t say a word. She brought me to hospital’
• ‘I was going to end my life or I was going to get better. That was the choice I had’
• Men DO open up about their problems – but no-one is listening
• ‘I’m not just grumpy – I’m living with one of the most painful conditions in the world‘
• ‘I’m okay with talking about my mental health problems – but will it affect my employability?’

If you need to talk, contact:

• Samaritans 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org

• Aware 1800 804848 (depression, anxiety)

• Pieta House 1800 247247 or email mary@pieta.ie – (suicide, self-harm)

• Teen-Line Ireland 1800 833634 (for ages 13 to 19)

• Childline 1800 666666 (for under 18s)