Thanks for taking enough interest to end up here.
I decided to set mentalitee up while recovering from a significant mental health crisis.
Having struggled with persistent low mood and long periods of depression since my mid-teens, at 47, I suffered a breakdown.
Even though it followed three years of extraordinary pressures building up in pretty much every compartment of my life, and so maybe shouldn’t have been a huge surprise, at the time, it still felt alarmingly sudden.
The best way I can relate the experience is this: if those expanding life challenges amounted to a large lake to get across, then I believed myself a strong enough swimmer. I’d had short programmes of therapy in the past and read my fair share of books on stress and anxiety. I meditated regularly. I was a trained mental health first-aider in the workplace. With that knowledge and experience to keep me afloat, surely I couldn’t sink? And yet one Wednesday evening, talking with my wife after dinner, I experienced the psychological equivalent of total body cramps and realised I was beginning to drown.
An extended period of recovery followed, and midway through, I was encouraged to name things that were helping me feel better, day to day and week to week. Second on the list, right after my family’s support, was golf. And I need to clarify what I mean by that because it’s critical to understanding what mentalitee is about.
I’m what a majority of people picture if they ever think ‘golfer’. Eighteen holes most weekends and some weeknights in the summer, too. A handicap. Member of a local club.
But when I was unwell, golf was none of those things.
At that time, it meant going to the local driving range twice a week and hitting fifty balls, not caring where they went. Sometimes, I’d see a familiar face and chat with them; mostly, I kept to myself.
It was about turning up and focusing on the repetitive action of swinging the club. Generally, the longer I was there and the further I got down the bucket, the more I found myself paying attention to the fresh air and space around me rather than my thoughts. On other days, if I really didn’t want to go outside, tapping a ball at an upturned mug on the carpet with my putter did a decent enough job of getting me on my feet and out of my own head for a few minutes.
Quick disclaimer: I can’t claim this was 100% news. There’s a large volume of books and articles going back decades examining the inherently calming, mindful aspects of golf, and I’d read my fair share.
Over the last few years – particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic – the conversation around golf and mental health has accelerated across all media platforms. But despite picking up my first club nearly 35 years beforehand, it wasn’t until the wheels came off my life that I fully, authentically experienced this side of the sport. And of all the various elements there are to the game I’d played for so long, the simple act of picking up a club and hitting a ball helped me feel like me again. The rest could return later, if I wanted it to.
This got me thinking: what if I could help others begin to feel better this way, too? Put clubs in the hands of people who’ve never swung one before, get them some introductory tuition and see where it takes them. Or guide existing players toward therapeutic aspects of their hobby that might be hidden from them so they could help themselves or others find some precious headspace. And what if all those people could band together as a support group, ensuring each member always had someone to talk to– with an interest in common, to break the ice if needed?
And here we are. We’ve a good few members now and plan to keep attracting more, pushing the conversation around mental health forward all the while.
Please keep talking. This community isn’t as strong without your voice.
And keep swinging. But focus on the good shots because even on the worst days, there’s always at least one.
