There is a great poem in Scots by Tom Leonard:

this is thi

six a clock

news thi

man said n

thi reason

a talk wia

BBC accent

iz coz yi

widny wahnt

mi ti talk

aboot thi

trooth wia

voice lik

wanna yoo

scruff. If

a talktaboot

thi trooth

lik wanna yoo

scruff yi

widny thingk

it wuz troo.

jist wanna yoo

scruff tokn.

thirza right

way ti spell

ana right way

to tok it. this

is mi tokn yir

right way a

spellin. this

is ma trooth.

yooz doant no

thi trooth

yirsellz cawz

yi canny talk

right. this is

the six a clock

nyooz. belt up .

I learned this in school in Edinburgh and understood it was about ideology, discourse and hegemony. (This was the 70s, after all.)

However, after I became a columnist I have always secretly admired the newsreader in the poem. He is a columnist manqué. Whenever I write I share that certainty that I am telling my readers not a truth but the truth. I’m not going to deny it’s intoxicating at times. Nor am I ever going to admit that I’m wrong. (Because I’m not. Not ever.)

But then I write about the easy stuff. Health, education, the economy, public services, foreign policy. As Lenin said, ‘What is to be done’. No question marks – just a statement.

The hard stuff is life. Not what we say, but what we do, how we are – or as  Martin Buber said: ‘Being with others in the world.’

 This last week has made me reflect on what is part of my life but I have never written about.

I have two friends and colleagues – I nearly wrote have had but they are still a part of my life and of me – two friends and colleagues who killed themselves.

One worked for me, one with me.

Both were young men in their twenties. Talented, thoughtful, ambitious. We’d met through work and become friends, as I thought, for the rest of my life. I never thought it would be for the rest of their lives.

I have, honestly, never dealt with this or come to terms with it. How can you? Death is final, but suicide is a rupture – a wound that never heals, and maybe it shouldn’t. But all experience is a spur to action. Yet, what action?

Russell Brand wrote an extraordinary piece in the Guardian about Robin Williams – he may never write another thing so good. But Alastair Campbell in the same issue struck home to me. He recounted a conversation he had had with Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt who was surprised that Alastair – ‘someone like you, with the life you have, would have depression’. For Alastair, and for us, this is the problem.

Ignorance about depression is so widespread.

As a friend of mine said to me once: ‘Remember when you were utterly devastated – stricken – by something. You thought nothing worse could happen to you.  That is nothing like depression.’ Chastening, humbling and instructive. We don’t have the language to talk about this.

But characteristically, Alastair Campbell cuts through it:

depression has nothing to has nothing to do with how popular or famous, unpopular or unknown, you are. It just is. Like cancer is. Like asthma is. Like diabetes is. Some people get it, some people don’t. It is a truly horrible disease, and must be viewed and treated as such.

He is right. Our focus must be on treatment,

That’s why this year I’ll supporting the work that is being done on men’s mental health.

This November I will attempt the impossible (ask my brothers) and try to grow a moustache. It will be for Movember. Not just a charity that invests in research into prostrate cancer but one that is the single largest private investor in the world into research in male mental health.

I’ve got mates who could still be alive – and so have most of us – if we had got this right.

Let’s try to make it better.

———————————

John McTernan is former political secretary at 10 Downing Street and was director of communications for former prime minister of Australia Julia Gillard. He writes The Last Word column on Progress and tweets @johnmcternan

———————————