Lifestyle & Sports
10 Oct 18

100 Voices: Damien Dempsey- Tells His Story: #NowWereTalking

We invited a 100-strong chorus of artists, writers, musicians, broadcasters, sports stars and more to contribute to Now We’re Talking, a mental health campaign, run in partnership with Lyons Tea and Pieta House.

When I was in my late teens, I suffered from depression quite badly. It just got worse and worse: everyday I was just getting deeper and deeper into myself. I was smoking a lot of hash at the time, so I think that was affecting me. For about six months it was really bad.

There's a place up on Eccles Street where I started doing meditation and that really helped me a lot. That kind of lifted it for me.

I think if you're gonna be doing creative stuff, you have to be deep and you have to be sensitive and you probably feel emotions more than other people. You probably feel more pain than other people. Some people don't really give a shit, they just get over it, but i'm not like that. I get bogged down.

Maybe I feel more empathy for people or something like that. A lot of artists are like that, and that's where the writing comes from; it's like you heal yourself by writing about the things that you're feeling painful about, or very emotive about.

100 Voices was published in the Hot Press Mental Health Special in conjunction with Lyons Tea and Pieta House as part of the Now We're Talking Campaign. For more please visit hotpress.com/now-were-talking/