Things get progressively worse, until they get to a place where things are so bad, they can never get better again. You never asked for help. And you played such a good game, exhausting all of your efforts on maintaining a facade of perfect functioning, that no one close to you thought to check in.

At some point in our society’s evolution, we thought dividing health into two brackets, “physical” and “mental”, was a clever thing to do. In doing so, we made it moderately OK to tell a friend or a doctor about our aches and pains in our joints or abdomen, but we made it next to impossible to discuss that sense of dread across our chests or that heavy feeling upon waking.

Then, when someone famous dies by suicide, we all talk about it for a day or two, express our utter disbelief that someone as confident as Anthony Bourdain or as successful as Kate Spade could have suffered in that way, and then we all go back to normal.

Over the last number of years, I have heard throwaway remarks about mental health that have stuck with me. Some were grossly unhelpful and others were wonderfully helpful.

Let’s start with the unhelpful ones. There were two in particular. A woman, now in her 40s, remarked to me about one of her colleague who’d had a health scare. The colleague did not want to make her business public in the workplace. She gave HR and her direct boss the sick note and chose not to explain her absence to the office at large. Her concerned colleague said to me: “But everyone will think she went nutso.” I was stunned to silence and said nothing. We never unpacked her stigma-laden statement.

The second incident involved a famous sportsperson who was in Ireland for the week. Since retiring from his sport professionally, he has spoken regularly about mental health. He spoke in particular about how you go from being at the top of your game, with teammates and endorphins and fans and trophies, to suddenly having all of that pulled out from under you. People found his frankness and honesty very refreshing.

A woman in her mid-30s, who was involved in minding him during his visit to Ireland, remarked to me: “Ugh, I wish he’d stop going on about mental health so much. He’s so intense.”

Our conversation sort of fizzled out from there.

As for the wonderfully helpful comments? One, I heard very recently from a mental health professional. We were discussing shame. She referred to a difficult work situation she experienced many years ago. She had emerged from the experience stronger and all had worked out well, but acknowledged how it had “tested” her “mental health to the limit”.

Her description sort of ratcheted things around in my brain a bit. It is not the human that is “flawed” or “weak” or a “failure”. Situations can be challenging. We all need to mind our health.

The other helpful comment I heard was from Blindboy Boatclub of the Rubberbandits. He was on the Late Late Show last October promoting his book, The Gospel According to Blindboy. Ryan Tubridy was asking him about his experience of panic attacks. Blindboy said how, in his teenage years, he could “not go outside and do normal things” and how he experienced that as being “very shameful”.

This then led to depression but it ultimately led Blindboy to accessing counselling in college where he learned the tools of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). The comedian then explained how, for the last 10 years, he has been very healthy, but, and this was the part I found helpful, it was because he uses his tools “every single day”.

Here were two people just discussing their health frankly. Albeit one was on the Late Late Show and the other was in the course of a private conversation. One talked of how a challenging life event had tested her and the other talked about the need to mind and maintain one’s health.

Personally speaking, I find I can beat myself up for not having the perfect mental health. That’s why I found Blindboy’s comments most helpful. You must tweak and change things in order to better respond to life. You don’t go outside every single day of the year in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and expect to not get burnt, be soaked in a shower, or catch a cold.

You wear suncream if it’s sunny. You use an umbrella if it’s raining. You wear layers of clothes when it dips below zero.

It’s the same with this division of health we have created between physical and mental. If you found a lump on your breast or a growth in your prostate area, chances are you wouldn’t bother reading this to the end because you’d be on the phone to your GP right now.

But if you were feeling low, had regular difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, or had a near constant tightness in your throat, would you really ring your GP? Would you even tell a friend?

If you had a partner or a parent you were close to and they asked you, in earnest, how you were, would you say “I find it hard to get out of bed” or “I haven’t been sleeping very well, I don’t know what’s wrong with me”?

The thing about stigma is that it does no one any good. It prevents people from answering that “how are you?” question honestly. And it absolutely prevents people from accessing help.

As a society we need to get to a place where we view psychological challenges as part and parcel of everyday life and general health. That way we can find proper solutions for our shared problems.