Changing My Mind review: PJ Gallagher shares his mental health ...
The comedian opens up about his struggles and reveals why a timely message from a friend saved his life
Documentaries featuring celebrities exploring their mental health difficulties have effectively become a genre in their own right.
Among the well-known figures to bare their souls and share their struggles with a television audience in recent years are Alastair Campbell, Nadiya Hussein, David Harewood, Demi Lovato and Stephen Fry.
This is indisputably a good thing. The more famous people who use their platform to raise awareness of an issue that affects many of us — and which many of us, not least men, keep to themselves for fear of being stigmatised or perceived as somehow weak — the better.
The latest celebrity to do so is comedian and Young Offenders star PJ Gallagher in Changing My Mind (RTÉ1 and RTÉ Player, Monday, May 20). In many ways, it follows what has become an established pattern in such documentaries.
Gallagher talks about having to confront and try to find a way of coping with his own difficulties, hangs out with other men at his motorcycling club who’ve had (or are still having) similar experiences, seeks the advice of clinical experts, and learns about advances in medication and treatments.
Near the end of the film, he takes the plunge with sea-swimming group Blueballs Ireland, where the talking, the sharing of burdens, is as important as the swimming. One member, Jonathan, describes it as “a men’s shed in the water”.
So far, so conventional. But what sets the film apart — and made me warm to Gallagher as a person — is his approach, his attitude. He’s often blackly funny, as you’d expect from a professional comedian, at one point joking that all his neighbours hate him, so you can imagine how difficult it must be for his partner Kelly, who has to share a home and a bed with him.
They were on the cusp of sharing something else: twins. Kelly, who happens to be a clinical expert in neuroscience and psychiatry, with a background in depression research, says Gallagher’s mental health will be an ongoing process even after the birth of the children.
The babies, boys they named Milo and Stevie, were born at the end of 2023 as the documentary was still being filmed.
Gallagher’s trademark cheerful chatterbox stand-up style disguises an agreeably spiky, forceful character. He doesn’t passively accept anything. He has doubts and questions, even about his own treatment. He pushes back — a quality Dr Mike Scully, who treated him at Blackrock’s Hermitage Clinic, regards as a positive one.
Talk therapy has never worked for him, he tells psychologist Dr John Francis Leader, and he’s not the type to commit his feelings to a diary (he’s never even written down his material for his shows). What works best for him, he discovers, is taking photographs: recording the happy moments.
Gallagher accepts that he’s going to need medication, as well as some kind of continuing care, for the rest of his life, because depression doesn’t let up. It demands constant vigilance. It’s there 24/7, he says, whispering in your ear: “You useless bastard! You are nothing!”
He might be accepting of the reality, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be angry about it. “I never really wanted to be known as the depressing guy,” he says. “I wanted to be the funny guy, but that’s gone now, that’s a career past.”
He has no compunction about going deep and dark and talking about how close he came to suicide. “If I’d had my way at that time, I’d now be two years dead,” he says, bluntly.
The time he’s talking about was four o’clock in the morning, when he decided this was going to be the day he ended his life. When he got out of bed, he noticed there was a text message from his close friend, the writer Stefanie Preissner, telling him he could contact her anytime. It would never be too early or too late.
Preissner, who appears in the documentary, says she told him to just hang on, reminding him that he had everything he needed for now.
“That was the turning point,” says Gallagher, who credits his friend with saving his life. He spent 12 weeks in the inpatient care of St Patrick’s Mental Health Service, an experience for which he has boundless gratitude.
What is life if not a succession of turning points? One hopes this excellent, bracingly honest film might be a turning point for others.
