Seal(ed) With A Kiss

Last night I watched The Voice. The last contestant, a young man who had performed with The Ten Tenors, had a wonderful voice. Coach, Seal, however, could sense something beyond the voice and gently coaxed information from him. The young man confessed that he had suffered from severe depression two years prior. Seal then also announced - on national television in primetime - that he had had severe panic and anxiety in the past. If that wasn't enough, Ricky Martin, also said that he, too, had suffered from depression.

By the time the three men had finished sharing I had both hands clutching my heart and tears streaming down my face. It was one of the bravest things I've ever witnessed. For the purposes of the blog I'm going to focus on Seal but that, in no way, belittles the other two men or depression in any way.

Seal is an intelligent, successful, talented and highly respected musician. For someone in his position to do what he did "normalises" Panic and Anxiety Disorder. He reached more people in one night on television than I can hope to reach in a life-time of blogging and I'm overwhelmingly grateful to him.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Panic and Anxiety Disorder is the most common mental illness in Australia, with 14% of the population of 16-85 years olds affected. That means that, if you have 100 friends in that age group, 14 of them suffer from anxiety. I'm not talking about pre-exam jitters; I'm talking about anxiety crippling enough to limit someone's life. I imagine you're shaking your head and thinking that I can't be right. Let's look more closely at the people you know. There could be the friend who won't go out alone or the one who prefers to. Then there's the one who is always distracted when you run into them in public, their eyes darting all over the place. No, they're not bored or stand-offish; they're checking for escape routes. What about the one who won't take public transport or the one who refuses to drive. The one who always wants to eat the same meal at the same restaurant could be another. Then there's the friend who'd rather sit for hours in a car, bus or train than ever fly or their opposite, the one who'd rather fly than be trapped for so many hours in a car, bus or train. And my all-time favourite (not) is the poor stay at home mum that the other mums bitch about in the school-yard, saying how lazy she is and what a bad mum she is for not helping at her children's school.

I'm not saying all those behaviours mean Panic and Anxiety Disorder. My point is that you simply don't know because most sufferers keep that information hidden with their underwear. How, then, could you know? I can't even pick fellow sufferers. I guess I don't have a very good "PADar"!

So, when someone like Seal declares in front of a large viewing audience that he's had issues with anxiety we breath easier and think that, maybe, we're okay, after all.

Besides, "if we're ever going to survive, we need to get a little crazy."