The DJ and the noonday demon

On the outside, he was a zany radio DJ. Inside, Gareth O'Callaghan had severe depression. He just didn't know it, he tells Clare Dwyer Hogg

Gareth O'Callaghan remembers the day that he decided to kill himself. He was at home in the afternoon, his wife was downstairs, and he couldn't face the thought of the night. Lying on his bed with the curtains closed to block out the sunlight, he could think of nothing but how to do it. Leather belt around his neck? Kitchen knife? His thoughts made him cry, but he couldn't block them out; and he had been this way for most of his adult life.

Yet these were the private thoughts of a very public figure, who every morning hosted an upbeat, zany breakfast show for Irish radio. "People find it difficult to understand how I was able to do a breakfast show every day at 7am and entertain an audience of 300,000," O'Callaghan says. "I did it for two hours with a tone of voice and a personality that signalled to most people that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me." In reality, life was becoming too much to deal with, and O'Callaghan can see now that by his early thirties, he was deep in the throes of depression. "I found it very difficult to cope with the demands that were placed on me by my job and family life," he says. "I was already suffering from the initial stages of diagnosable depression, but I didn't know it."

O'Callaghan wishes he'd known what he had long before he found out. With hindsight, the signs were all there: every morning he left the radio station as soon as possible and went home to bed, where he would stay as long as he could. He would just about pull himself up in time for his children coming back from school, but putting on a bright face was too much most days.

To compound the situation, he started to drink very heavily. This fuelled the depression, which in turn exacerbated the need for alcohol. Inevitably, the strain caused O'Callaghan and his wife to separate. She couldn't understand what was wrong with him, and he wasn't ready to recognise that he was suffering with depression. "I just had uncontrollable, confused emotions," he says. "They were getting completely knotted. I didn't know why I felt like that when I didn't want to feel that way. I couldn't express them."

For someone who wouldn't discuss depression when he was in its depths, O'Callaghan has learnt a lot about it since he realised his condition. "I started studying a number of areas of behavioural psychology because I was adamant that I was going to overcome this thing," he says. "I needed to fully understand whatever it was and move beyond it."

O'Callaghan, now 42, maintains that the problem with depression is that it is surrounded by myth. "You always hear that it's something which you can expect to suffer from for the rest of your life, something so horrifically awful that many people are reluctant to even discuss it," he says. "The medical profession is going to have to change their tack on this because I've come through it and I know it's none of those."

O'Callaghan has a routine now that is about lifestyle choices, and he believes they can safeguard against depression. "It's not the brain that rules the body, it's the immune system," he says. "Our immune system is wired into every cell and molecule in our body. It encompasses everything." There's nothing radical about O'Callaghan's diet, it's just healthy and balanced, but he believes it has played an integral part in his state of mind. Similarly, there's nothing unusual about his fitness regime – a brisk walk every day – but he points to these little changes as crucial to his recovery.

"I just began to do simple things," he says. "I've pulled back from the mercenary side of life. I love to listen to people now and look for what's behind the individual. That's what I call spirituality. You just suddenly begin to feel that there's a much bigger thing out there." O'Callaghan stops. He doesn't want to sound glib or hackneyed, but this is what he has discovered after being through the darkest of times, and through and out the other side, where there is, he says, a life. And because it took him so long, he is anxious that others should be able to pinpoint their symptoms and deal with them as soon as they can.

O'Callaghan was not so fortunate. The split with his wife allowed his depression free reign. Without the routine of his family, he had too much time on his hands without the incentive to do anything, including eating and sleeping. "The only way to describe it is a black, extremely weighted heaviness somewhere so deep inside me, that it was impossible to reach," he says. "It was easier to let it pin me down than it was to get up and fight." Even then, O'Callaghan didn't think that he had depression – he saw it as a "strange condition living inside me", without a name, and continued to find solace in drinking. "I found myself slowly self-destructing," he says now. "I didn't give a toss about anything." Soon, despite O'Callaghan's best attempts to hide it, friends began to notice that something was wrong. He was persuaded to join the AA, and shortly after giving up alcohol, he was reunited with his wife.

Life resumed a sense of normality, but even though he was rebuilding his life on the premise that he was an alcoholic, there was something about this supposed answer that was not really addressing his fundamental problems, and he knew it. "Something deep down inside me was telling me that I wasn't an alcoholic, that the alcohol dependency was really only the surface of a much greater problem. All the alcohol was doing was helping to dilute it so that it was manageable, but it wasn't manageable. When I gave up drinking, it got worse." People at the AA warned him that they had thoughts like that every day of the week, and not to go back to drinking, but that wasn't the point, O'Callaghan felt: the point was that he had been trying to cure the buffer, and not the issue.

He still didn't want to seriously consider the possibility that he was depressed. It wasn't until an encounter with his GP that the mist cleared. "My GP asked me a series of questions, and then told me that he had no doubt that I was suffering from depression. I felt like someone had lifted the most amazing weight off my shoulders. It was as if I'd been vindicated and cleared of all the things I'd accused myself of."

Suffering years of undiagnosed depression is surprisingly common, even in these self-aware times. "More people than we know are walking around with depression," says Tiffany Richards of the mental health charity MIND. "Men are less likely to spot the signs than women, and if they do, they tend to go along the self-medicating path, turning to anything from street drugs to alcohol."

Many depressives, like O'Callaghan, can hold down high-powered jobs. "Part of celebrity," Richards points out, "can be living on a daily adrenalin rush. Without wanting to stereotype, the availability of drugs and alcohol in these environments doesn't help."

O'Callaghan traced the seeds of his depression back to when he was abused at the age of 11 by a member of a religious order in Ireland. "The more I suppressed this whole situation, the more my depression gathered momentum and took hold of me," he says with hindsight. Recognising his condition, of course, was not the same as curing it, but it was the biggest step he had made in his life towards getting better.

Antidepressants were his first course of action. "Lots of people steer away from them because of side-effects," he says. "But really the primary side-effect that the pills are trying to overcome is that you are not in a habitable state of mind, that you aren't strong enough to cope with what you're actually surrounded by." After a year and a quarter, he felt ready to stop taking them, and over a couple of months weaned himself off them. "You've got to remember," he warns, "that weaning yourself off antidepressants is like weaning yourself off caffeine. The headaches, shivers and the muscular jolts; they're not signs of depression coming back, they're just the body acclimatising." That was over three years ago, and he is well.

"The opposite of depression is expression," he says. "It's a period in your life you can come through. Once you address it you can move beyond it. Fully. 100 per cent."

'A Day Called Hope – a personal journey beyond depression' by Gareth O'Callaghan (Hodder Mobius, £9.99)