It comes after the politician shared a post on social media earlier this week where he said he “had his own darkness to deal with”.
While speaking with Newstalk’s Anton Savage Show, Mr Ó Ríordáin (48) said that “quite a number of events in his life coincided and became very difficult for him to deal with” a couple of years ago.
“A number of changes, negative ones, and then there was a bereavement in there, as well. All came together, and I found myself in a very, very difficult position,” he said.
He decided to share his story to “give the message that if anybody is going through a period of darkness, that is not unusual”.
“What I’ve learned through my experience is that thousands of people go through it. It can feel intensely lonely if you’re going through something which is particularly dark in your life, and you can feel like you’re a bit of a failure.
“It can feel as if everybody else seems to have their life sorted, and you’re going through this alone. But that’s not the case,” he added.
The politician said he treated his high-pressure job as an MEP as a “sanctuary from things in his head”.
“Work is work, and sometimes you understand the boundaries around work. And there’s people around you who are going through the same thing, who are experiencing the same type of pressures at work.
“But I found that work was the place I went as a kind of sanctuary from things in my head. So it was actually the transfer from work into my own life, which was actually quite problematic for me.
“It became regular for me just to sit in the car for a while after I got home, because maybe I was trying to cling to the workday a little bit.
“But I found moving into the personal space, where it is just you and your head was more difficult.
“It’s stuck to you the whole time. But at work, you have a distraction. You’re dealing with a lot of problems other people have, and you can delve yourself into that, and whatever’s happening to you is absolutely secondary to what you’re doing.”
Mr Ó Ríordáin said he has now “turned a corner on it,” but it took him around three years to work through the difficult period.
“Somebody described it once to me that I looked like I had a lot of tabs open in my forehead. We have a computer screen, and somebody has 47 tabs open, and that’s what I was like.
“I was just kind of carrying it around a lot for quite a number of years.”
The politician shared he suffered from a “lack of energy”, a “lack of enthusiasm for anything”, an “inability to do the most basic chore” and a “heavy, clouded head”, he said.
“And being a guy, and this is the problem with us guys, is that the last thing in the world you want to do is to tell anybody about it, because you also don’t want to be bad company.
“I didn’t really want to go and talk about it to anybody, but it’s just something I had to plot my way through. But it became something I just got used to, that this is that, this is me now. I used to be something else.
“I used to wake up with a certain freedom in my head. And now, I wake up like this.”
Mr Ó Ríordáin confirmed he sought professional help to work on his mental health, which has benefitted him.
“It just got easier over time. And I sought a level of professional help, which has definitely benefitted me, but it is something that I look back on, rather than I’m living.
“When all this talk about mental health is happening and you’re in a position of responsibility and the Darkness and the Light thing that’s happening, I suppose there is a percentage of you, which says: ‘Maybe if you just said this, somebody else could get something out of it’.”
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