TikToker John Connolly says ‘men don’t want to need help’

Two years ago when a stranger asked John Connolly to take a picture of her family she could not have known she had interrupted his plan to take his own life.

As he looked at their smiling faces he thought of his own loved ones and began his long road to recovery.

He now has almost 350,000 followers on TikTok, where he posts videos advocating for better mental health awareness and showing his recovery through the gym.

The latest data shows suicide is the leading cause of death among young men in Scotland, however Mr Connolly says it can still be a taboo topic.

“Men don’t want to need help,” he told Kaye Adams on the Mornings with programme

“I’ve found my way of dealing with it, and that’s by keeping busy, going to the gym, actually thinking about how I feel and I meditate as well.”

Mr Connolly, from Glasgow, says he first noticed he was struggling when he was about 16 or 17 but he had never heard the term ‘mental health’.

“In school I felt really different from everyone else. I felt disassociated from myself. I had zero confidence,” he says.

“I was told that I had an anger issue, that was my diagnosis.

“It turned out I was just a young teenager who never knew who he really was, had a lot going on in his life and didn’t know how to process it.

“That’s not an anger issue, that’s just a young man,” he says.

After school he says was able to stay distracted by working as a chef and then in car sales.

“I never had that much time to think about what was going on inside my head, until Covid came,” Mr Connolly says.

Around this time he was also prescribed medication but felt that it didn’t suit him.

In 2021, he was on the brink of taking his own life when he was distracted by a woman asking for a photo.

“She said ‘are you okay?’, and I thought, ‘oh my god, somebody has noticed’,” Mr Connolly says.

“Somebody has actually noticed how I’m feeling.”

Mr Connolly says he has not had suicidal thoughts in “a long, long time” but there are still ups and downs in his journey with depression.

A year ago he started sharing his fitness progress and how it was improving his mental health on TikTok.

He quickly gained 20,000 followers by posting what he described as ‘sad and relatable’ content – “just men talking about how bad their life is”.

However, after a health scare earlier this year, his mindset and the tone of his videos changed.

“I decided I’m just going to open up about everything,” he says.

“I’m going to lay it all out there so I can start again.”

He made another video for TikTok reflecting on this new motivation and says it got about two million views.

He now has almost 350,000 followers on TikTok and has attracted sponsorship from a fitness brand.

Mr Connolly says a sense of community on TikTok has helped him realise that he’s not alone in his experiences.

“It gave me the courage to fully open up,” he says.

“It’s taking away that stigma of “oh, he’s a bit sensitive, or he’s just cried”, and going, ‘look, that’s just him doing it his way, and it works for him’.

“If it doesn’t work for you, find your own way. It’s as simple as that.”

He says he gets thousands of messages, including people saying “you’ve changed my life”.

Mr Connolly says mental health is different from person to person.

“What could help someone, that bit of advice, could also break someone. And that’s where the real problem is,” he says.

As well as the risk of messages being misunderstood online, Mr Connolly also says social media algorithms are in danger of increasing the prominence of one type of content which can have a negative impact on mental health too.

After feeling the impact of only seeing sad content, he began to post videos which would acknowledge the struggles, but crucially also motivate his viewers that they would be able to get through it.

He says: “Use me as an example. That’s my whole thing – use me as an example of how much you can turn your life around.

“In the last year my life has completely changed, and that came from me opening up and forgetting my ego.

“Sometimes you just need a fresh start, and you can have a fresh start any day.”

If you, or someone you know, has been affected by mental health issues, BBC Action Line has put together a list of organisations which can help.