Filming invisible injuries. Then finding mine.

For the past couple of years I've been making a documentary called Brain Shocks. Most of it is me sitting across from veterans and first responders while they tell me about the injuries nobody can see.

They talked about traumatic brain injury. About invisible injuries and the coping mechanisms that got them through - the healthy ones and the ones that nearly finished them. About the long road of polypharmacy, where one prescription leads to another prescription to manage the first one, and so on down the line. And about the new directions some of them are taking with alternative treatments, under the clinical eye of psychiatrists, psychologists and GPs who are genuinely trying to find better answers for people in pain.

As the filmmaker, I empathised, listened, and asked the next question - there's a practicality mixed in with the emotion and the creative craft. I thought my job was to understand their world well enough to tell their story properly.

Then, somewhere along the way, I stopped being just the bloke behind the camera.

This year I was diagnosed with ADHD. If you know me, that sentence probably reads less like news and more like a caption. But a diagnosis in your late 40s is a strange gift: half relief ("so THAT'S what that was"), half grief for the years you spent calling yourself lazy or scattered when you were actually running uphill the whole time.

And here's where my two worlds collided last week. After the diagnosis of ADHD comes the drug, and after the drug come the side effects, and suddenly I could relate - from a safe, civilian distance - to a small corner of what my interviewees had been describing for two years. The trial and error. Working out what time of day to take it. Which days to take it at all. Noticing what the medication gives you, and being honest about what it quietly takes away. I started jotting down the side effects and the times they happened, so that when I talk to the psychiatrist next I can be clear about when and possibly even why these were happening. Things like severe mood swings, anger, frustration. I would get annoyed at drivers around me, whereas in my normal life I couldn't care less. Even if someone cut me off, you wouldn't hear the horn toot. Suddenly I was aware of every driver around me at every single corner. I was one step away from road rage, and I was ashamed of myself. I also noticed uncharacteristic levels of clumsiness. I consider myself to be a fairly coordinated person. If I knock something off a table, I usually catch it before it hits the ground. Out of nowhere, I was spilling drinks and tripping over bags. My coordination was definitely not what it used to be. And where normally I would go quiet, let it sit, and maybe even keep my opinion to myself, I was the one stoking the dinner-table debates.

I would ordinarily keep this side of my life to myself. But being a high-functioning member of society with a community and business profile often stops you from talking about the very thing that you should be the most open about. You tend to second-guess what people will say about you, what their perception of you will become. It's partly true: some people's opinion of you does change once they learn that someone they thought was, by society's standards, completely "normal" is struggling mentally.

But I'm constantly advocating for people - men in particular - to talk about their mental wellbeing. What one generation saw as a weakness, the next should turn into a reason to help each other out. You even hear conversations in your own circles: "Oh, just about everybody has ADHD now. Just hand the next prescription to the next person in line." Or "Everyone these days seems to be on the spectrum in some regard. Things have changed." It does have an impact on how much you share publicly. I wish I had been a little stronger, a little sooner. It would have helped to have had this diagnosis when I was much younger, and it might have spared me some of the other fragile patches in my mental health along the way.

Back to Brain Shocks. Here's what roughly twenty-seven conversations to date have taught me, now that I'm on my own much smaller version of the road:

You don't need a war to have an invisible injury. The blokes I interviewed earned theirs in ways I can't imagine, and I'm not comparing my situation to theirs for a second. But the mechanics of living with something nobody can see - the explaining, the masking, the "you seem fine to me" - turns out to be a shared language.

The people who cope best aren't the toughest. They're the ones who talk. Every single person who sat in front of my camera and spoke openly was further down the healing road than the day they started talking. Every one.

Treatment is a process, not a purchase. Nobody I interviewed found the answer on the first try, and neither have I. You adjust, you notice, you go back to the professionals, you adjust again. That's not failure. That's literally how it works.

So here's the practical bit. If you're white-knuckling through your weeks and calling it normal - if you're the person everyone describes as "always flat out" and you privately know it's something more than busy - say it out loud to one person this week. A mate. Your GP. Your partner. You don't need a plan or a label to start, you just need the sentence. Mine took about 25 years longer than it should have.

I am lucky to have such a support network around me. My wife is the first to catch "the mess" as it unfolds - and it's not easy on her. I'm not the most rational when dealing with side effects and I seem to blow the smallest of issues out of proportion - which she is constantly trying to de-escalate. I also have friends who have been in much worse situations, who have seen the signs and understand the risks. One of them is introducing me to my first ice bath this afternoon! He wants me to heal as quickly and as fully as he has. And I'm grateful for his invitation. He's also been sending me a daily text asking how I am, as he realises I'm in the experimental phase of my medication.

The usual disclaimer, and I mean it: I'm not a doctor and none of this is medical advice - anything to do with diagnosis or medication belongs with your GP. But if you just want to compare notes with someone who gets the juggle, my inbox is open. I'm up for the chat.

Take care of yourselves.