By accident or design, Mark Allen and James McClean made it a good week for men’s mental health

Ultimately, this was probably a good week for men’s mental health. It didn’t feel like that at times but that’s all part of it too. Very little about mental health is ever straightforward and neat.

For now, a couple of high-profile Irish sportsmen talked in public about their mental health and, intentionally or not, conveyed something about broader issues and attitudes towards it. That’s good. That’s progress.

James McClean and Mark Allen are in two different places, living two different lives, facing two different scenarios. McClean is selling a book, his terrific autobiography The Walls, skilfully rendered by Daniel McDonnell. Allen is stepping away from snooker, maybe for a while or maybe for good, in an attempt to get himself back on an even keel.

So it’s not necessarily easy to draw a line between the two of them. They don’t, on the face of it, have a lot in common. But that’s sort of the point.

When we talk about a subject as wide and varied and amorphous as men’s mental health, we are usually dealing in generalities. That’s why it helps for individuals to present themselves as case studies, whether that’s what they mean to do or not. McClean and Allen are real people but serve as pretty useful archetypes too.

Plenty of friend groups have had experience of the James McClean approach to mental health. The guy who buries all the shit deep down under layers of bravado and bluff and bench-pressing. The chap who is a bit out there, no-filter, erratic. Someone you find yourself telling outsiders is actually a grand lad underneath it all.

By the same token, plenty of us have seen friends gradually drift into Mark Allen’s position too. Haunted and withdrawn. Self-esteem on the floor. Quiet and apologetic and second-guessing themselves. Retreating into solitude, unable really to articulate what it is that’s causing them to feel this way.

So much research into mental health pinpoints acceptance as being a key component in any progress you hope to make. The more people who see traces of themselves in McClean or Allen, or any other public figure when it comes to this stuff, the better. Mental health struggles are a lonely station. It’s never bad to see you’re not the only one who feels like this.

Even if, in McClean’s case, what he said didn’t seem to be particularly helpful. He threw around some loose language in an interview with Paul Kimmage, talking about therapy as a sign of weakness. It brought condemnation from all quarters in the early part of the week, including from his wife Erin, who was moved to put out her own statement in response. “I do not agree with James’s opinion on the subject of therapy and mental health,” she wrote on social media. “I’m working on getting him to a place where he recognises that speaking about this is not a sign of weakness.”

There is no greater hero in The Walls than Erin McClean, a formidable Derry woman whose husband, to his credit, genuinely acknowledges how lucky he is to have her. By the end of the week, McClean was on UTV, clarifying and maybe even softening. Maybe.

“Any man that goes to therapy, any man that seeks help, I couldn’t commend them any bigger for doing that,” he told a reporter at his book launch. “But I was talking about me and my own situation. And probably using that word ‘weakness’ or having that view that it’s a weakness for me, maybe that’s my weakness.”

The contrast with Mark Allen couldn’t be more stark. The Antrim snooker player played in Belfast on Tuesday, his first match since April. He played it out of duty, basically – he was drawn against his friend Jordan Brown and the tournament was in The Waterfront. He had spent 10 weeks in a mental health clinic before willing himself to go and play in it. Then he gave an interview to TNT’s Rachel Casey and talked about how he was in a bad place and “just trying to survive”.

Allen’s interview was so bracing that it couldn’t but bubble up out of the usual swamp of content around the internet. It broke through for a couple of reasons. One, though Allen is curiously under-celebrated here, he is one of the best snooker players in the world. For someone in the elite tier of his sport to be so frank and vulnerable took enormous strength. No weakness on show there.

The other reason it caught a viral wave was Casey’s sensitive handling of the other side of the microphone. She didn’t push Allen to say more than he wanted to. She didn’t overload him with questions. She didn’t hurry things along to fit the TV schedule. Her affection for a struggling fellow citizen in snooker’s small world was obvious. When she reached in for a hug, it didn’t feel unprofessional. It felt as if he mattered.

People matter. People with high profiles and people with none. If you have any sort of sporty bent to your media consumption, you heard about either James McClean or Mark Allen, or both, this week. That mattered.

Maybe it made you think about a friend and you checked in for the first time in a while. Maybe it made you think about yourself. Maybe it had no effect whatsoever on the vast majority of people. Maybe it had some small effect on someone who needed it. One way or another, people were talking about men’s mental health.

That’s a good thing.