Pedalling a positive message
He’s a little saddle sore, but Manna Institute Lived Experience representative and PhD researcher Darren Wagner is a proud team member and finisher of this year’s Wellways Break the Cycle ride to promote positive mental health in rural and regional Australia.
Darren was part of a 22-person team that travelled 860 kilometres from Lake Cargellico to Albury via Hay, Balranald and Deniliquin over seven days earlier this month. Along the way, in larger and smaller communities, participants shared their personal experiences and invited conversations around suicide awareness and prevention.
For Darren, the ride was symbolic of his 30-year journey to recovery.
“I have been undertaking a marathon ever since attempting suicide, processing how I wound up in that space,” he said. “I now have a great appreciation of how easily one can find themselves not being able to talk about their mental health.”
After growing up in rural America, Darren became a police officer and “gathered many of his stresses and bad experiences” in a workplace that didn’t encourage debriefing.
“My first exposure to suicide was my first day on the job, as a really young police officer, and for the next 10 years I responded to suicides of people of all ages and backgrounds, which eventually led to my own hopelessness and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder),” Darren said. “I really shouldn’t be here; it was just a fluke that a friend dropped by at the same time.
“Break the Cycle really touched me because I have skin in the game. All riders had been touched by suicide to some degree – they had lost friends and family. I was riding for myself, but also for the many people I have encountered throughout my life.”
The ride aims to raise awareness in rural and regional communities that are generally under-serviced in terms of suicide awareness and prevention.
“Which is problematic for people who are having a mental health challenge or are in suicidal distress,” said Darren, who now works as the Project Lead on the Suicide Prevention Peer Worker Support Strategy for Wellways. “A great stigma also persists around mental health in rural areas, where maintaining anonymity can be difficult.
“Riding into towns, we met people who had lost loved ones and others who had had thoughts of suicide, many of them men who had never spoken about it with a counsellor, psychologist or even their wife. A couple said their wives didn’t even know they were there meeting us. We would hear and honour their stories, they would hug you and we would cry with them. You could see the weight lifted.”
Although he’d only gotten a bike for Christmas and had but a few months to train, Darren humbly donned the Lycra and carried a message stick presented by elders after a smoking ceremony and welcome on Mutthi Mutthi country in Balranald. When he wasn’t riding, he was supporting his fellow riders during an experience that mirrored his own mental health experiences.
“On the last day, with a final 30 kilometres to go, I had nothing else to give,” Darren said. “We had three last hills to climb and I hate hills. I conquered the first two but didn’t have the energy for the third one, so a friend of mine got off his bike and we walked our bikes over the hill together. We got to the end and people were cheering us on and I openly wept. It was so emotional.”
Within a month, Darren embarks on a different kind of challenge – a PhD with Manna Institute to explore the role of peer workers and how this emerging workforce might be expanded and made more sustainable in rural and regional communities to augment current and future mental health teams.
In the meantime, he’s still revelling in the memories of the big-sky country he traversed, replete with kangaroos and wedge-tailed eagles. “It’s something I will carry with me forever and has provided great inspiration for my work,” Darren said.