Dean Oberin is a mental health ambassador for Echuca Regional Health. He hopes he can support others on their own paths to healing and growth. Transformation is a powerful ripple effect and by becoming aware of, and taking responsibility for, his whole life, Dean feels like a better person, husband, father and mate and is happy to share his story if it is going to help others think about getting help.
Part of this mission is uniting our community to raise funds dedicated to local primary mental health initiatives. To donate, go to erh.org.au/make-a-donation/
Twenty years ago, if people had heard it, no-one would have believed it.
But then, 20 years ago, you would almost certainly have never heard about it in the first place.
It just wasn’t what men talked about. Never to other men. Never publicly. And rarely privately.
‘Real’ men sucked it up and shut up.
Until, eventually, they realised you can only shut up so much before it comes back to bite you – big time.
To most people, Dean Oberin has led, and still leads, a nice life.
Born into a successful family, building successful businesses, happily married with three girls, it all appears laid out for a beautiful future.
Ask Dean about it and he’ll never deny birthright gave him a pretty good leg up.
But all of that depends on being aware of where you are, where you’ve been, and all the things in life that have affected you, for good and bad.
Ask Dean about it.
“I’ve got a bunch of uni mates, we catch up for a dinner every year and lie to each other about how great we were in the good old days,” he said with a laugh.
“At this year’s event, just one of them mentioned, very low key, he had been seeing a shrink. It hadn’t been mentioned before but boy, did it open the floodgates.
“By the time we had finished the dinner, you would have been the odd one out if you hadn’t sought some kind of help.”
Anxiety has been a long-term challenge for Dean.
He calls it “my thing” but, as he puts it, we all have our challenges, one way or another.
He describes balance in life as “cool”, but when life isn’t going to plan, when you have problems coping, that’s when help doesn’t just count, it is crucial.
“Often, at first, you don’t even realise something is happening, something is affecting you, and everything about you — but it often creeps up, just a little bit at a time,” Dean said.
“This is also when you face the first challenge, when you make decisions which may well be good at first, but too often aren’t good in the long term, because especially when you are young you think you are bulletproof, you can deal with anything.
“You are getting round at a million miles an hour and your first choice might be to self-medicate with avoidance, or alcohol, to help you calm down, to help you think you are coping, or going to cope.
“But I can tell you, from personal experience, you don’t really cope with this on your own.
‘’If you don’t learn you have to put your mental health and wellbeing first, everything else runs a very distant last — you lose, your family loses, your business loses, everyone loses.”
Being in the public eye, having a dad who was a long-serving councillor and mayor, creates this aura of expectation.
For Dean, it felt as though everyone expected him to be on his game all the time, every time.
He said at one stage his whole life felt like a spreadsheet — so organised, so rigid and, for him, so out of control.
Finally, it reached the point where he would get to the front door of his house or his businesses and he would stop and admit to himself, “I can’t do this”.
The pause and the thought pattern were very short, but so very real.
And then he sucked it up and stepped through the door.
Today the anxiety hasn’t disappeared. He can feel it in the dark recesses of his mind from time to time.
But if he’s looking for a milestone moment on how far he has become, when he gets to the door these days, if he has that hesitation, he has the skills to step back, turn around and walk away.
“You need to take a breather. You need, you must, make the smarter choices and you need someone to help you with those choices,’’ he said.
‘’Even if it sounds like common sense, when it comes from a trusted someone else, you listen.
“And while the recognition you need help might come as a relief, it is not necessarily the silver bullet.
“The thing about getting help, whether it’s a psychiatrist, a psychologist or a therapist, it still has to work for you.
“You can go through multiple shrinks before you find one with whom you are comfortable enough to really open up with, because if you don’t open up, you are cheating yourself.”
Dean said one of his first tries was someone who barely spoke to him for three months, expecting Dean to do all the work. This didn’t work. Dean needed the conversation.
The rapport, he insists, is “absolutely essential” if your relationship is going to deliver the results you want and need.
And Dean does not mind admitting his first attempts at reaching out for help were made well away from his home town, because you don’t talk about these things where people know you.
“If you get the right person, someone you connect with, it does make everything easier, the longer you go,” Dean said.
“Because, you slowly start to realise, much of the conversation you are having is with yourself. It was for me.
“The good ones can guide the conversation and help you make sense of how things should be.”
The triggers, Dean added, could come at you from anywhere.
It could be a sudden loss, a drawn-out decline of an older family member or friend. It could be a business setback, or simply too much going on at the one time. It all adds up and, left alone, it doesn’t go away.
“More recently I have been seeing a psychologist here in Echuca, and not long ago a mate saw me coming up the street from the clinic and asked what I was doing, was I okay?” Dean said.
“I thanked him for his concern, and pointed out I wouldn’t have been in that street if I was okay, and for me, and for lots of others I suspect, it’s good to be able to come out and say you have a few problems and you’re working on them, that you need some space. It makes the talk a lot freer.
“I’m 55 now, I’ve done a lot of hard yards, made a lot of decisions, good and bad, but I owe it to myself, to my family, my friends and the people who work with us, to have that fixed point in my universe.
“And even things such as a walk, a bike ride or the gym can make such a difference to how you see everything. It can be amazing.
“When you’re on a life high, when you are a success, it does bring a sense of entitlement, a belief nothing can go wrong for you.”
That’s wrong too.
What he would like to see put right is a simple little bit of empathy more often.
In his words, “you don’t know what you don’t know”.
Don’t judge, just be accepting and just let people own their space.
And if there is one thing Dean wishes he could change is that he wished he knew all this earlier.
“But I didn’t seek outside help, I didn’t even consider my mental health and wellbeing, I didn’t see it as an option,” he said.
Now he knows it’s a good option to consider.