Niki Tennant

began to affect his physical health and his body shut down.

After blood tests failed to identify any physical ailment, he was diagnosed with depression followed by anxiety, something he would battle for five long years.

James admits he had held mental ill health in poor regard, considering it to be a weakness, particularly in men.

For up to three years, he had suicidal thoughts and, on two occasions when he had made up his mind, it was fate’s intervention that stopped him taking his life.

“If you were to ask 100 young men if they have had suicidal thoughts, a high proportion would say yes,” said James, who was in a really bad way when a friend introduced him to a life coach.

After just two hours, he emerged feeling that he better understood his mind, an experience that took him on a six- year journey towards his vocation of becoming a personal development coach and setting his life on the right track.

“I became very good at getting people to look at things differently and to see that depression and anxiety are not necessarily a bad thing,” explained James, 44, who says his own anxiety developed as part of the healing of his depression.

“Instead of understanding depression, you keep it secret and silence it and that grows it. When you are in depression, you feel separate.

“That is why speaking up is so important.