A while back, Anton Tohill was facilitating a mental health workshop in a small club in Fermanagh. The Gaelic Players Association (GPA) have been working in conjunction with the Movember charity, trying to put a focus on suicide prevention, normalising openness and talking, all that good stuff. Tohill was a few minutes into his spiel when a middle-aged man in the audience pulled him up. “Here,” he said. “Why are you coming in here now?” So Tohill, primed and practised, recited all the reasons. Mental health is an ongoing thing. It’s something that’s increasing in prevalence. We’re getting a lot better at picking up these things and the idea of these workshops is hopefully to stop things like suicide from happening. The chap cut him short again. “He says, ‘But wait, there was a suicide here six weeks ago. Where were yous then?’” Tohill is 25. He’s a giant of a lad, 6ft 7 in his socks, and he’s packed a huge amount into his quarter century so far. But standing there in the clubhouse of Donagh GAA, he knew he was a small comfort to anyone and was scrambling to know what to say. So he just said what he felt. “Usually, the way the programme works is we only go into clubs long after the dust has settled on a tragedy like that. But this one had slipped through the net somehow,” Tohill says. “And obviously this was a man who was very, very bereft. The emotions were very high. You just have to in that moment be like, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry for your loss.’ It’s such a tragedy. It’s a step for the club in the right direction to have initiatives like this. “But just the anger and the frustration and the sadness and the anguish, all of it was encapsulated in one moment. It’s very, very hard in those scenarios, you’re just terribly sorry for what’s happened. And hopefully we’re on the right track to trying to educate people better on it and to get people talking about it all.” Tohill is chatting on a Zoom screen in full scrubs, having just come off a shift at Belfast City Hospital. He’s in oncology this week but life as a medical student means he moves around a lot. By August 2026, he’ll be a qualified doctor, all going to plan. He was going to be a dentist, he thought. Growing up, he was big into machines and how things worked but didn’t want to be an engineer because it wasn’t really a job where you’d have a lot of personal interactions. But he loved all the drills and gizmos they had in the dentist’s surgery. “Here look,” he laughs. “I’m a bit weird like that.” His whole outlook changed in 2013 when his father Anthony injured himself in a freak chainsaw accident in their garden. After that, if he wasn’t going to be a professional sportsman, he was going to be a doctor of some sort. He was going to help people fix the things that had gone wrong. “My father wouldn’t have a recognisable human face if it wasn’t for the people that did the surgery on him,” he says. “So it’s still a passion of mine, facial surgery and facial reconstruction. Because when people lose a leg or an arm, they still get looked at as a person. “But whenever people have facial deformities, whether they’re born with them or have acquired them through trauma or cancer treatment, it has such an impact on their life and how people perceive them in life. There’s been so many studies done on the psychological impact of it. “And I just thought, it’s probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen to take somebody from where my father was to now, whereby people wouldn’t even notice that he’s had the accident he had. To have that sort of impact on people and to be able to take a problem and solve it based upon the training you’ve done to improve somebody’s quality life, I just think this is the most incredible thing ever. So that kind of pushed me toward the medicine side of things.” Little wonder then that when the GPA was looking for intercounty players to get involved with Movember’s Ahead of the Game programme, Tohill jumped at the chance. His medical training was one side of it. The other was the fact that when he’d been in Australia playing AFL, he’d got to know Red Óg Murphy, the young Sligo player who would later die by suicide. “Probably the biggest wake up call for me was Red Óg. I was in Australia with him for a year in Melbourne and would have known him quite well. He was somebody you always thought was happy and smiling and always very content. Whenever you see these kinds of things happening, it’s like, ‘God, I wish I had known more about what I’m talking about now’,” Tohill says. “I would have played a bit of golf with Red Óg and other bits and pieces as well. He was at a club in North Melbourne that was a wee bit further out of the city than the rest of us. So we didn’t get caught up quite as often as we would have liked. “The shock of it when he died. You’re like, ‘No way, that’s not right.’ Or not real or whatever. And then the news comes through and materialises to be true. It’s just the realisation that somebody’s life is not there any more. And that all the lives around them are changed forever. Your heart goes out to the family and all the people that know him a lot better than I did. They’ve got such a massive hole in their life now.” And so now Tohill does this. In between training to be a doctor and playing for Derry, he makes a point of finding the time to go around clubs and run these interactive workshops dealing with mental health. They nearly always start quiet because suicide is still a taboo. But the whole idea of them is to get people to talk. If they’re not going to do it in the room, they’re unlikely to do it outside. There’s talking and there’s talking, of course. For so long now, it’s been the pat answer around mental health difficulties. If you’re feeling down, talk to someone. Talk to anyone. Tohill approaches it from the other direction. For talking to work, it has to be meaningful. Don’t just check in, dig in. “Talking’s grand,” he says. “But the way I like to describe mental health to people is that if you’re really struggling with something, it’s like you’re at the bottom of a really deep well. It’s isolating, cold, dark, damp, an uncomfortable place to be. And down there you feel totally alone. You’ve got a wee halo of light up at the top, where you can kind of interact with society through. But you’re still isolated and alone. “And whenever we say talk, it’s very easy for somebody to walk past the well and look down and give you a shout. ‘Oh, how’s it going? What’s the craic?’ And you can just put the thumbs up and just say, ‘Not so bad, getting on.’ We can just pass that off and then the person can just walk on past. And you think, ‘Great, I talked now, that’s grand.’ [ The life and death of Red Óg Murphy: ‘We had no reason to believe anything was wrong’Opens in new window ] “But it’s whenever somebody is in that kind of phase where they’re really struggling, the really important thing is if you can make them notice that there’s somebody who actually cares about them and has noticed the change in them. Or maybe somebody actually cares enough to want to help. “Noticing that something’s wrong and focusing on any kind of change that you’ve seen is a very big thing for making the person that’s unwell realise, ‘Oh Jesus, I might not be in this alone.’ Somebody might care enough to actually want to talk about it and deal with it with me.” When he talks to sports teams, he reminds them that they have a head start with this stuff. They’re already involved in something where they’re pushing their physical limits so it isn’t a huge stretch to apply that to their mental limits. By that, he means making an environment where talking about your emotions is commonplace. And not just the bad ones, either. If you’re in a place where it feels natural to express your excitement and your joy, you’re far more likely to feel free to articulate the opposite. And, in the most serious cases, free to ask the hardest questions of all when you’re worried about someone. “You have to be proactive. I think that stuck out to me the most. When you get trained in how to ask the questions and talk about thoughts of life not being worth living and suicidal ideation or thoughts of self harm, there’s lots of evidence that talking about these things to the people who are struggling is the best thing you can possibly do. “If you’re really worried that somebody’s thinking of taking their own life or harming themselves in any way, ask them about it. Asking them if they’ve had any thoughts like that is the best thing you can do to either snap them on the track and think, ‘Oh, God, I’m actually thinking about doing this,’ or just throw their hands up and say, ‘No, no, I’m not that bad yet.’ “There’s no risk associated with increased suicide on the back of it. That’s one of the messages that we give a lot in our parents workshop. There’s no harm in asking. If you’re really worried about somebody and are concerned about it, bring it up. “Talk about it. Have it as part of that conversation with somebody who is really struggling. It is the only way to properly assess the risk of where they’re at. Knowing that information, having that in front of you is so important.” [ ‘It’s tools for life’: Domhnall Nugent to take time from hurling to help run mental health campaignOpens in new window ] For Tohill, the campaign is just one of the plates he has spinning. The studies take up plenty of his time – and that’s before he laces up a boot for Derry. He missed the Donegal defeat with a broken hand but will be back in time for the All-Ireland Championship. The injury came in the last game of the league against Armagh and though it happened shortly after half-time – and even though Derry were getting an almighty hiding – he played on to the final whistle. “I didn’t talk to the physio about it until after the game. I was basically thinking, ‘I’m going to be out for a while after this game so this is the last football I’ll play for a few weeks.’ Why go off? The Athletic Grounds is a great stadium. I know we didn’t play particularly well that day, but I’m still not going to go off if I can play away. I’d be a fairly ignorant fellah, you know?” Not that ignorant. Not where it matters. Anton Tohill was speaking to The Irish Times as the GAA/GPA and Movember urge players across the country to Break the Silence on mental health as part of the Movember Ahead of the Game programme. Visit aheadofthegame.movember.com for information and support. If you are affected by any of the issues in this piece, please contact The Samaritans at 116 123 or email at jo@samaritans.ie