I consider myself a strong and resilient individual. As a 27-year-old man, when I reflect on the range of mental health conditions I faced throughout my teenage years and into my early twenties, I feel proud to have pulled myself out of what were, at times, some very dark periods in my life.

I don’t remember the exact moment I recognised that I was struggling with my mental health. I sometimes feel like I was born anxious. There are theories to suggest that descendants of displaced people are more susceptible to mental health conditions. My parents were refugees to the UK from Kosovo and I know that my ancestors endured colonial violence, systemic oppression and repeated displacement. Therefore, research indicates that intergenerational trauma is very real and can impact communities across space and time. 

Mental health was never openly discussed by my Kosovar family in London, only hinted at through uninformed, often bleak, references to those who struggled. Whether it was the family friend who had suddenly died  — he had taken his own life — or an uncle’s depressed wife, whom everyone whispered had been cursed by someone using the “evil eye,” a curse believed to be cast through a malevolent glance, causing harm or misfortune to the targeted individual, as if black magic explained her suffering. People were known to have experienced mental health conditions, but everyone was, frankly, too scared, ashamed and uninformed to talk openly about what people were experiencing. 

This was only made harder by the cultural, gender-based expectations placed on me from a young age. As an Albanian man, there were certain standards I was expected to live by, traditional ideas of strength and what makes a “real man,” marked by supposedly being unemotional, hypermasculine and being made to maintain expectations that felt unnatural to me. These representations of Albanian masculinity were overemphasized to me both in my Albanian community in London and back in Kosovo. I knew that speaking openly about my mental health would likely be seen as a weakness, as a failure to maintain the stoic exterior expected of Albanian men. 

In our culture, overtly emotional expressions and open discussions around mental health for men are often non-existent. But I’m no longer willing to stay quiet. This is a conversation far too many of us in the Albanian community still need to have.

My world turned upside down 

There were a range of factors that contributed to the onset of my mental health conditions — experiences I do not yet feel comfortable discussing within the Albanian community, though they are experiences that affect many of us. 

Over time, I began to notice certain changes in my body and the responses it had to situations that had previously caused me no issue whatsoever. Sporadic bursts of panic, anxiety and a gut-wrenching emotional ache would begin to consume me, but I had no language nor tools to express what was happening to me. Not addressing these issues in their infancy allowed them to quietly and insidiously take over my life. And I remember the day when everything came at me full force. I was 14, it was around 1:45 p.m. at my school in East London when, all of a sudden, mid-conversation with my teacher, my entire perception suddenly shifted. It felt as though a creature had seized control of me, gripping me in uncontrollable fear and distorting my entire reality. My heart pounded my chest, my vision blurred, the room spanned and every crevice of my body was soaked in sweat. 

This first episode was the beginning of a long battle with Depersonalisation-Derealisation Disorder (DPDR), a dissociative condition marked by ongoing feelings of detachment from oneself  — depersonalisation — and the world around them — derealisation. It took me nearly a decade to take control of this life-altering condition. I once more didn’t have the language to properly explain what I was experiencing. I would say that I felt “dizzy,” because that was the closest description I could offer at the time. But in truth, DPDR had control over nearly every aspect of my life and my relationship to the outside world. 

It wasn’t just a sense of disconnection, I would look at my mother’s face and feel a hollow, vacant emptiness, as though she was a stranger. As a writer today, I still can’t seem to find the words that capture what this disorder did to my life and to the relationships it dulled with the people I love most. This type of dissociative state eventually gave rise to a panic disorder, a mental health condition marked by sudden and unexpected panic attacks, accompanied with repeated episodes of intense fear. I also developed agoraphobia, defined by an extreme fear of entering open or crowded spaces, turning the most basic of tasks, such as leaving my own home, into a profound difficulty. I lived in my own personal hell for four years before anyone in my family took it seriously — or at least that’s how I felt.

Being in my mid-to-late teens seemed to be enough for every adult I encountered to dismiss my distress with, “You’ve got nothing to be anxious about, you’re young!” And the fact that I was a six-foot, broad-built Albanian teenager only added to the disbelief, as though my physical stature invalidated the chaos I was experiencing internally and adultified my still developing brain. I felt completely out of control, and no one seemed willing to see beyond the surface or past the cultural expectations to recognise the support I needed. 

Shame, shame and yet more shame… 

While I know my family felt distressed watching their son and brother unravel into an anxious mess, suffering multiple panic attacks a day, confined to the house for months and teetering on the edge of hospitalisation, I now recognise how cultural shame shaped their response.

There was one moment in particular that stands out: my parents told me not to disclose the medication I had been prescribed to anyone after my mother took me to the local doctor’s office. I didn’t plan to broadcast my internal struggles, but this moment revealed something deeper. I noticed how a culturally rooted shame shaped the way they communicated with me. They didn’t want me to be marked with the “he’s not well” label, which in my culture treated those with mental health conditions as “weird,” “pitiful” or “fundamentally broken.” I also know that had I been more vocal about my experiences, people in my community would have judged my parents for supposedly not caring for their djali i hasretit, a term used to describe a boy born into a family of all girls, often seen as especially cherished. 

My parents did the best they could with what they had, and despite deriving from a cultural background where families did not historically address mental and emotional health properly; they allowed me the space to be myself in parts and are deeply supportive of everything I do today. But they also reinforced broader cultural and patriarchal expectations on me, from telling me how to act publicly, to minimising the very real struggles I was facing in my youth, to dictating certain aspects of my life, these expectations created a pressure-filled environment I neither understood nor needed.

In truth, my parents did not have the tools to support a son who was undergoing experiences that extended beyond anything they had ever known. I truly believe that if there had been greater cultural awareness around mental health within the wider Albanian and Balkan communities when they were growing up, they would have been better equipped to support me and themselves. But this layer of silence, shame and unwillingness to accept that their son can, in fact, experience emotional distress, despite having all the privileges they didn’t, resorted to over a decade of struggle, isolation and several rounds of therapy. 

Ending the cycle 

This Men’s Mental Health Awareness Week, we must confront a difficult truth: Albanian men have always had mental health and emotional wellbeing difficulties — they’ve just historically neglected it. In the context of our history connected to war and systemic oppression, where our primal survival was the focus of our existence, these narratives took a back seat. 

But this continuous neglect stems from a patriarchal and problematic definition of masculinity, one that continues to perpetuate and normalise male violence against women and girls, but has also inflicted harm on men themselves. Today, I try to express my own definition of Albanian masculinity, one that is not defined by the supposed resilience of my stiff upper lip or how “macho” I present myself to others. It’s time we recognise that the alleged definition of what makes a “real” Albanian man only breeds harm, and we, as the men who have historically upheld these systems, must be a core part of dismantling them. 

My story with mental health will never be over. This experience has shown me just how important it is to center your mind because it’s something that carries you through life. I was raised in an environment that taught me I had no reason to struggle with my mental health, and yet I still did. I’ve been in recovery for some time now, and while I wouldn’t wish these experiences on anyone, it was my journey with mental health that made me a more empathetic person and also allowed my family to begin breaking down those baseless expectations that once shaped our lives.

I believe that by acknowledging the traumas of our ancestors and the lack of care many showed to mental health, we can transform that pain into a new path, one where Albanian sons, brothers, fathers and men can cry, are allowed be gentle and soft without ridicule, process complex emotions in a healthy way and seek help without shame. Today, I’m proud of the man I’ve become, resilient and giving back to my community in the best ways I know how. But my heart breaks watching so many Albanian men and our wider culture continue an approach of silence and shame around men and their mental health. 

It’s time we end that cycle.

This feature image was created with the assistance of the AI tool Sora.

Feature Image: K2.0.

Want to support our journalism? Become a member of HIVE or consider making a donation. Learn more here.