"Trying to raise hope' How one rugby coach managed to find some light amid depression

We hear the term ‘functioning alcoholic’,” Paul Pook says, “well, sometimes I think of myself as a functioning suicidalist.”

- Andy Bull

He apologises for the comparison, says he isn’t sure whether it’s inappropriate, only he can’t think of a better way of explaining it. Pook has spent the past 20 years working as a high-performance coach, for the Irish rugby union team, the Russian Olympic Committee and the Australian Institute of Sport. He has helped athletes to win grand slams and gold medals. And all the time, he had these thoughts. The doctors call it “suicidal ideation”.

Pook describes being on a flight from Moscow when the plane hit turbulence. “And I’m thinking: ‘ This could be it, the plane is going to crash and I wouldn’t feel this pain any more .’” He is bipolar, and he talks about the illness in terms of a sliding scale “where one is suicidal, five is normal, and 10 is psychotic. I’ve been at one five times in my life, I spent a lot of time around three, and maybe once I was up at eight or nine.”

That was when he was so overwhelmed by the patterns of coincidence he saw in the world that he ended up running into a church, “and I looked up at this statue of Jesus and he had his hand up, and he only had four-and-a-half fingers on it, well I’ve only got four-and-a-half fingers myself … ” He holds up his right hand, which is missing the tip of his pinkie. “So in my mind I was linked to Jesus, I remember phoning my daughters to say: ‘ Daddy is going to become really famous.’ A week later I was in Covent Garden meeting a publisher to try to persuade them to tell the story.