Practice Stories
Counselor, Northern Ireland · men's mental health
A men's mental health counselor in Northern Ireland who once needed the help he now gives is building the practice — and the safe room — he wishes had existed for him.
Karen joined the Air Force at seventeen. Engineering followed, six years with an American company, TX, based in Northern Ireland, working his way up to maintenance facilities manager. On paper, a steady technical career. Underneath it, something else was happening. "All through my teenage years and my adult early adult life I had a lot of mental health problems," he says. "Twenty years ago actually I tried to take my own life but thankfully I'm still here to tell the tale."
He carried on. Kept working. Became, at TX, a mental health first aider — and found he liked it. An advert for a counseling course caught his eye, and he told himself it would just be a useful skill to have alongside his engineering job. He didn't think it would become his life's work. "Even then thinking that it would be just skills to learn that I wouldn't actually end up in this field because I still thought I can't help people, I haven't figured myself out yet. Who am I to sit in that seat when I should be in the other seat?"
The course changed the shape of his days at work before it changed his job title. Guys on the shop floor started finding him. "As I went through it and I found that as I become more and more known as the guy, the mental health first aider... there was more and more guys even in the shop floor coming up, chatting to me, opening up, wanting to talk. And it was real good experience." He noticed something simple and decisive: "I realized, you know what, that's where I want to be. I'm going to be finishing up the week thinking I've helped some people this week rather than maybe just making some more money for the shareholders."
Now building his own private practice, Karen names the motivation without dressing it up. "I wanted to be the guy that I needed all those years ago, the guy that I could have spoken to." He remembers what happened the few times he did try to open up in his twenties: "I would get the same messages of, 'Oh, you just need to man up,' or 'it's not that bad'... and that kept me quiet for a long time."
Karen works mostly with men, and he's clear-eyed about what stands in the way before anyone reaches him. It isn't that men don't want to talk. "I've seen people want to talk, men want to talk. If they can see someone that's open to it, someone that's going to listen, then they will open up." He tells the story of a talk he gave two weeks earlier at a workplace, a room of fifty or sixty men, where he shared his own story. Afterward, several came up to him. "Can I have a chat with you," they said. "I've never told anybody this before."
His advice to a man who's reluctant, who's never sat across from a counselor, isn't a pitch. It's permission to start small and expect imperfection. "Just to try it," he says. "It's not about turning up on day one and telling everything that's going on. I believe you have to build a wee bit of rapport... and once that comes, then you start to feel more comfortable." And if the first counselor isn't the right fit? "Don't give up. There's plenty out there... It's literally nothing to lose and everything to gain."
That same instinct shapes how he talks about grounding and burnout, too. It starts with noticing: a shorter fuse, zoning out on the sofa, struggling at home. "If you can bring that awareness... then you can start to work through it." From there, something stubbornly simple: communication, started small. "If you've got a friend or someone you can open to, just pick up the phone, send them a message, and it doesn't have to be everything all at once."
Karen isn't a skeptic of the technology reshaping his field. "I think AI is everywhere... I've used it myself. I think it's a fantastic tool. But like any tool, it's how you use it and how you respect it." He uses it for social media ideas and working through tax questions. "I nearly a black belt in Google," he says. "AI is almost shortcuted that."
But there's a line he draws before anyone asks him to. "I don't put anything in there client-wise. No confidential information, none of that." He also names a limit on what the tool can offer a person in distress: "You don't get the challenge from AI — it kind of tells you what you want to hear." That's precisely why the room with another person in it still matters.
Karen is honest that he hasn't settled the harder question — not whether AI belongs on the side of his practice, but whether it belongs inside the one-to-one session itself. "As far as for counselors using it, a lot of them may be using it, but again as a tool on the side, not necessarily within therapy yet... I don't see how I bring it into the sessions, the one-to-one sessions. I don't see that at the minute. And that's right now, but who knows what the future is."
The message he keeps returning to, in his talks and in his own reflection on the years he spent struggling before he asked for help, is simpler than any framework. "Don't wait," he says. "Don't wait until you're in crisis." He built a practice, and a version of himself, around being the person who was there when someone finally did reach out. Watch the full conversation to hear him tell it in his own words.