'I was depressed and suicidal - but a 3,000 mile walk around Britain helped me recover'

I took the decision to walk a 3,000- mile lap of Britain for Jake Tyler to get a hold on his depression. Feeling broken and suicidal after years of low thoughts, and with a nocturnal life as a London pub manager, he was hardly a textbook candidate for circumnavigating the country.

When he set off in June 2016, shortly after his 30th birthday, he was two stone overweight and had a drinking problem. The walk would take him more than a year and a half to complete, and along the way he’d lose his walking boots, stagger onwards in his socks, and have his backpack stolen, containing every possession he needed.

And yet through the physical challenge – resulting in calves like rocks and ankle damage – came an emotional calm derived from the simplicity of nature. It was this, he says, that saved him. ‘It really felt like I was just walking it all off. I was completely winging it – I’d done no training – but I had this thing driving me.

‘Walking was a vehicle to have a big inward look at myself.’

Tyler, now 34, is talking to me via Zoom from his flat in Brighton, on the eve of the publication of his memoir, A Walk from the Wild Edge. With strawberry-blond curls, a light beard and clear, bright skin, he is a far cry from the portrait he paints in the book of himself in the months leading up to the trip, when he had poor hygiene and rarely washed his clothes. He was in a thick cloud of depression at the time and came close to taking his own life.

In many ways, he is one of the lucky ones. The rate of men dying by suicide in England and Wales was at its highest for two decades in 2019, according to recent Office for National Statistics data. Men accounted for about three quarters of all suicides recorded.

Tyler believes that the reason he became suicidal is simple – and true of many men: he felt unable to talk about his depression. ‘I still have this internalised thing where I [think] I have to be strong, that it’s not attractive for me to cry and be vulnerable,’ he admits.

‘It is obviously something so ubiquitous in male culture.’

He first experienced depression at 15. ‘I’d been really happy in primary school,’ he remembers. ‘I was outgoing and confident, never feeling sad. Then when I got to [my mid-teens] I started to feel really sad…

‘There would be times when I’d go really quiet. It would feel like my personality [had left] my body.’

For years, he tried to ignore these feelings, but it all came to a head one day in March 2016, when he seriously contemplated suicide. This was a turning point. Afterwards, he was signed off work and went to stay with his mother in his home town of Maldon, Essex.

It was a dark time. ‘With no job, no fixed routine and no energy, my only tasks were to get out of bed in the morning and go back to bed at night,’ he recalls.

He refused antidepressants (believing they wouldn’t get to the crux of the problem) and began cognitive behavioural therapy, a form of talking therapy. But what helped most was walking the family dog, Reggie.

‘It was Mum’s idea to take Reggie out every day. Wandering made me think, “OK, the world is pretty amazing and nature is lovely.”’ Gradually, the walks got longer, reaching five miles.

During one outing, an idea to circumnavigate the British mainland popped into his head. ‘I realised how healing being outside had been for me,’ he says. ‘I’d always felt at home in the outdoors as a kid, never [bothered] by the rain and cold.’

The more he thought about the idea, the more determined he became to see it through. ‘I honestly don’t know what was driving it, other than the fact that I had come so close to thinking that my life was over.’

He bought a map of Britain from a local bookshop, spread it out on the living-room rug and, with a black marker pen, furiously circled every section of natural Britain he could see: national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, trails, beaches… ‘Anywhere that was green and didn’t have tangles of roads coming out of it,’ he explains.

Next, he drew a line connecting the circles, and what emerged was a giant loop of the country, starting at Brighton’s Palace Pier, then going via Cornwall, the Yorkshire Dales, East Anglia, and large swathes of Wales and Scotland, and finally back to Brighton for ‘a beer and a bag of hot doughnuts’.

Using Google Maps, he calculated that if he walked 13 miles a day, staying off roads where possible, the route would take roughly seven months to complete. He would sleep in a two-man tent but he budgeted for the occasional hostel on nights when the weather was particularly bad.

In all, he budgeted £5,000 for the entire trip, including kit and a daily allowance of up to £20, which he raised through a combination of crowdfunding and drawing on his savings.

Telling his mother was nerve-racking. But to his surprise, she supported him, after asking one question: ‘You’re really sure that this is the thing that’s going to make you feel better?’ It was.

Tyler was far from an exemplary explorer. He carried only a tent, a sleeping bag, a waterproof clothes bag (which he used as a pillow), two tops, a fleece, some socks and a compass (which he never used), plus a spare phone to keep in touch with his mother. His rucksack was otherwise filled with bread and packets of fruit and nuts from Lidl. He decided to buy one meal a day in a pub or café from his daily budget: ‘If I hadn’t eaten enough I’d feel it, and if I ate too much I’d feel it.’

His training was lacking, to say the least. ‘I could have [trained] a lot better but it wasn’t important to me. Probably, if I had, I’d have given myself reasons not to [go].’

The walk got off to a rocky start. On 27 June 2016 he set off, walking 10 miles out of Brighton to Worthing, but at the end of the day he was in such agony from his lack of training that he got drunk with a pub-manager friend.

The following day, after crashing overnight in the pub, he was too hungover to walk anywhere. He persevered, but those early weeks were a strain. The first 800 miles took him 82 days, much longer than planned, and by the time he reached the Severn Bridge and crossed into Wales, the weather turned.

‘I was constantly wet,’ he remembers. ‘I’d put wet clothes on in the morning and I’d be freezing, and I’d smell damp and of mould.’

By now, his tent was in need of repair and his mood was low, the setbacks mounting. ‘Bad weather, sore feet, stones in my boots, not knowing where I was half the time, the wind, going to the loo outside...’ And yet with every challenge, he became more confident.

‘When things go wrong and you come out the other side, you learn something about yourself,’ he says. ‘I thought to myself, “I can get annoyed by this or accept it.” It was hard to do, but I did it and it made me feel more dogged. I remember thinking, “Wow! Not many people could put up with this.”’

One standout moment came in October, four months in. He had to cut through the town of Pembroke to continue his route on a coastal path and, after pitching his tent for the night in a clearing, he went off to treat himself to a toffee apple from a local shop. When he returned, absolutely everything had been stolen: sleeping bag, clothes, maps, spare phone.

Despairing and angry, he found a bed for the night in a local pub – and to his astonishment, a local woman, who had got wind of the theft via Facebook, spotted the stolen camping stuff in a bush near her house. She collected Tyler, drove him there and he recovered everything. ‘The power of a tight-knit community is a beautiful thing,’ he says.

It was just one of many acts of unexpected kindness he encountered – like the time in the Brecon Beacons when a shop assistant in a camping store gave him a free display tent to replace his broken one, after he shared his story. ‘I found this astounding,’ he says. ‘I began the walk thinking people are just looking out for themselves. I had a certain level of mistrust of people. But I learnt to accept help or a place to stay, or dinner.’

It was this human kindness that kept him going, and kept him optimistic.

Physical feats brought moments of elation too, like the day he reached the top of Ben Nevis. ‘I remember thinking, “I’ve come so far,”’ he says. ‘It wasn’t just the mountain, it was symbolic of me. It was the culmination of my journey, in every way.’

He had a similar sense of accomplishment on the South West Coast Path. ‘[I still remember] the feeling of the wind and the sound of the sea, which for the most part was all I could hear,’ says Tyler. ‘Everything felt completely stripped back. I was on my own in this natural setting and I felt reset.

‘I realised everything had been here before and would be here for long after me. I felt insignificant but in a good way, a way that made me wonder at it all rather than making me feel small.’

His 3,000-mile journey allowed much time for reflection. He finally completed the challenge in February 2018, some £3,000 over budget and more than a year later than planned. The walking itself took six months longer than he’d calculated (partly because he decided to stay with people he met for a couple of days at a time), plus he took a six month hiatus in the middle to take part in a BBC documentary to raise awareness around mental-health issues.

By the time he finished, much had changed. He not only felt different, but he looked different too – significantly more muscular and roughly two stone lighter.

On the morning of 12 February, Tyler’s family and a gang of friends joined him for the last six-mile stretch from the seafront at Peacehaven to the finishing line in Brighton. ‘It felt like I was home,’ he says.

‘The most important thing I’ve learnt from the walk is that I have to be kind to myself. I’m going to have highs and lows forever, so when I’m low I have to treat myself with the same love and compassion I would anyone else who feels that way.’

Today, life is very different. He has settled in Brighton with his girlfriend Jordan, whom he met in the city shortly after his trip. He now juggles two jobs – working for a friend’s restaurant business and consulting in social media. Staying busy helps to keep his mental health in check, he says – plus, he and Jordan are planning to travel through Canada, Iceland or New Zealand as soon as lockdown restrictions allow it.

His depression is under control but, he says, on the occasions when it does resurface, he is open about it. This, along with regular walks in his local area, has helped him stay on track, including during the pandemic. ‘We have the South Downs on one side and the sea on the other,’ he says. ‘We walk on the seafront a lot and I’m currently training for the Brighton Marathon.

‘I feel like the year I started the walk was a bit of a watershed year for mental health,’ he continues. ‘Every person I stayed with from Edinburgh to Brighton wanted to talk about their mental health. Everybody’s [experience] was different but they all wanted to talk about the same thing. It is less stigmatised.

‘My brother once told me, “Everyone is on the same team,” and it has taken me a while to see what he was saying but now I understand it.’

A Walk from the Wild Edge, by Jake Tyler, is published on Thursday (Michael Joseph, £16.99). Pre-order a copy at books.telegraph.co.uk

Exclusive extract from A Walk from the Wild Edge

Jake Tyler on his descent into depression and the phone call that saved his life

March 2016. In just the past month I’d thought of nine or 10 ways I could kill myself. I’d been living like a wounded animal for weeks, too hurt to move, begging to be put out of its misery. But despite obsessing about death, I honestly never thought I’d go through with it – at least, not until that morning.

My shift had ended early. Bethnal Green Road had been quiet, even for a weeknight, resulting in probably the most peaceful evening I’d seen at the Well and Bucket since I’d agreed to take over as manager eight months previously. It was typically a very busy haunt – located off the top of Brick Lane on the fashionable Shoreditch/Bethnal Green border. It was renowned for good food and good, interesting booze, and served as a landmark of sorts, a solid piece of London’s social history.

After over a decade spent slinging pints and mopping up vomit in Brighton’s thriving but slightly mucky bar scene, I had been excited to be asked to oversee a venue with that much class and history. However, only a couple of months in, my initial enthusiasm had begun to fade, and my excitement about landing the ‘dream job’ was replaced by an intense, rotting feeling inside me that I didn’t understand.

Something was happening to me. And what terrified me the most was that I didn’t know how to fix it.

That night, after ushering out the last few stragglers, I cashed up and joined my staff for a post-shift drink. We congregated in our usual spot – on the side of the bar beneath three large Victorian portraits with human skulls superimposed over the faces. I sat there for hours, silently knocking back can after can of Camden Hells, half-listening to the gossip about customers, friends and current flings, staring at the paintings. They had a macabre quality, and looking at them made me feel closer to death, in a way that was more comfortable than it should have been. I looked towards the ceiling, picturing my room on the fourth floor, and realised that I felt no sense of comfort in doing so.

My bosses hated the idea of me living above the pub, and for good reason – [there was] no clear divide between my job and any sanctuary. My room was a truthful reflection of how I viewed myself – cold, bare and void of any charm or personality. Waking up in that room every day made me feel like the lowest of the low; lacking even the most basic self-respect to keep it habitable. My hygiene routine had run aground a few weeks previously, and slumping into bed without showering at the end of the night was now a regular thing. Looking into a mirror for longer than a second was starting to torment me, and running my tongue across my teeth felt like licking the felt on an old pub pool table. I was in poor shape, in every conceivable way. And I had never felt so alone.

I thought I had to avoid being found out at all costs and, whenever I felt this way, I buried it, [but] never deep enough to cover it up completely, so when the working day was over and I was by myself, the feelings re-emerged.

I’d always felt that there were two versions of ‘Jake’. Version one is confident, engaged, talkative, has the guts to take on just about anything; version two is quiet, unable to think straight and unsure of who he is. I was ashamed of the second version of me, and I carried that shame around with me like a bag of rocks. Surrounded by what I saw to be relentlessly confident people all of the time, my lack of consistency was a source of intense embarrassment, and I used so much of my energy trying to hide it.

[Even so] I never once considered that it could be described as a ‘mental health’ issue. I was convinced that what was going on inside my head was specific to me, a personality malfunction. The thought of seeking help from a doctor never entered my mind.

Finally calling it a night with my staff, I locked the pub and climbed the stairs to my room. As I lay on my bed, a fog swam through and occupied every corner of my mind. I spent a few glazed-over moments just staring at the end of the bed. The beer-stained shirt and jeans I’d peeled off lay there, and I winced, knowing that despite that they were still my cleanest clothes and that I’d have to wear them again the next day.

Across the room was the window I smoked out of. I used to like sitting there at night, listening to the busy sounds of east London, out of view of everyone on the street below. As I lay staring at it, sadness engulfing me, I realised this was it. The pain I felt was so deep I convinced myself it would be impossible to recover. I would never be happy again. In that moment, there was only one way I could see to end the pain.

I focused on the window so intently that everything around it faded to black, and I felt a chill run through my veins. It was over, I knew that. The chill turned into heat and shot so much adrenalin through me I thought I would throw up. In a bid to calm myself before I stood up, I took a breath and began counting down from 10.

Somewhere in between unconscious survival instinct and the conscious understanding that my life hung in the balance, I saw her face. Without even thinking about it, I reached for my phone, opened my contacts and found her name: Mum.

‘Hello, stinker,’ she said. I could almost see her scrunching up her nose, a playful glint in her eye. It felt as if my heart was breaking.

‘Hi,’ I said. Deep, rasping, broken.

‘Jake? Are you all right?’ Crying. Breaking. Shattering.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ I stuttered.

Silence.

‘I’m really worried… I’m going to hurt myself.’ I was sobbing.

It’s become very common for people to suggest that you ‘talk to someone’ if you’re struggling with your mental health. While this is good advice, sadly it’s not always that easy.

The pressure to be clear about what’s going on in your head and to communicate your pain so that someone else understands is one of the reasons so many people struggle to open up. What you are feeling is disjointed and jarring and nothing makes sense. You feel that no one else could possibly understand, and so you put it off, assuming you can’t be helped.

What I learned in that moment on the phone with my mum is that opening a door and sharing your mind with another person isn’t about seeking answers, it’s about no longer being alone in your pain. Letting my mum in somehow made the load lighter. Her love and concern forced their way through the fog, squeezing and weaving, creating a chink of light bright enough for me to see what it was I was considering and to question whether it really was the answer. No doubt about it – that phone call saved my life.

Abridged extract from A Walk from the Wild Edge, by Jake Tyler. 

Disclaimer: We cannot provide any expert advice on mental health. If you or someone you know are affected by the issues discussed here, call Samaritans on 116 123, or visit samaritans.org