COTY is between Bressie and Bruton for me.
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Broke out a pair of glasses for the occasion 
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Here’s a news story from 2013:
Bressie has opened up online about his mental health issues.
In a heartfelt blog post the singer admitted that he has struggled with General Anxiety Order.
*He says he first started showing symptoms a few years ago and nearly fell out of his chair when he was diagnosed. *
His first panic attack came while filming an episode of the Voice, apparently, which he says understandably wasn’t the ideal place for it.
The former gaelic football and rugby player say he was able to get a hold on the condition by taking up long-distance running.
*The 32 year old hopes that by opening up, he can encourage more people to seek help for mental health problems. *
He said he encourages anyone from the bottom of his heart to speak about it. Get it out there. The more people that do this the less stigma attached to the condition.
If people become cynical and negative towards you, he says they don’t deserve your friendship.
How does this stack up with the claims in the article?
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Voice star Bressie has revealed being on the hit RTE show left him with crippling anxiety.
The 32-year-old singer said the fame that came with the success of the first series left him having palpitations.
He spoke out on RTE Radio One’s John Murray Show with hopes of encouraging others in the same situation to get help.
Bressie said: “It was relatively recently and I’m quite open about it. It’s something that for too long has been stigmatised in this country. People assume anxiety and stress are the same.
“But anxiety is all-consuming – it takes over your life and it doesn’t pick its victims. Often people will say, ‘But
everything is going well,’ but that doesn’t make a difference really.”
Bressie added he first felt the symptoms when he became the hottest new property in Ireland as a coach on The Voice.
He said: “For me it was when the show started I think. I started realising I had lost a bit of my anonymity and it just
came on.
“With anxiety there are massive issues with sleeping. You have palpitations in situations especially if you are doing live television.
“And I said to myself, ‘That’s the kind of person I am, I’ve got to learn to control it’.”
Bressie said it was getting back into physical exercise that helped him manage his condition as he had missed it since he gave up his rugby playing to make a go of his first band The Blizzards.
He said: “Other people don’t learn to control it and they take up the wrong way and go down the wrong route with it.
“But that was one of the main reasons I got into the triathlon training. I felt that was a really good thing because I missed that physical challenge I had when I played rugby.
“That’s a big void in my life so I started doing triathlons and it really helped. But then again once I came out and talked about it I started realising that everybody I know is going through this but they are hiding it.
“And I think it is ridiculous that you have to hide something like this.”
Bressie said that although he didn’t take medication, he had been considering it.
And even though he didn’t experience full on panic attacks he could never settle and relax.
He explained: “I went to the point where I was considering it but I figured I had to kind of manage it.
“ I didn’t get full on panic attacks – whereas I have friends who wouldn’t be able to breathe.
“I wouldn’t get that, I would just get palpitations.
“And I could never sit down and turn on the TV and watch it. I could never relax.
“People who would have known me before would realise that was not me at all.”
Great work, he can’t keep up with the lies and bullshit he has spouted.
This needs to be exposed in the public media.
Read the above, and now read this passage from his speech to Oireachtas:
Some days I would sit in my classroom on the verge of fainting as I hyperventilated and fought for air while my teachers continued to teach the class, oblivious to the fact that one of their students was in the midst of a living nightmare. I spent so many of my school days praying that some of our teachers may talk about this, or just say something so I didn’t feel so isolated and terrified. They never did.
+1
TFK can be at the heart of the demise of his career for 2016. The fact that he’s looking for schools to fork out up to 4 figures for him to ‘talk’ shows the type of person he is.
Has he ever said he suffered with depression? There are no indications of it in anything he said - it is all about anxiety.
Anxiety can be a cunt but depression is a whole new ball game.
He specifically says in his 2013 articles that he never suffered from a panic attack, that he just got anxious after the first series of the voice.
He also specifically says it was a new “condition” and "People who would have known me before would realise that was not me at all.”
Yet now this has morphed into his teenage years being ruined by “Crippling insomnia, harrowing panic attacks and incomprehensible self-harm dictated my life, all disguised behind a mask of normality that polarised the general lazy stereotype or label we associate with those with a mental health illness."
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At one of his cycle against suicide talks he talked about how he locked himself in his room and kept punching a wall until he broke his hand so he’d be admitted to hospital to get help.
So he either lied in his 2013 interview, or post his 2013 interview he saw the reaction and thought there might be more to gained to from it if his condition was a bit worse than what he initially described.
Shill
Fantastic detective work from The Runt here 
Great background work.
What’s the next logical step here ?
Twitter ambush?
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Right, I’ve gone back into the Google Cache and dug up the original blog post from March 2013 from his now (conveniently) defunct website. Here it is:
Greetings and apologies for lack of blogging recently. Not had a second to even scratch my arse last few weeks but now my new album is out, I can breathe a sigh of relief.
When I got the promo schedule in from my record label I knew then that I had a decision to make regarding a few personal issues I have dealt with over the last few years and whether I wanted to document them in the press or keep them private.
My decision was not an easy one to undertake as those who know me personally will tell you I am an extremely private person but after doing a moral type cost/benefit analysis I felt it was something I certainly did not feel I needed to hide behind and also something I felt could offer some form of strength and comfort to others who may be less inclined to speak about it due to the social stigma associated with the condition.
Excuse all the cryptic bullshtty opening paragraph but I wanted to first underline a few points relating to the subject matter of this blog.
Last Tuesday afternoon I sat in a bar in Dublin city centre to do an afternoon of print promo to promote the album with a few journalists who I had a fundamental element of trust in not to twist the nature of my interview into some tacky headline that I felt would belittle what is a very serious problem in contemporary western society.
Mental health is some what of a mis-understood word among the general population. It’s got a broad spectrum of conditions that all are equally difficult to treat and deal with. The statistics of those affected is growing at such a rate that its almost as common as a cold to hear of people suffering from depressive or anxiety type mental health issues yet society still in general choses to almost ignore it as its the easier option.
I feel if we are to become more accepting of the words “mental health” as a society we must first remove the stigma that leeches onto it currently.
How am I affected by this?
**Just under two years ago I started illustrating asthma type symptoms where I would find it massively hard to catch my breathe. At the time I was generally quite a fit active guy and over all felt very happy as everything career wise was starting to move in a positive direction for me. I decided to go to my local GP as the breathing issues became more frequent and also more aggressive so much so that I started to faint and occasionally collapse. I was scared shtless. I thought something was seriously wrong. When my doctor diagnosed me with General Anxiety Order I almost fell out of my chair laughing. I was so relieved that it was not something physically serious as I was one of those people who refused to accept anxiety as nothing only a bit of stress and nerves which we all suffered from occasionally. I could not of been more wrong.**
As the months progressed my condition worsened. I was a complete insomniac and had to take sleeping pills on a daily basis to get any form of sleep. It constantly felt that somebody was sitting on my chest and my stomach and it was utterly consuming.
In this period we were filming the live shows of The Voice and I remember specifically our presenter Kathryn asking the coaches a question regarding a performance we had just heard and as she started making her way over to me I suddenly felt this almost vice like grip around my neck and shoulders and my lungs refused to give me air. It felt like I was choking and for some reason Kathryn forgot to ask me a question and moved on. I had my first panic attack. Ideally, If I had a choice I would not of chosen live television as the stage for my first all out panic attack. I ran into my dressing room on the break and finally got my breathe back and splashed water in my face to calm down knowing I had to go back out on the cameras for another thirty minutes. The strange thing is live TV or live gigs do not for a second make me nervous so It was so strange having a panic attack in surroundings I am normally very comfortable in.
The next morning I decided something had to be done as I refused to let this irrational threat consume me anymore. I started different therapies including cognitive behavioral therapy and natural remedies all of which did not improve my condition. I knew I had to fight back against it or it would literally tear me apart. My next port of call in terms of tactics was to undertake a physical challenge. Since I retired from rugby to pursue music, there was a massive physical and competitive streak that I have innately had since a kid that disappeared from my life. This got me thinking. What if I decided to do a marathon or triathlon . Something that pushed me and made me focus on some kinda attainable goal outside music. So I got training. After a few weeks I noticed a massive improvement in my condition. I was starting to sleep. My diet was cleaner and ultimately my head started showing some signs of normality . The anxiety still existed but when it raised its ugly face I just put on a pair of runners and ran till it pissed off. This worked for me, it may not work for everyone but I am not here to offer solutions or give a lecture on what exactly mental health is.
I am here to tell my story and also to hopefully help others suffering with conditions such as anxiety or depression to come forward and talk about it. We are all human anxiety/depression is not biased when it comes to its subjects. Anyone can be affected by it .
My album’s subject matter is aimed firmly at what I went through but more importantly how I overcame and fought the devastating affects of anxiety.
I encourage anyone from the bottom of my heart to speak about it. Get it out there. The more people that do this the less stigma attached to the condition. If people become cynical and negative towards you, f*ck them. They don’t deserve your friendship. Your true friends and family will help you find ways of coping with it. I of course have received many overwhelming and emotional responses on twitter regarding my press interviews about this condition and I am so happy it was in the majority received this way. I also received many tweets calling me a “pussy” and told to “man up”. I expected as such and once again this is a side affect of the stigma surrounding mental health. Until you have experienced it or someone close to you has its hard to comprehend.
As the song on my album suggests , please don’t hide under it and mute yourself. Talk about it. It truly helps.
“you get what you pay for, when silence is your saviour.”
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Pull it together and tweet it to someone like broadsheet. Let them do the leg work from there and watch the sheep assemble
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I’m no fan of Breslin… In fact I detest the cunt… but is it plausible that he had to go through the process of opening up fully himself, bit by bit? Initially he opened up some bit and found compassion and humanity thereby giving him the courage to open up fully? I think he is certainly over playing/hyping up the situation but having done some work on myself you also can’t rule out the possibility of him opening up in stages. It aint easy to bear your sould to the world, pal… unless you are a psycotic, meglomaniac in it for fame and money.
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That blog post seems quiet open and frank.
What would be the issue in admitting that these issues affected him as a teenager?
