Leela's Story

Leela has always been a passionate advocate for Mullets for Mental Health. She took part in 2021 having gone through a super challenging lockdown and rocked her mullet – her, “dorky hairstyle” for her Dad. 

I became involved with the Mullets campaign in 2021 when we were in COVID. We were locked down in Melbourne and I saw the Mullets for Mental Health campaign on FB and thought it looked cool.  

I sort of thought about it for a few weeks and I was like, I could do that.? 

Growing up I lost both my uncle and father to suicide in a short time frame and that was obviously really hard.  

Mental health was a big thing. My dad had bipolar, depression and anxiety. And I come from a pretty big family - there were eight of us. Now it’s just mum now and six kids.  

I was the kind of person that bottled things up too much. Our family didn’t really talk about our feelings, which carried on through adulthood. For a very long time after my dad passed, I was bottling it up without realising, and then going through this kind of vicious cycle of feeling really unwell and depressed.? I was a lot younger at the time, so didn’t really know the best way to manage my mental health and address the difficult feelings associated with such a hard experience.   

After losing my Dad, the effects intensified, and I started to realise that I wasn’t doing okay.  

It took me a while to acknowledge that properly. I would get to points where I'm like, OK, I need to get help – I'd go and get it, feel better and then it would kind of be this weird cycle where I think I'm OK again and so I wouldn`t take the next step. I’d then fall into old patterns by not addressing things, and my mental health would take a dive again. I feel like that happened about three or four times.  

"My biggest hopes for the future of mental health would be integrating mental health services into school." 

When I was in school, mental health support wasn't really integrated in the system very well at all, and no one really used those services like that. It might be different now, but that’s how I remember it. 

Asking for donations and raising awareness about Black Dog Institute and their research and support services is also super important for me as well. I loved rocking my mullet – it's such a dorky hairstyle and personal like my dad. He used to always nickname me ‘Big Dork’, and so it reminds me of that. And I was like, I am a dork, and I'm gonna rock this hairstyle.  

It was kind of a bit special, I guess, in a way to me. And yeah, it was kind of different, out there, which is sort of like me as well.  

"It does start that conversation where I'll go, “Yeah I have a mullet because,” and then you talk about fundraising and people are like aww, that's really special.  

I’d encourage anyone that would like to support Black Dog Institute to open up conversations and raise funds for mental health, because a lot of people my age do deal with poor mental health, or have been indirectly affected by mental health.  
 
I think everyone I know has some sort of mental health condition, or symptoms, you could say.? 

And I think it's important,  for people to get on board or if you're not willing to cut a mullet, you should definitely support someone doing it.?