At 50, Mo had everything he'd worked toward.
Three decades of study and experience — psychology, exercise physiology, corporate wellbeing consulting. He'd just been headhunted as a director at the largest Employee Assistance Program provider in the country. The very organisation built to support people through their darkest moments.
Eight months later, he was in fetal position on his bedroom floor, crying, unable to move — and quietly making a plan to end his life.
"The brain chemistry at the time was absolutely shocked," Mo reflects. "I was spending 65 hours a week caring for others. I was not caring for myself."
This is not an unusual story. But it is a rarely told one.
The Trap of Being the Helper
There's a particular cruelty in the collapse of someone who has spent their career supporting others. Mo had studied psychology at 21, spent years as a corporate wellbeing consultant, and dedicated himself to the prevention of workplace injury and psychosocial harm — long before those terms were common.
He was, by every measure, someone who understood mental health better than most.
And yet, when the micro traumas accumulated across three decades — a difficult business partnership, redundancies, value clashes in corporate environments — he found himself unable to apply that knowledge to himself.
"I kept telling myself I could deal with it," he says. "I had always pivoted. I had always found a way through. What I didn't realise was that every time I got through something, I was also ignoring myself more."
This is the catch 22 of resilience that doesn't get talked about enough. The more capable you are of pushing through, the more you risk pushing past the signals your body and mind are sending.
What the Research Tells Us — and What Mo Lived
Burnout is not simply tiredness. It is a state of chronic emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion that fundamentally alters how we think, make decisions, and connect with others. Research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare consistently identifies men aged 45–64 as a high risk group for suicide — not because they are more vulnerable by nature, but because they are least likely to seek help.
Mo's experience maps directly onto this. He was at the peak of professional credibility, surrounded by the language and frameworks of mental health — and still, the moment he needed support, he had almost no pathway to ask for it.
"I was made redundant while I was in that state," he says. "I just had shut down. Totally shut down."
The Three Things That Pulled Him Through
Mo doesn't frame his recovery as a single moment of clarity. It was a process — messy, incremental, and built on three foundations:
1. Accepting he needed help. Seeing his GP. Getting a mental health plan. Starting therapy. For someone who had spent a career delivering these exact resources to others, this required a dismantling of identity. "Here I am, in the space helping people, having to now..." He pauses. "It was a whole shift."
2. Refusing victim mode. Mo makes a careful distinction between self compassion — which he champions — and victimhood, which he consciously rejected. "I was a survivor if anything. Never a victim. Never." This is not about minimising what happened. It's about choosing the frame through which you rebuild.
3. Reframing the experience. This is perhaps the most powerful tool in Mo's toolkit. "Don't let that define who you are," he says. "Reframe around it, and then use all that who you are to slowly rebuild."
Thirteen years on, Mo is strategic operational lead at Happiness Co Foundation, a mentor at Momentum Revolution men's workshops, and one of the most sought after voices in psychosocial wellbeing in WA.
The Question That Changes Everything
Near the end of his conversation on the Roadblocks, Risks & Resilience podcast, Mo's host Paul offers a reframe that has become something of a mantra:
What if it happened for us, not to us?
Mo's response is immediate: "I wouldn't change it for the world. But boy oh boy, it was horrific."
That tension — between the pain of the experience and the purpose it unlocked — is at the heart of what genuine resilience looks like. Not the Instagram version. The real one.
If you're currently in a place where the floor feels very close, please reach out. Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636. Lifeline: 13 11 14.