Leeds author documents how crisis of faith led to mental health decline - and how Coventry City helped him heal

By 15, his love of Coventry City was parked as he found God and began dedicating himself to Christianity. He worked as teacher in a church school and was also an Anglican minister, although the crisis of faith that would eventually descend upon him sent his mental health spiralling.

"The wheels started to come off my faith,” he said. “I had various experiences which made me question everything. It took about five years, it started off in 1980 and it was only in about 1984/85 that I realised it wasn't for me and I couldn't believe it anymore.”

1985 proved to be a wearing year, as his faith slipped away and his long-term relationship ended.

"A lot ended in 1985,” James said. “My career in a church school, my life as an Anglican minister, and then I had a huge hole in my life. My attachments had gone and I sought to plug the God-shaped gap with relationships, for which I was not in the slightest bit prepared. It's very difficult to replace God, the church and your partner in one person and you shouldn't really try.

"My own mental health started to go down when I started to doubt my Christian faith. I always thought there would be an end in sight, that I would get it back. I saw my identity disintegrating, that was the main thing. All my friends were Christians. I didn't know who I would be if I wasn't a Christian. I didn't know how I would live.”

James began suffering with severe depression and sought help from a psychotherapist, who introduced him to a range of coping mechanisms and therapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy.

"I was incredibly needy and turned to psychotherapy,” he said. “I went to see a psychotherapist and she was very, very good. I did psychotherapy with her for several years and it kept my spirit up. That helped to take some of the sting out of it.”

He insists the psychotherapist was a great help but the professional help is not the only factor he believes aided him on his journey to an improved mental state. In 1987, he went back to watching his beloved Coventry City and described the resumption of his love affair with the Sky Blues as a “breakthrough”.

"The real breakthrough came when I saw my beloved Coventry City, my first great attachment from the age of nine onwards, I saw Coventry actually win some matches,” he said. “The first overwhelming part of my life was going to Highfield Road, Coventry. They were in the FA Cup and happened to be against Sheffield Wednesday and then Leeds United. That took us to Wembley and it was Coventry City's first ever FA Cup final. That was the best therapy I had.”

Attachment is a consistent theme in the story of his life and attachment theory is a passion of his. It is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory concerning relationships between humans. It outlines that young children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development.

“My two great passions are attachment theory and Coventry City,” he said. “They were the two therapies that brought my life back around.”

James Adams is not his real name and is in fact a pseudonym under which he writes. Over the years, he penned stories about his own life and they have now been used to assemble a memoir exploring his psychological journey. In keeping with the anonymous writing, there are certain details within the book that are slightly adjusted but the words still very much reflect his life story.

"I started writing my stories down, I realised I had stories to tell,” he said. “I wrote hundreds and hundreds of stories about my life which eventually, 20 years later, came together to be the book I've written.”

The book is available from various retailers, including Amazon, now.