Channel 4 Hunted star turned to Buddhism to fight his crippling anxiety as cop

2022-10-15

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TV fugitive hunter Paul Cashmore has turned to Buddhism after suffering crippling anxiety during his time as a cop.

The star of Channel 4 ’s Hunted revealed he struggled with mental health problems after spending years putting himself in danger.

Paul, who recently split from S Club 7 star Tina Barrett, has opened up about the life-or-death situations in which he found himself while working in a specialist robbery squad with the Met Police – including running over a gunman who had fired at police.

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After finding a new career on Hunted, he has opened up about his crippling anxiety which led him to a complete lifestyle change and joining a Buddhist centre.

Paul said: “The trauma replays in your mind and I learnt to overcome it is how you learn to remap and reframe your mind. These things don’t go away and that’s when I started learning and meditating.

“It just shows it can happen to anyone. Even someone like me who from the outside was pretty fearless. People don’t believe me when I say I am part of a Buddhist centre, but I love it.

“I never thought I would be someone to struggle with my mental health. I was the captain of my rugby team, I was a confident policeman and I never thought in a million years that something like this would happen. It was tricky to deal with and massively hard, but I had made a huge decision I needed to fix it. I was begging for someone to press reset on my head.”

The dad-of-three joined the police at 21 and got selected for the robbery squad in London.

Paul said: “I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve been face on with an armed gunman, helping someone who had just been stabbed, talking a woman down from jumping off a building and almost getting stabbed by a needle in a drug house. Nothing really bothered me at the time. I was just focused on the job.”

After years of getting a rush from the adrenaline of being in dangerous situations, he revealed he reached breaking point after sitting with a dying stabbing victim – and the years of trauma came spilling out.

He said: “I went to the hospital with him and I could hear his family outside crying and wanting to see him. I felt so helpless and it sparked a feeling in me that I wanted to, and needed to do something to make a change.

“It hit me and knew something wasn’t right. I wondered what was happening and exacerbated it, and at that point I saw my GP. But I knew didn’t want to take medication. I wanted to deal with it myself.”

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