Couple turned their traumatic high school ‘torture’ into a social enterprise
Chris was bullied so badly in high school he was on the brink of taking his life, now he’s helping teens avoid the same fate.
“My life at high school was torturous,” explains Chris Glebatsas, co-founder of new skincare brand, unlabelled.
“Every recess and every lunch I’d be faced with the same group of bullies. I was the ‘fat kid’, I was the ‘nerd’, I didn’t fit in. Also I think everyone else knew I was gay before I did. I was picked on relentlessly.”
It all came to a head for him when his thoughts started turning suicidal.
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“It got to a point where I couldn’t deal with it any more,” he shared. “I’d thought through what I was going to do and I planned it all.”
Then he made one choice that saved his life — he reached out to his mother and asked for help.
“I went to her one night and explained what was happening to me. She took me on a road trip with just me and her, to try and get my headspace back to a healthy place.”
It was a decision that helped at the time, but Chris wasn’t to realise how deeply his high school bullies had affected him until, years later, when a business dispute meant that he was once again dealing with somebody very relentlessly aggressive.
This time, it was his husband and unlabelled co-founder, Anthony McDonough, who saw the changes in Chris’s behaviour even two years after the incident.
“I reached out because I noticed that while I had moved on from this business situation we were having, and I wasn’t reliving it, Chris couldn’t even sit down and watch an episode of Law & Order,” explains Anthony.
“Any show with revenge or legal issues involved turned him into a complete mess. He would have nightmares every night. It got to the point where I had to speak to him and say ‘Chris, there’s something wrong’.
“He said, ‘yes, I need help.’”
Chris soon realised that getting professional help was a turning point for him. He saw a psychologist who found that he had PTSD from all the trauma he experienced in high school.
“Now I’m on the opposite side of it I can see that if I hadn’t of had the opportunity to speak to a professional, or hadn’t found the courage to be ask for help on those two occasions, I wouldn’t be here today,” Chris says.
With Anthony also no stranger to schoolyard bullied, who teased him for being gay before he even realised he was himself, the couple used their experiences to inspire unlabelled — a skincare social enterprise donating 100 per cent of their profits to the Black Dog Institute, QLife, Headspace and Kids Helpline.
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They’re also using their product labels and advertising as a way to show teens, like their 18-year-old daughter, that being different is amazing. They’re bringing light to all sorts of identity issues — from body image, bullying and LGBTQIA+ issues — that can lead to youth suicide.
Oh, and the products are natural, vegan, cruelty-free, Australian made and the bottles are 100 per cent recyclable.
“I want kids to be able to have the words to say ‘I need help’,” says Chris.
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