Its Time To Start a Conversation

Lets talk........ Mental Health

This article was originally going to take a very different direction.

The subject was supposed to be Covid, lockdown and the inevitable rising crisis in mental health, but no matter how I tried to put it together, it just wasn’t happening. I have always prided myself on being able to write about most things, even stuff I am not very knowledgeable on. Google is most definitely my friend and has proven invaluable when it comes to researching unfamiliar subjects. For some unknown reason though, I was uninspired, flat and unable to focus on what I wanted to put on paper. That is, until this morning.

This morning, I was lying in bed with a caramel macchiato, (thank goodness for Tassimo!), with Grace and Frankie on the telly in the background whilst I scrolled through facebook.

As with most facebook scrolling, I wasn’t really paying any attention to what I was looking at. It was the usual adverts, pointless memes and photos of peoples’ breakfasts, (I am ashamed to say I was one of those who put a photo of my breakfast on there on Saturday), when suddenly, I was stopped in my tracks by a terrifying statement.

‘It is projected that by 2030, mental health problems, (particularly depression), will be the leading cause of mortality and morbidity globally.’(www.mentalhealth.org.uk)

It was like a slap in the face.

The sudden realisation that I could throw facts, figures and anything else I liked at you, but it wouldn’t really make any difference was staggering.

You see, I know this intimately. I have spent most of my adult life struggling with mental health and what I know is that all the facts and figures and attempts at help make no difference when you are in the throes of an anxiety attack or desperately trying to drag yourself out of bed and all you want to do is pull the cover over your head and shut the world out.

The rising crisis is incredibly personal to everyone who suffers, and even with all the changes that have been made around the subject of mental health, it is an incredibly lonely and debilitating way of living.

We still don’t talk about it enough, so today, I want to start a conversation that really matters. To do that, I am going to share a little bit about me, and how mental health issues have impacted my life.

I’m Rebecca and I have lived most of my adult life with chronic anxiety, exhausting periods of depression and more recently, PTSD related anxiety. I’m learning with each day that passes that it's important that we talk openly about our mental health not just for ourselves, but so others know that they can talk too.

This is my story......

My mental health issues began at around 14 years old. As with most teens, puberty kicks in, creating immense mood swings and an inability to cope with even the most basic of situations without turning them into a huge drama.

For a long time, I assumed that the issues I experienced were just part and parcel of the atypical teenage angst we all deal with, but as I headed towards my early twenties and the birth of my first child, I began to realise that those feelings of despair, anxiety, panic and low mood were no longer just caused by me being overly hormonal, but were actually symptoms of something deeper.

At that time, as many people in their 40’s and older will remember, mental health was something that generally wasn’t talked about. It was considered inappropriate and would leave people quite uncomfortable. We were at the cusp of change in how openly people discussed their mental health, but we were still part of the generation of the stiff upper lip - keep calm, keep stum and bury it because nobody really wants you to talk about it.

I had an amazing family but was never in a position where I wanted to bring them in, not because I didn’t think they would listen but because like most of us who suffer with these issues, we don’t want to burden anyone else with them. We believe we can hide them and that maybe, if we do, they’ll go away on their own and even if they don’t, we can manage them better if we don’t say the words out loud.

They are our cross to bear and the longer we hold them tight to our chests, the more difficult it becomes to open your mouth and say those three little words – I need help.

Mine took its first really serious tumble after the birth of my first child. I had lost a baby at 23 weeks and within 8 weeks, was pregnant again. I hadn’t processed the loss of the first baby and was unprepared for the emotional toll carrying another child would take. I went from exquisite highs of ecstatic happiness to devastating lows that impacted every step of my pregnancy. The ensuing anxiety and fear that was a direct result of the loss took its toll, and I developed postnatal depression after his birth which left me heavily medicated and unable to bond initially with my new baby.

This encapsulated already serious doubts about my abilities as a new mother, and still has a direct effect on my confidence as a parent today, albeit nowhere near as seriously as it did then.

I went on to have another child 9 years later, and whilst this pregnancy was a very different one emotionally, due to concerns around his growth and then the introduction of an ICU crib during his birth, I once again developed postnatal depression and found myself medicated, but this time with a doctor who took the situation a little more seriously and put me forward for counselling.

Counselling is a very personal thing. If the individual in question isn’t right, it's unlikely to work, and unfortunately for me, my first experience of counselling was not a positive one in the sense that I struggled to connect with my counsellor. She was a lovely woman, and I believe a very competent counsellor, but we just didn’t connect in the way that I needed.

I shut back down again, put my walls back up and continued to pretend that everything was fine whilst I was in front of people.

Unless you have suffered with depression or anxiety, it's difficult to really explain how it feels. For me, it was and still can be debilitating.

For those who have never experienced anxiety, when an anxiety attack hits, the ensuing panic is horrific. I would feel pain shooting through my chest, experience palpitations and spent several occasions in my twenties hooked up to a heart monitor at the hospital before it was formally diagnosed as anxiety related.

My skin crawls as if it's covered with thousands of tiny creatures and I can feel heat emanating from underneath it, as if my insides are on fire. I hear my heart beating in my ear like a drum, the vibrations as intrusive as the sound and my head begins to pound not with pain but with the beat of my heart. The desperation is manic and completely disabling and the need to get away from wherever I am at that moment is immediate and all consuming.

Anxiety also manifests itself as an uncontrollable anger at times for me, again based in complete and total fear. It's difficult to recognise immediately, but when you have lived with it as long as I have, you begin to recognise the beginning of it, and you put coping mechanisms in place to help you manage it as best you can.

Depression hits me completely differently. Whilst anxiety was an almost temporarily manic state of being, depression was completely the opposite. It would start with low mood, and over a period of a few weeks I would sink until I hit the point where something as simple as cooking a meal became almost impossible. I am unmotivated, physically and emotionally exhausted, and couldn’t be bothered to do anything. Dishes can sit for several days, my hair will be scraped back into a bobble, and I come in from work, turn the telly on and don’t move to do anything other than go to the bathroom. Even then, I hold it as long as I can because the energy to move is almost too much. At my lowest point, I didn’t leave bed for a week. I couldn’t see the point. Other than drinking water, I lay and looked at my bedroom wall, not even having the energy to cry.

I don’t say this for sympathy but because for those who haven’t experienced mental illness, it's very difficult to comprehend the depths of its hold and just how hard it is to pull yourself away from it.

It becomes an almost comforting space in its familiarity. The pain is like an old friend and it's easier to embrace it and disappear into the darkness than it is to fight it. The overwhelming urge to lay down and let it completely envelop you in its entirety is paralyzing. The energy required to fight it is beyond anything you can imagine and takes time to develop.

I have had more occasions than I care to count where I have finally had to give myself a metaphorical kick up the ass and drag myself up or I knew I would never leave my bed. I sometimes wonder if I didn’t have my kids around if I would have just succumbed to it. Having my children has been a lifesaver for me because I have had to get on with it even when all I could think about was giving up. They have saved my life more times than I can say.

For years, I have bounced between doing okay and then spiralling, usually as a direct result of external influences that I have not been able to control.

Moving forward to today, I spent the last 18 months controlling my anxiety and depression with meditation, exercise, healthy eating and focussing on the right things. Unfortunately, those coping mechanisms stopped working and around 8 weeks ago, I found myself in the doctor's office again, shaking and crying and telling him I desperately didn’t want to go back onto medication but that I couldn’t manage it anymore. I had lost control.

The thing is, we don’t like to talk about the need for medication. I am the first one to avoid medication. I believe that a lot of things can be cured by exercise, diet, focus and lifestyle changes, but there is always a point at which you have to look seriously at the situation and say – ‘I cannot do this alone.’

The right thing for me at that moment was medication. It has allowed me to get everything back to a more balanced state and gives me the support that I need to get through each day whilst I work through the rest of the issues.

Even now, with everything we know and understand, there is a degree of ridicule attached to people who take medication for mental health issues. An aura of shame is still attached to admitting that you cannot cope on your own. For all that we have come forward leaps and bounds in the way we approach mental health, we are still almost prehistoric in the way we talk about it day to day. This makes asking for help when you are suffering extremely difficult.

The first issue is admitting that there is a problem because in today's world, why should there be? We have more than we have ever had and yet we are more disconnected from each other and society than we have ever been.

We are on the cusp of the biggest mental health crisis the world has ever seen and we still refuse to deal with it in the right way.

We refuse to open up and share our stories and yet, 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime, and 1 in 6 reports to the Doctor with a mental health disorder every week in the UK.

In 2022, over 703,000 people worldwide were recorded as having taken their own life. In the UK, around 115 people die by their own hand every week and 75% of those are male.

Even before the effects on mental health of lockdown and covid, we were seeing an almost apocalyptic rise in mental health issues impacting on every aspect of life for those who were suffering. The most debilitating element of this is the feeling that you cannot and should not talk about it and the worst feeling comes from knowing that someone that you care about is suffering in silence.

Just think, how would you feeling losing a family member because you suspected they were struggling, but you didn’t ask because you were worried about embarrassing them or yourself?

It's time to start those conversations, however uncomfortable or difficult they might be because you being uncomfortable is nothing compared to how difficult and desperately lonely your loved one's life may actually be. Even if you don’t suspect there’s a problem, creating an environment that is open to the conversation is a huge step forward and can be the difference between someone surviving, and someone giving up.

My name is Rebecca and I have mental health issues.

I live with them every day and finally have begun to accept that that’s okay. They are part of who I am, and they always will be but with every day, I get stronger and more able to cope with what life throws at me. It can make things tough, but it's also gives me an empathy and heart that many people lack. I am me and I am enough just the way I am.

I would love to hear your story.

Until next time.........