‘I would stay up at night and write

I CAME from a very loving family with supportive and generous parents and a sister. I lived in comfort and had friends. But, as a teenager, I was also living with depression which at times left me feeling suicidal.

I started to suffer from depression when I was around 11, although I didn’t realise that was what it was at the time.

It was triggered by a period of very ill health when I was confined to my house with glandular fever and unable to go to school for a couple of months. It was a really difficult time for me – I felt isolated from my new school and missed out on building friendships.

I started to feel really isolated and that I didn’t belong anywhere. The more alone I felt, the more I wanted to retreat into myself and the worse the isolation got. It affected every part of my day.

I ate a lot of bad food to make myself feel better and so gained a lot of weight and felt really low about my appearance. I would stay up at night and write lists of all the things I hated about myself.

Being around people was so tiring because I felt like I had to put up a front. My family knew that I was depressed, and feeling lonely, but whenever they spoke to me about it I would put a brave face on and tell them I was fine.

I didn’t want to burden them with how I was feeling because I didn’t want to upset them. But the reality was I feeling increasingly more depressed.