MIND MATTERS
One in four of us will experience mental illness at some point in our lives – so why is there still a stigma around asking for help? As that starts to change, three women share their brave and honest stories…
Overcoming mental illness
‘I’ve learnt there is always a way to feel better’ For many years, grief threatened to drown Lisa Richards until she found a new mindset, which has brought her the courage to face the future.
Iwas 28 when I had a breakdown. I remember waking up one morning and feeling so low that I couldn’t see to the end of the day. I’d just returned home from a wonderful round-the-world trip, but it was as if a dark cloud was pressing down on me, blocking out everything else. had a recurring image of being on a tightrope; not knowing how I got there or how I was going to get off. I was alone and vulnerable in the middle of this wire across a big cavern, and although I was tense and paralysed with fear, I couldn’t help glancing down into the black abyss below.
Looking back, I can see that this was always likely to happen. As a teenager, I saw my mum suffer with clinical depression and, when I was 19, she tried to kill herself. The brain damage she inflicted by taking a cocktail of drugs and alcohol meant she effectively died that day. Mum left a big hole in all our lives that
no one seemed willing or able to talk about. Somehow, my family carried on almost as if nothing had happened. We didn’t know how else to deal with it.
I never considered taking my own life. After all, I had seen the damage that it could do. But I was in such anguish that I couldn’t think straight. For years, the pressure of suppressing thoughts had been building and, that day, it truly felt like I would explode. My dad urged me to see my GP and I had counselling and was put on antidepressants. Two weeks later, I came off them. They were making me ill and masking my feelings. What I needed to do was talk – and with the help of my psychotherapist, I was able to learn about my emotions and feel brave enough to confront them.
As the years went on, I was well enough to lead a normal life. I met my husband and had a son. But just a few months after George was born, my father got cancer and died soon afterwards. The loss of Dad – the constant who’d always been there – was a huge shock. I tried to keep going, throwing myself into work and motherhood, but the grief loomed large. I was suppressing my emotions, just as I had been before. My husband and friends were a huge support – yet the unresolved grief was like a heavy stone on my back.
My father’s death was the first of a series of bereavements. In 2011, Mum died, followed by my grandmother. Then my mother-in-law passed away and my husband was made
redundant. As my stress grew, I felt increasingly mentally exhausted, struggling to be a good mum as well as manage my job.
During this time, I tried every therapy I could, from counselling and self-help books to yoga. Slowly, balance returned, but the grief remained. Then, in July 2017, I came across a programme called the Grief Recovery Method.
The idea is to recognise the most common myths surrounding grief – from ‘time heals all wounds’ to ‘be strong for others’ – and to push them aside, focusing on your own experience of grief. At the end of the course, I had to write a letter detailing how I felt about my losses. On to those pages, I poured 30 years of emotion, and when I read it aloud, I felt a huge sense of relief. I had finally made sense of my feelings and felt ready to move forward.
Up on my tightrope of anxiety and grief, I’d always felt frozen, like I couldn’t move for fear of falling. I knew there was a way forward, but I was never brave enough to find it. Yet by taking those first few shaky steps, I had moved towards the future. I learnt that you don’t have to wrestle with feelings on your own, and that there’s always a way to feel better.
Now, if someone asks me how I am, I never just say ‘fine’. I answer honestly. It has made such a difference to me. For the first time in many years, I feel happy, self-aware and thankful for what I have.
‘The unresolved grief was like a heavy stone…’ LISA
‘OCD will always be a part of me’ Since childhood, Anna Palmer had struggled with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder until it took over her life. She explains how she learnt to resist her fears.
We’ve all experienced that feeling when our stomachs flip. It’s a stab of worry, the sudden thought that we may have forgotten to do something. Most people are able to rationalise their fears. They can cast the anxiety aside and let the doubts float away. But as someone with OCD, my own thoughts can feel like a runaway train. I’m the engine and my worries are a never-ending line of carriages behind me, racing faster and faster out of control.
There are many different forms of OCD. Mine is called Pure O and is based around intrusive thoughts. It tortures the person with dark notions that they have done or might do something awful, or that terrible things will happen – like convincing yourself you’ve left the hair straighteners on, and that the whole street will burn down if you don’t go home and turn them off. The only way to relieve this feeling is to fix the situation no matter what.
As a little girl, I went through a period of bad separation anxiety, and would leave school trips early. It was assumed I was homesick. But the real reason was that I needed to be with my parents. I thought that if I wasn’t there, they were going to die. Throughout my teenage years, these feelings continued. I was often convinced that I had HIV – a very common OCD worry – and I grew up thinking that I’d die before I was 20.
I was officially diagnosed in 2013, at 38. My OCD comes in spurts, and I am often able to tick along with it, going to work and taking my children to school as normal. My mum and my husband have always been a huge support. I’ve been married to my husband for 17 years, so he knows the triggers inside out – sometimes better than I do.
However, there have been times when my condition has taken over my life. At its worst, OCD made me believe that I’d put a bomb in
a friend’s birthday card and posted it through her door. I continued to think I had HIV, and on one occasion, went out at 3am to buy my son a new toothbrush because I couldn’t be certain that I hadn’t used his by mistake.
Yet even when the OCD was at its worst, I tried to shield the children from it. I didn’t want them to be affected by my condition.
My OCD will always be there; it’s a part of me. But with the help of antidepressants, CBT and my weekly anxiety support group through the charity OCD Action, I’m learning to manage it.
For me, it helps to visualise my OCD. He’s often a big red ball of tangled string, jumping up and down angrily, screaming, desperate to be heard. Sometimes he’s sly, pretending that he’s only trying to help. Each time I ignore him and don’t let him win, a little bit of him unravels, so he gets smaller. My victories reduce him.
I’ve stuck up motivational quotes in my kitchen. The phrase ‘don’t let fear of what could happen make nothing happen’ is particularly poignant. There have been opportunities I’ve avoided because I’ve been worried about the outcome. Now I realise that no one can predict the future. As an NHS director of mental health, Mandy Stevens thought she was immune to developing serious problems – then depression hit.
Ifell into my career almost by accident. At 16 and desperate for work, I got a job as a cleaner in a psychiatric hospital. To begin with, I was terrified. I’d grown up thinking it was a place full of ‘lunatics’. But I quickly abandoned these initial perceptions, discovering that I really loved the job.
I became a healthcare assistant, trained as a nurse, worked on a crisis response team and spent eight years as a community psychiatric nurse before becoming a matron. I worked on dementia wards, acute inpatient wards and with patients who had conditions such as schizophrenia. For the past 10 years, I have been in different director roles. I would have said I knew everything about mental health – until it affected me.
In October 2016, I was talking to my boss when, out of nowhere, a tear rolled down my cheek. As I started talking about my feelings, the clinician in me felt a pang of concern.
That night, I did a psychometric test for depression. As I looked through the list of symptoms, I realised how many applied to me. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I’d been cancelling social engagements. My score revealed moderate depression.
In the past, I’d had a couple of mild to moderate depressive episodes, and had seen a private psychiatrist, so I rang her for an appointment. But within a week I was having suicidal thoughts. I felt totally helpless.
I hid behind meetings and emails, covering up my suffering while depression told me I was rubbish at my job and that my family didn’t care about me. When my psychiatrist asked me how my mum and sisters would feel if I killed myself, I remember shrugging.
‘At my worst, I believed I’d posted a bomb through a friend’s door’
‘No one is immune – it can come from nowhere’
My psychiatrist told me to contact my NHS crisis response team, who wanted me to come to hospital, but I refused. On the Monday, I dragged myself to work, but that afternoon, I had what I can only describe as a breakdown, as though the whole inside of me had shattered. There was nothing left; it was a black emptiness. A lot of suicides are impulsive and happen when people feel this way. I knew if I didn’t get help immediately, I’d get in my car and kill myself. I rang the crisis team, who told me again to come to hospital. This time, I didn’t argue.
I stayed in hospital for three months. For the first few weeks, an internal battle raged in my head. The depression urged me to kill myself, but the clinician in me knew that I’d recover. I’d make deals in my mind, promises not to kill myself until the doctor had seen me, until my mum had visited, until after I’d had my morning coffee. It was the only way to manage the bleakness.
At my worst, I couldn’t walk, eat or talk properly. I wasn’t changing my clothes, washing or cleaning my teeth. My family didn’t know how to cope. They’d seen me as a positive senior health professional, now they’d visit and I’d sit and cry.
It took time to recover – months of psychotherapy, medication and mindfulness. The care I received was exceptional, yet as the depression lifted, I began to experience anxiety and panic attacks. I was no longer suicidal, but I felt constantly on edge. But as time passed, I was able to challenge the negative thoughts, to take control and remind myself that the dark would pass.
In January 2017, I was discharged from treatment, and I returned to work in May. I may never know what triggered it, but I now have a greater insight into the problems of my patients and the terrible suffering of depression.
I’m finally back to the Mandy I used to be. No one is immune to mental illness – it can affect anyone at any time. But in the hardest hours, we must all hold on to any strand of positivity. There is always hope.