Month: Jul 2018

Under The Spotlight: My Emetophobia

~ Bee x ~ Leave a comment
emetophobia
ɪˌmɛtəˈfəʊbɪə/
noun
extreme fear of vomiting.
It’s ironic that I had planned on writing about my emetophobia today, as my mood has spiralled this afternoon and with it came an overwhelming amount of anxiety…. to the point I’ve just cooked and then thrown away two dinners because I convinced myself they weren’t cooked properly and were too high risk after just one mouthful…. I felt so pathetic not being able to fight the anxiety as I scraped them into the bin…

The emetophobia started creeping in when my anxieties developed at college. I became desperately afraid of vomit and anything to do with it – someone else being ill, myself being ill, someone on TV being ill, even people saying any permutation of the word that wasn’t ‘vomit’ or ‘being sick’ – any other slang term or reference could induce a complete sense of panic and leave me temporarily unable to function.

The emetphobia completely stole my life – I could barely socialise unless it was a completely safe environment and with people who I could trust. I couldn’t do what normal 17 / 18 yo’s did, like going clubbing, and my self-esteem was rock bottom. Nobody thought I’d be able to function normally again.

Another frustrating part about emetophobia is the fact that it induces anxiety and a symptom of anxiety is feeling sick, feeling sick further induces anxiety and makes the emetophobia worse and this is a vicious cycle which means it is hard to get any relief. This led to a variety of behaviours that were all grounded in this inherent fear:

  • If someone was sick on TV I would have to cover my ears and run out of the room until I was sure it was over. I probably looked extremely dramatic clutching my head and curling up in a ball on the stairs still trying to hide from the noise. Despite this we continued to watch medical dramas which, in hindsight, seems a little illogical, but I suppose works sort of like exposure therapy and we could use how strong my reaction was as a way to judge how far I’d come as I started coping better.
  • I had ‘safe’ foods that I knew wouldn’t make me ill and that is what I stuck to, being adventurous, even though I thoroughly enjoy different foods, was a great source of anxiety. I am so grateful that I can enjoy food again but, as today proves only to well, depending on my head space I can still be slightly too obsessive over ensuring high risk foods are properly cooked and haven’t gone off.
  • If I felt sick then I would sit up all night, until my body could no longer resist the exhaustion and fight off sleep. This is because my association with being sick is that it happens in the night – that was when I was sick more often as a child – so if I didn’t sleep then this couldn’t happen.
  • I became addicted to Polo mints because mint is commonly considered to reduce nausea. I could go through multiple packets in a day and, as I was popping them so frequently, had to take to breaking each one into quarters just to make a pack last a little longer.
    • I actually gave polo’s up as a present for my mum’s birthday one year when I was starting to overcome just how severe my phobia was and, to this day, I can’t eat Polo’s without feeling sick (definitely some irony in that). In saying that I have since switched to other brands of mints but my reliance on them does not go as deep, it is only on a really bad day to I find that I desperately need them, the rest of the time they are a ‘nice to have’.
  • I became obsessed with Gaviscon. This started because the GP could not work out a reason behind why I always felt sick. I would drink it straight from the bottle and in quantities greater than recommended, particularly before bed, and carry around sachets in case I was overcome by feeling more sick than normal when out. This behaviour I could justify wasn’t a problem because it was prescribed by a doctor. Again, this behaviour has diminished but it is still rare you will find me without a few sachets of Gaviscon in my bag and a bottle in the cupboard.
  • Digging my nails into my arm and stomach. Initially this started as biting on my knuckle and the pain gave some release to the feeling sick, I’m not sure when the biting became digging my nails in but I’m pretty sure it was because hurting my arm was easier to hide when I was sat in a lecture theatre or out for dinner, particularly from my parents. And I’m not going to pretend I have broken this habit; the scars on my arm, which remains littered with fresh marks during a bad week, prove otherwise.
  • Texting my mum. This is still my number one coping mechanism and must drive her crazy but because she once told me that she can tell that my behaviour differs when I’m genuinely ill and likely to be sick, I started asking her if I was ‘acting funny’ multiple times a day. I will still ring or text her from any situation to ask or just let her know I feel sick so that she can tell me that I won’t be. And thankfully this reassurance is now often the only thing I need to do so that I can control my anxiety.

The fact I managed to get to a point I could work in care with children and young adults for whom vomiting was something I would have to face is something I am both extremely proud of and, when I think about how bad I was, I am still surprised by – there was a point I don’t think any of us thought I would make it this far. I think it does help that, due to the nature of the life limiting conditions of the individuals, it was not a sort of sickness that I could catch and I don’t think I will ever be able to remain completely calm in the face of a stomach bug, but at least it no longer rules my life… except for on a bad day.

But the emetophobia is something I will always carry around with me, even though I’ve come so far, and will still creep up on me and take back control. Like a few weeks ago when a friend came round and said he’d been sick the day before, he wasn’t sure if it was a bug… so I am ashamed to say I followed him around and anti-bac gelled everything he touched when he wasn’t looking… I even threw the pen used away…

Bee x

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My Mental Health Story: The Beginning – School and College

~ Bee x ~ 1 Comment

So, how far back do we look to get to the beginning of my mental health story? I guess we should look at secondary school and college because that’s when there started to be a recognisable problem disrupting my life that I needed to do something about and was the first major period of challenge I faced in my mental health…

School:

I was extremely academic at school and heavily invested in extra-curricular opportunities – whilst working towards my GCSE’s I was also a Peer Supporter, English Prefect, Senior Prefect, Tutor Representative, Head of the Prom Committee and created a Peer Support Website that won the Princess Diana Anti-Bullying Award. I was always striving to be the best I could be and a lot of my anxieties and subsequent diagnoses are reflected in that attitude, the early signs of what was to come. I could never achieve highly enough, even the highest grade wouldn’t be enough because the score itself wasn’t perfect. And, in some ways, this served me well – I achieved a fair number of really good grades – but it is this unhealthy attitude that developed into all the things I still struggle with today. In hindsight, now we know what to look for, I guess a lot of the signs of Borderline Personality Disorder are apparent back then.

College:

This is where things began to get problematic. I went from a big fish in a small pond, so involved in school life that I was completely content and confident, to the tiniest of fish in the widest lake I had ever been in… new people, new subjects, new pressures put on us by the college, and the underlying fear of having less than a year to decide what to do with the rest of your life. And this is where I started to unravel.

The perfectionism I experienced at school was still there, but the environment didn’t allow me to flourish with it like school had. From a series of hypnoanalysis sessions, we established that the development of my anxiety disorder had a lot to do with a few key points:

  • The limited amount of extra-curricular opportunities meant my already unstable identity had nothing to be defined by. I was used to being known as the person who did everything, tried to help everyone and took on positions of responsibility. I was completely lost without them, although I didn’t realise it at the time, and it is certainly related to many of my BPD traits.
  • Without those positions of responsibility, I didn’t have a strong identity, but I also didn’t have as much opportunities to seek reassurance and do things to be liked. This, I am ashamed to say, has always been one of my biggest motivators with anything I do and is all due to my inherent fear of rejection – which I can confidently say I’ve struggled with for as long as I remember.
  • This fear of rejection goes hand in hand with a fear of control which, unbeknownst to me at the time, is one of the contributing factors that led to the most crippling mental health issues of my teenage years: Emetophobia – fear of vomiting.
    • I will dedicate the next post to my emetophobia because it is far too large a part of my life to give just a few lines

I didn’t have a normal teenage life. Particularly between ages 16 and 18 when the emetophobia and anxiety ruled my life. I could barely socialise and that triggered feelings of worthlessness. I couldn’t go to town clubbing or drink with my friends, I was hardly able to celebrate my own 18th birthday, let alone anyone else’s, which is devastating when you desperately want to be a part of it and your mental illness just won’t let you.

It was clear enough to everyone close to me that I wasn’t coping in the real world that my best friends have since admitted that they never thought I’d ever recover enough to make it to University. So, I guess making it is something to be proud of. I was determined to get better. I went to the doctors and asked for help, but they referred me to the Community Mental Health team who sent me to a counsellor for CBT and the patronisation of the ‘tell me where mummy and daddy live’ cliché she spouted angered and upset me in equal measures and I never went back. So, I googled and researched and eventually found another option to try – hypnoanalysis – and thankfully that got me to a place where I started to be able to cope a tiny bit better each week. But we can go into that another day.

As we started to see the changes – which mum and I partly judged in a completely scientific manner through a weekly trip to TGI Fridays after my session to see if my anxieties had reduced enough to allow me to begin to eat a bit more normally – I was able to pass my A Levels and accept my place at University and the next chapter of my life began. But I have never fully escaped the anxiety and, on a bad day, the emetophobia can be just as crippling now as it was then; learning to cope with them better and recovering from them are two very different things.

Read what happened next in My Mental Health Story here…

Bee x

Let’s Do This…

~ Bee x ~ Leave a comment

My hands are literally shaking as I write this… this means it is out there… for all I am open about my various mental health struggles, I’ve never put them into such a public domain before and that is petrifying. Add in what my diagnosis entails and the fear of rejection is getting more overwhelming with each word written…

I guess I first started struggling to noticeably struggle with my mental health at the end of Secondary School and going into college, around 16 years old, but in hindsight the attitudes and coping mechanisms developed long before this. At college it became crippling, my anxiety levels peaked and with it came emetophobia – the fear of vomiting. Many parts of my life completely stopped and I was sure I’d never get any semblance of a normal life again, but with a lot of hard work, hypnoanalysis and incredible family and friends I made it through and even made it to Uni… but we can talk more about that journey another day.

With University came a whole host of other issues, triggered by my desperation to live a ‘normal’ life and therefore not taking the time I needed to really recover from my anxiety disorder and decide what I wanted to do with my life, so I took the decision to leave and return home with the aim of going back when I knew what I really wanted to do.

Fast forward six years and my mental health issues never went away, they just got different. On a bad day my anxiety disorder and emetophobia can be utterly debilitating. But we’ll get to that. I ended up in an extremely unhealthy relationship and on antidepressants which I decided weren’t working and took myself off and this, in turn, led to me having seizures… I lost my licence, the job I loved and my independence, and after years of doctors and tests it turns out that they, too, are just another manifestation of my mental health and a diagnosis of Non-Epileptic Attack Disorder (NEAD) on 21st March 2018.

And after having been put back on anti-depressants which triggered a hypomanic phase (actually, that’s a funny story… I’ll tell you sometime), I was diagnosed on 16th April 2018 with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It’s been a whirlwind, it explains so much but creates so many more challenges, and there will only be more going forward with a caseworker and treatment still to come.

So that’s where we are, and why we’re here – I have been writing since before this started and I thought, why keep this to myself? BPD is such a stigmatised disorder, and so much more prevalent than people realise, but how will we change that stigma if no-one is willing to come forward and talk about it. So here I am – we can talk about how I got to where I am, and join me on my journey going forward as I start treatment and face whatever else life has to throw at me… Hopefully we can have some fun too!

Bee x