Tag: Depression

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