Experience 5

During A levels my mental health just kind of went down the drain. It was like really, really bad and I was having really bad suicidal thoughts. A friend of mine was like, I'll take you to the GP. She saw how bad I'd really gotten and was like you really need to get help. I'm not actually sure I would have gone and got help had I been left by myself. So I went through the GP process with my friend and went on medication for a little bit, but it didn't really settle well with me, so I stopped it.

When I got to uni, it got really bad. It just didn't stop getting bad and eventually I was like, okay, I should really go to the GP again because at that point I was living alone and I was still having suicidal thoughts. So I went to Gp and they prescribed another different type of antidepressant and they didn't work very well for me, and so I tried counselling and that didn't work for me either. 

During my second year at university I went back to the GP and was like I don't really know what to do, and then they recommended NHS talking therapies, so then I decided to do that. You just go online and self refer, explain the situation and then I think they call you not long after. After the call you book something in and I think originally I had six Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) based sessions. I was really lucky to have a really nice therapist, and I think she gathered that six sessions wasn't going to be enough for me, so she extended it to a few more sessions. 

The CBT therapy sessions were one-to-one and I'd go in person to go see her. It was definitely positive and it's something that still helps me to this day, because I feel like I learnt ways to cope and ways to kind of go around the issues and certain things that were going on. It didn't matter how many times I spoke about it, there weren't things that could really change, they just were going to happen. So it was really nice to have a therapist who understood that and then said, okay, well we can work on your anxiety, or we can work on your depression, and we can set things in place for you. So even if you're feeling low, try and get x, y and z done, understanding that the feeling after is what's gonna be enjoyable or trying to ensure that I like put self care in, and try not to beat myself up when I don't get things done, and just trusting that I would get things done. 

So I always had a fear of failing and no matter how well I did in my grades, I still felt like I was going to fail the next assignment. She kind of had to drill it into me that actually, if you look at statistics, you haven't failed anything. So the logic behind you failing, it's not really there. And she was like, every time you feel like you're gonna fail, just remember that you haven't failed anything so far, and so the likelihood of you failing is a lot slimmer. That's something I've carried into other aspects of my life.

CBT based therapy really helped in terms of learning to have a routine and ensure that I do the mundane things like cooking and cleaning and doing my laundry, and just do really basic things that when you are really down are an absolute struggle to do. It really helped to just ensure that to the best of my ability, I still to this day like, try to get those things done, even when I'm having a bad day or a bad week.  Like, even if I'm feeling really bad, I still go to the gym unless I genuinely feel like I cannot do it to the best of my ability, as you just try to do it, knowing that things will get better off if that makes sense after feeling. I know it's much better than the feeling before when I have to force myself.

Bad days are going to happen and I'm okay with that. But it's putting things in place for myself to sort of be like, okay, if these days do happen to do x y and z because I know little things, like if I haven't eaten all day, if my bed is really messy, if my bedroom is really messy, if I haven't showered, like those things then trickle into uni work as well because then I wake up feeling really bad. Whereas if I get those small things done throughout the day, I tend to feel a bit better the next day. 

The most positive thing I've taken from the help seeking process is learning to definitely trust myself more and just know that I know myself better than anyone else. I would advise others to definitely seek help, but understand that it's not always going to work the first time. For some people the medication does work, and that's great. And for some people the first type of medication doesn't work, but the second one does. And then, for some people like me that hadn't worked and then counselling hadn't worked but therapy had worked. So it's just the idea that if it doesn't work the first time, it doesn't mean that it's not going to work. It just means that maybe you just need to keep searching to kind of figure out what you want and also research it.

For me, therapy was great because it worked on behaviour, and at that moment I didn’t want to sit down with my feelings. I really just wanted a way to figure out how to move on with Uni. But you might be in a position where you do actually want to sit down and talk about your feelings, or you may have had a traumatic experience where CBT therapy may not be useful for you, but counselling might so seek help and just seek help from loads of different places until you find the right fit for you.

More information on the different types of antidepressants can be found here: https://www.rethink.org/advice-and-information/living-with-mental-illness/medications/antidepressants/. 

More about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and what it involves can be found here: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-treatments/talking-therapies-and-counselling/cognitive-behavioural-therapy-cbt/overview/ 

More information about NHS talking therapies can be found here : https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-treatments/talking-therapies-and-counselling/nhs-talking-therapies/