This week is Mental Health Awareness Week. It’s a week that is hugely important, as we still have such a long way to go before we’ve broken the stigma that surrounds mental ill health. Last year, I wrote a post for Mental Health Awareness Week claiming that I was going to start sharing my story of living with depression, beginning with my nervous breakdown and diagnosis. Yet, these posts never materialised. Writing your own tale of living with depression is…
As a society, we value intelligence. And once our children start school we want them to do well academically. We help them learn to read and we show them how to write their name. Evenings are spent practising spellings and times tables. Yet we rarely teach our children about emotional intelligence. From an early age, we shhh them when they cry. We tell our children to be quiet when they’re angry. And we often use negative language to describe their emotions. They’re…
On Monday the singer Sinead O’Connor posted a heartbreaking video to her Facebook page. O’Connor films the footage in a grotty hotel in New Jersey. And in it she is clearly in the middle of a depressive episode. She is distraught. Beside herself. Her thoughts tumble into one another. And as you watch you can see and hear her heart break and her soul rip into thousands of tiny pieces. It is a horrid video to watch. Especially for someone,…
I have suffered from depression for 18 years of my life. And I will suffer with it until the day I die. Depression is a part of me. I’ve had it for the majority of my adult life. It has made me the person I am today. I know I’ve talked about it on this blog but I’ve mainly written pretty prose about feelings or the fear of relapsing. I haven’t ever talked about the nitty-gritty of living with depression. This…
I’ve been quite open recently that my mental health hasn’t been brilliant. It certainly isn’t terrible but I haven’t been myself. I’ve been feeling anxious and unmotivated. There have been days when I have felt tearful, unable to control my mood and I have just wanted to clamber back into bed and sleep. My Mental Health There are many small reasons why my depression has relapsed. The stress and sadness of the recurrent miscarriages and the anxiety I felt in my…