24 Feb

Posted at 11:47h in Mental health
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On either side of my driveway crocuses and snowdrops have started to appear. They have forced their way through the decomposing leaves. Bursts of colour against the damp brown matting. I take a rake and gently pull it across the flowerbed, easing my way through the flowers carefully, trying not to knock off the delicate blooms. The flowers I expose are top heavy, their stems are white, translucent, anaemic. Many of them flop forward, unable to support their own weight. I fear my zeal might have shortened their already brief life. I recognise myself here. I have been re-learning how to live in a...

15 Feb

Posted at 15:05h in Family
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There was a time in my marriage when, in amongst the normal and the good, a space had started to open up.  A distance was widening between us. My plan was to ignore it. If I busied myself with the day to day I assumed (I hoped) we would one day naturally regain our previous ease, our relaxed intimacy. While I waited, I held Matt at arms length. To protect my heart, I hid how I was feeling. Matt tried to talk to me about how things were, but I refused to acknowledge it. I had neither the time nor energy nor courage to...

07 Feb

Posted at 09:53h in Mental health
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I wrote this a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning. It is pretty raw and I wasn't sure if I would share it. But I have decided to because honesty is more important that appearance. "Last night was bad and for the first time in a long time I remembered, no - I experienced - what it was like to not be able to rely on my brain to act as it should. Again. I had gone to bed calm and well, but woke two hours later sweating, my stomach tied in a painful knot. I lay awake in agony, my hand on...

24 Jan

Posted at 15:31h in Mental health
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It is January in the north of England and my garden looks as you would expect; damp, leaf strewn, drained of colour: a mess. There is not much to be seen, but there is work to do. I plan to cut back some shrubs that have needed a hard prune since we moved in four years ago. They are overgrown and block light from the house. As I begin to work, my neighbour walks past on his way back from his allotment. He calls over, “Take it right to the floor, you will only get leaf this year, but the flowers will be back...

18 Jan

Posted at 11:52h in Living well, Mental health
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I can't remember a time I did not know the lyrics to the theme tune of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Throughout the early '90s the song wormed its way into my ear, remaining in my head long after the show had finished. And, kudos to the song's composers, years later as my children grew up unaware of the origins of this piece of musical genius (heavy on the irony), we have on occasion found ourselves singing it to the kids, mock-rapping in the kitchen, initially thrilling and later totally embarrassing them. Last week my ten year old discovered nearly 150 episodes of Will...

10 Jan

Posted at 10:28h in Family, Mental health
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Last week I took the kids to the park with a friend. Two adults, six children and a dog. Pretty ordinary. I arrived a little early. The kids raced ahead of me to the swings and I walked through the damp leaves following them up the path. Rewind thirteen months and I remember making this same journey. It was just before Christmas and we were desperate to find something to do on a grey day, some way to get the kids out of the house, even if just for an hour. We were tired at the end of the long term and...

08 Nov

Posted at 19:17h in Living well, Mental health
1 Like

It was seven years from my first panic attack to a diagnosis of anxiety. Seven years without any help. Seven years of thinking I needed to get a grip. Seven years of beating myself up for not being able to stay in control. Before my diagnosis I didn't think I was ill and I didn't think I suffered with anxiety. What even was that? I thought I was a freak. And weak. A weak freak. I didn't know anyone who had struggled with their mental health (or maybe truer to say, I didn't know anyone who had ever talked about it). I had no...

10 Oct

Posted at 10:06h in Mental health
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This is for you if you are in despair. I know how you feel. I have been you; terrified to leave the house, feeling I had no control over my own body. I have felt my brain was alien and unpredictable and I could no longer rely on it to tell me the truth. I know what it is like to wake in the night and be consumed with fear, able to hear my blood pumping around my body, the sound loud in my ears. I have wanted to hide, and felt shame. I have not known who I was or how to go on....

21 Sep

Posted at 16:47h in Faith, Mental health
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My therapist tells me that she believes it probably won't be long until there is a test, a blood test or something, that will tell what is chemically happening in your brain. To ascertain that something isn't right, some chemical or hormone isn't being released correctly or in the right amount (forgive me - I am no scientist). This would distinguish between mental illnesses that requires chemical intervention and those mental illnesses that can be alleviated by environmental changes and talking therapies, without the need for the pills. And although we shouldn't have to prove it, we shouldn't need that validation, it...

20 Sep

Posted at 11:34h in Mental health
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"Depression for me, wasn't a dulling, but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell and now the shell wasn't there. It was total exposure… What I didn't realise at the time, what would have seemed incomprehensible to me, was that this state of mind would end up having positive effects as well as negative effects"* When I was first diagnosed with post-natal depression towards the end of 2009 I had no idea of what was to come. But a door had been pushed ajar. A portal to another place, or perhaps, a portal...