It is the 21st of April 2021. At 20 years old, I have just been told that I am being admitted to a psychiatric hospital against my own will for a month after attempting to take my own life the day before. I am terrified and I feel as though my life is falling apart. A week ago, I was studying Psychology at university. How had I gone from being a high-achieving student, with little history of mental ill health, to being sectioned in a psychiatric unit two hours away from home?
I could also ask myself though, how I managed to recover, and in doing so, returned into education and work a year and a half later? That is what my blog is about.
” I have just been told that I am being admitted to a psychiatric hospital against my own will, for a month, after attempting to take my own life.”
Part of writing this, is allowing myself to be honest with you and show the vulnerable sides of me. I am not perfect, and I have made mistakes. I have struggled. I cannot count on my fingers the number of times I have thought about giving up because life felt un-survivable. I also cannot count the times I have acted on those thoughts. There are still times when my depression gets the better of me, and I have those thoughts and feelings again. My therapist once told me, that part of mental health is recognising that feelings don’t go away, you just get better at feeling them, which makes them less overwhelming, scary, and debilitating. I have coped with them in better ways and watered these same feelings down with my tears. I have given myself space and time to feel, which has allowed me to study and work part time alongside university.
It was not plain sailing; I spent the best part of a year and a half in an incredibly depressed state, using harmful techniques to cope, rotating between taking substances and self-harming. I felt hopeless and as though I had failed. Some days I still don’t feel like I am ‘doing enough.’ I lived with my parents for most of those 18 months. They did not want me to be alone yet didn’t want my friends or housemates to be ‘responsible’ for me. I battled with an eating disorder and post-traumatic stress – and still do now, it has not just gone away – but for so long, both of those struggles held me back. I could barely function. I felt chained, almost as though my mental health was holding me hostage. I think for a lot of us, we are simply trying to survive in a world that is far from kind. To survive, to get up every day alone, is so hard for so many of us that struggle mentally. We are our own worst critics, and constantly compare ourselves to others. I know I certainly do. Yet, I know that I have had so much to contend with, and that I am on my own, beautiful path.
“Some days I still don’t feel like I am ‘doing enough’.”
Education can be incredibly daunting, but when you have factors impacting that, it makes it harder to learn and study. Self-motivation with depression is next to non-existent, and anxiety cruelly chains us to the same four walls and doesn’t want us to go out and socialise, study, live even. How can you begin to learn when it seems an invisibility is working against you?
One thing about suffering from mental ill health, is that you can become incredibly isolated in your illness. A lot of us push people away, unintentionally. We may do it out of shame, fear of being misunderstood, or we may not want to ‘hurt’ those around us. For me, I gently isolated myself, so it didn’t seem incredibly obvious that I was planning to die. My poorly brain thought that it would make my death easier for people to process if they weren’t present much in my final hours and days. Little did I know, these same people would provide me a lifeline in my darkest moment. These were the people I would call from my bedroom in the psychiatric unit, the same people who rooted for my recovery and got me to where I am today, back in education and working part time too. I was incredibly fortunate that I was met with compassion. I know some people who attempt on their life, are met with misunderstanding and invalidation and stigma.
“A lot of us push people away, unintentionally. We may do it out of shame, fear of being misunderstood…”
I was met with compassion throughout the hardest time in my life, from some friends, from the police, from the nurses who plaited my hair in the psych ward, from my parents when they rang me from Yorkshire to check in. It made the process less guilt-inducing for me, but I still felt awful for putting my friends and family through this. They were compassionate but didn’t show pity. I feel as though if I was pitied for surviving what I didn’t want to, that would’ve made me feel worse and would’ve reminded me of how badly I wanted to leave this world.
I did unfortunately lose touch with people through my illness though. I had one friend, who we’ll call Hattie, who I lived with during university. The night I attempted to take my life, the country was on local lockdowns due to coronavirus, and people could only travel if it was deemed necessary. My parents couldn’t come to the hospital straightaway. Hattie, like the lovely, compassionate girl that she was, texted her boyfriend and told him she needed to be with me for a few hours. She stayed with me until my parents came the following morning, sleeping on a rock hard chair in my hospital room. It was incredibly raw. I sometimes kick myself for being so vulnerable. Suicide was such a taboo term for me, and I felt guilty for Hattie being involved. However, sometimes being vulnerable and brave can save your life. It certainly saved mine. Had she had not rang an ambulance that night, I would’ve died. I didn’t tell anybody in the days leading up to it. How could I turn around and tell my loved ones that I didn’t want the life they gave me anymore?
“There were so many missed opportunities for me to say to Hattie, I’m not okay.”
She learnt more about me in those 8 hours than she had in the last 8 months of our friendship, but I never saw Hattie again after that. I remember in the months before the night I planned to die, we chain smoked in a park down the road from our flat. We would walk down to the field in the dead of the night, the only light coming from the moon. Our arms would be full with the cigarettes, snacks, and conversations we’d be carrying. We would lie on the grass, our backs on it, just talking. There were so many missed opportunities for me to say to Hattie, I’m not okay. The last time I checked on her – through social media, I’d seen that she’d graduated and had accepted a job.
“I feared I would never be okay again.”
Yes, I returned to education in 2022, but I didn’t go back to the same university. I couldn’t bring myself to. The university I originally attended held too many bad memories. I’d never be able to stand in the same bedroom again without being reminded of how suicidal I felt. I often wonder who stays in there now, praying they never have the heavy feelings that I did. I hope that if they do though, they do what I didn’t, which is reach out and say that they’re not okay. I feared I would never be okay again. With that in mind, I returned to university just over a year later but moved cities and changed courses. It felt like a fresh start.
“I managed to recover, and in doing so, returned into education and work a year and a half later…It felt like a fresh start.”
Some of us may never finish education. I have had friends leave education due to crippling anxiety and never go back. I have had colleagues leave work due to stress and not return, but rather do a work from home job. Some of us may never work/study at all and that is okay. I have met so many people over the years. Some are in full time jobs, with a mortgage and a baby. Some are living at home and repeating a year of studies. Some are under mental health services or in therapy to try and make sense of and recover from the trauma they have encountered. We all have one thing in common though, and that is that we are surviving. Everybody is different. Some of us need a jam-packed schedule simply to function or we’ll never leave the house, or some of us need to rest more than others, because our bodies and minds are tired after being in survival mode for so long. Some of us need medication, myself included, or therapy, and some of us manage without. That does not mean any of us are doing any worse or any better than the next. I promise.
York Ending Stigma
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find out more about our work and to join us to end mental health stigma in York, please refer to our website https://yorkcvs.org.uk/york-ending-stigma/ or email us on yes@yorkCVS.org.uk