hmm…erm… an “about” section is hard to do for an anonymous blog. The only things I can really tell you are: I have spent the best part of the last decade in the mental health system with severe mental illness, I hold a PhD in experimental physics and I am using the pseudonym Alex Mendelsohn

However, I realise many of you out there might want to put a face to the words I have written. Fortunately, I have drawn an ultra-realistic self-portrait using my C+ grade in high school art. Risky I know. But I think I just about got away with it.

Summary of My Story

• I started suffering from depression at 18, which got progressively worse until I was 23 (one year into my PhD). I decided to take my first antidepressant – an SSRI called Sertraline
• 4 days after taking Sertraline, I had a severe reaction which caused me to suffer almost every anxiety symptom (panic attacks, hypochondria, agoraphobia, shaking etc.) in their most severe form, having never previously experienced an anxiety symptom before in my life
• These symptoms did not go away when I came off the Sertraline
• I took a break from my PhD and spent 8 months trying, well, pretty much all the therapies! I learnt meditation too. I was also prescribed my second antidepressant – an SNRI called Venlafaxine.
• I then went back to the PhD, assembling a “Frankenstein” brain that barely sat under the line of functional to non-functional.
• During the PhD I worked in 20-minute intervals, meditating in between. I planned every inch of my life. Despite the chaos in my head, I somehow built a life I had no right to build. I had a social life and a good relationship with my PhD supervisor.
• Eventually, I finished the PhD. I don’t think anyone will ever read my thesis! But that doesn’t matter. I did it.
• I then collapsed from exhaustion
• My disease required medication, not therapy. Also, it turned out that the Venlafaxine, at the dose I was taking, was actually a weaker version of the drug that caused my severe reaction. This means I effectively poisoned myself over the course of three years. The deterioration of my condition was so slow that I never recognised it was happening.
• My untreated generalised anxiety took over my brain. I remember it being like this second “eye” that was looking for anything that could provoke a fear response. I no longer “felt” anxiety, I was fully encapsulating it. Every moment was pure agony. All that remained was a single thread of rationality.
• Social interactions had now become excruciatingly painful. To stay alive, I had to remove myself from society. I was for all intents and purposes forgotten.
• Previous psychiatrists kept making decisions that were inadvertently making my condition worse, so I reluctantly decided to guide my own treatment. By stretching the few rational neuronal connections that remained, I put into action the skills I had learned during the PhD and researched treatments.
• With the help of my mum (who was my carer and without her I would most certainly not be around), a good psychiatrist and a GP, I found treatments that began to help. It was terrifying. Utterly terrifying knowing that a misstep could lead to more suffering and/or disability, maybe even death.
• I eventually found a couple of medications that started to improve my condition. My recovery has been like walking backwards from the shore after a tsunami. The miles upon miles of devastation. The shore has long gone from view, but there are still holes in buildings, and rubble in the streets. One day I hope that I will wake up and I will no longer see any damage around me.
• To put the severity of my illness in perspective, according to the NHS it takes 1-2 weeks to start seeing improvement in symptoms with a usual duration of treatment of 6 months after remission of symptoms has been achieved (the general quoted length of time to remission of symptoms after starting an antidepressant is 6-12 weeks).
• I started taking Pregabalin, the first medication that gave me significant relief on the 30th March 2021. If this sentence is still here, it means Pregabalin is still reducing my generalised anxiety symptoms. I will remove the previous sentence when remission of symptoms have been achieved or my condition stops improving (I’m hoping it is the former!)
• As an analogy: if my anxiety and depression were a vastly overgrown privet hedge, the effect of the Pregabalin has been like the trimming of that hedge with a pair of secateurs – but only one tiny branch each day.
• I don’t really know why I am still alive. But since I am, I will do everything in my power to make good use of it. I will try to educate as much as possible in order to help change the tide in societal perceptions of mental illness.