When I was 22, I made a mistake—one that many young people make when trying to start a career. As the workload in the first year of my PhD built up, I worked harder and harder, and my social circle grew smaller and smaller.
I tried to correct course. I got counselling, I took an antidepressant, and the rest is history.
An extremely rare reaction to the antidepressant resulted in extremely severe anxiety. The next 7 years became a chronically painful scrap to find treatment. I was fortunate to find something that started to work. And I hope long may that continue.
I don’t know why I thought the story would end there. In my mind, I would get the treatment and then poof, it would be a quick recovery. I would make friends, restart my career, move out of my mum’s place and begin a life put on hold for nearly a decade.
I thought that just like the spiral down into mental illness, there would be a spiral up into a healthy mind. I thought that each positive event would build on the last. I thought there would be people who would want to help me back to normal health. This was another mistake.
The cruelty of severe mental illness is that the usually slow decline takes away what is necessary for recovery. In almost every recovery story you read, such as this one, the good comes before the bad.
The sufferer makes close friendships and relationships, then suffers a tragic injury/occurrence of which the close friends are there to support the sufferer back into health.
The likely reason you don’t usually read stories the other way around: where someone experiences the bad before the good, is because of survivorship bias: more people make it with a social support network before the bad thing happens.
My decline into severe mental illness severed the connections I had with friends and isolated me over a decade. The bad has come before the good. So even though I am in a position to recover, I have no social platform to grow from. I need to make new friends.
And man. Is it so unbelievably painful to make new friends when you are anxious as hell. The first step was trying to make it out of the house. Throughout 2022 and 2023, my mission was simply to be able to be walk some distance away from my house without coming back with an anxiety headache and mental exhaustion1.
My anxiety response for everyday simple things, like going to the grocery store, was amped up to the level of giving a public speaking event in front of hundreds of people.
For every aspect of normal life, I had to overcome severe anxiety. It was like one of those video games where you are exploring a map that starts out in fog. Every new place uncovers an area of the map.
By the end of 2023, I realised I needed help. I was on my own, and I was so tired of facing these challenges on my own. So I got in touch with the UK Mind charity “befriending” service. This is where volunteers meet up with people with mental illness once a week for an hour or so. I explained the problem, and me and my befriender met up in cafe’s, pubs, grocery stores etc. and just talked to help me feel more comfortable.
My progress accelerated. Five months into our six month period together I was comfortable outside and ready to start joining new social groups. I tried at first to do so with my befriender, but it didn’t really work. My befriender was much more comfortable in social settings and I would naturally gravitate towards talking to them rather than anyone new.
After the befriending service had finished, I was back on my own. But with some renewed energy, I started to try out new social groups. First, there was the silent book club. The obvious problem here was it was silent. And instead of people talking at the start or end (with silent reading in between), no one seemed to talk at all and just arrived, read a bit, then left. Not really for me (reading at home is a lot easier and requires much less effort).
Next was a non-silent reading group. This went much better. I eventually got talking to some nice people, they only met up once a month, but it was a start.
Frustratingly, I realised that I was not the same person. I used to be confident and outgoing. It was quite humbling to experience the opposite. Years in the psychiatric system, years of pain, have made me studiously untrusting. A significant problem when trust is one of the first things required to build a friendship.
In March 2024, I joined a free acting workshop. It was far too soon to join one. I was not ready. But I would have to wait another year before it would be up and running again. It was fantastic. I regained so much confidence.
So I joined the amateur dramatic theatre group. I was desperate to join some kind of community. And here, I thought, I found it. I started with the technical team who were incredibly friendly. I did some very basic work for some shows. And well, when after such a long time you finally feel some kind of belonging. Feel somewhat valued. It is easy to overstretch and overdo. Which is what I did.
I went to an audition. I did not feel the same sense of belonging and I was unbelievably nervous. The next week, I had a breakdown. My brain was kaput and I knew it. I was going too fast, and pretending to everyone there I was “normal”. My confidence to say “no” was just not there.
I rejigged my life in the next month, and made the changes I needed to make to slow down the progress. Something which is still hard to do given my desperation to have a social life again.
When I was ready to go again, I received a group email to everyone who came to the audition. I was the only one not to get a part. The director, a man who gave themselves a part, wrote a short passing statement, using the excuse that “too many men” showed up.
I was unable to deal with the rejection very well. It was not the fact I was not cast (I was having doubts that I could be able to fulfill the role anyway) it was how little value the director saw in me. I was not even worth the five minutes to write a separate email. Much easier to just lump me in with everyone else.
Without the social foundations, I had no one to talk to (other than my mum) about the rejection. And so it spiralled around my head with no outlet. And I broke down again.
I told my mum “I hate how cynical I am, I hate that I have to battle against my instinct to see the worst in people every time I try to socialise”. She told me “you aren’t cynical, you are lethargic – you are so tired of the constant pain, the setback after setback, you cannot help but see what others choose to ignore.”
It is now September 2024. My mood has plummeted, I am hardly any closer to making any new friends than I was two years ago and I again can’t help but see what others choose to ignore.
For the severely mentally ill, it is not only pain all the way down, it is pain all the way back up. And what is so frustrating to me, is it is unnecessary pain.
When will people learn there is no such thing as a heroic individual effort against all odds? From the people that built your house, to the teachers that taught you, nothing you have ever done, nor will ever do, will be an individual effort. Humanity’s strength is working together and supporting each other in organised groups.
Such an organised group doesn’t really exist to help the severely mentally ill back into society. Most advice concerning mental health problems is to go to some dark room somewhere and talk to a counsellor. I did that. Problem is 1. I actually needed medication to treat my specific mental illness 2. I need practical help, not someone who holds my hand at a distance while I flounder.
The wealthy have personal assistants. The same job title is given to those who help disabled people, but the job description differs quite a bit. They act more in a caring capacity. I can’t help but imagine how much easier my recovery would be if I had a personal assistant.
To helping out around with house menial tasks, to supporting me in my journey back to building a social structure. It is exhausting to explain the limitations of my illness every time I join any group (and, fingers crossed, at some point an organisation for work). A personal assistant could ring ahead, help me deal with any problems that arise (like my acting problem) by opening a line of communication and supporting me in the whole process. A personal assistant wouldn’t be there forever, but they could initially reduce the amount of time I spend in the “bad” so that I can build relationships based on the “good” first.
Unfortunately, the UK financial support system is currently biased towards support for physical disabilities2. People with mental illness are in constant fear their financial support will be taken away from them because of the subjective structure currently in place.
I am someone in an exceptionally privileged position. And yet, it feels like there is hurdle after unnecessary hurdle placed in my way to get back to recovery. When the bad comes before the good, it is a very long time before one sees hints of good again.
To rephrase the saying often peddled by Rocky wannabes. It is not how hard you hit, nor how hard you get hit, it is how fortunate you are to not be hit in the first place.
- This was made all the more difficult when we (mum, disabled sister and I) suffered a bed bug and rat infestation concurrently. The rats came in through the dryer hole in the wall which my dad (now divorced and long gone) had stuffed with newspaper in the mid 2000’s and forgot about it. The bed bugs were isolated to my bed. How on earth does an agoraphobic person who is unable to leave the house get bed bugs (given you get them through hotel rooms and public transport)? A pillow I bought contained them. ↩︎
- An example is the PIP form, where I found it oriented at those with physical health conditions ↩︎
