Why I Talk So Openly About My Mental Health

This month is Green Ribbon month - where See Change and their supporters encourage people to wear a green ribbon in support of those struggling with their mental health and to help us end the stigma around mental illness.

I've been an ambassador with See Change for about four years now. With See Change's support, I share my mental health story in interviews and in talks.

But for a long time I struggled to find meaning in my mental illness. I had suffered in silence for years.

While I struggled with my mental health throughout secondary school,  I never identified it as ‘I have a mental health problem’. It wasn’t something I was aware of, or even educated in.

My only understanding of mental illness as a teenager was how it was represented and portrayed in the media; asylums and straitjackets. Sinead O'Connor and Britney Spears going 'off the rails'. Being 'depressed' was bad and those people were not fun to be around.

As a result, years of bullying in school went unaddressed. Years of anxiety and sleepless nights were never mentioned. Years of low self-esteem, years of feeling isolated, years of hating myself.

When I moved away from home for college, these feelings escalated. My low moods began to affect me physically. I couldn’t sleep, I lost my appetite, and I started to throw up when I was nervous. Without a support network (friends or family) around me in college, I felt isolated and alone. I felt like I was 'missing out' on the college experience I was supposed to have.

I lost hope that things would ever get better and my thoughts turned to suicide. I didn’t know how to ask to help. I didn't know I was supposed to ask for help. I wasn’t sure anyone would help me.

It took a while for me to realise that what I was going through wasn't normal, I wasn't okay. Eventually, an old friend I got talking to convinced me to see a doctor. A diagnosis gave me relief and comfort. I learned this was an illness and that it was fixable. There was hope.

Before my diagnosis, and for months afterwards, I felt so alone. I felt like a failure. I'd disappointed those around me, I'd failed to have the ultimate college experience - whatever that was.

Once I started to see glimmers of recovery, I knew I had to turn my mental health into something positive.

I hated the thought of anyone feeling as alone, scared or lost as I was.

I hated the fact that people who were struggling, who needed help, didn’t know how to ask for or where to get support.

So I joined local campaigns to raise awareness of mental health issues and the supports available.

A few years later, when See Change invited me to join them as an Ambassador, I jumped at the opportunity. Together we could reach more people in dire need. I could show others that things do get better, not to give up hope like I had.

And every time I spoke, someone I didn’t know or who I had lost touch with over the years, would approach me and say ‘me too’. ‘I’ve been there’. ‘Thank you’.

So I would keep going. And I started this blog because I knew I had more to share. I had my whole journey to share. I had stigma to challenge and day-to-day struggles to document.

It’s been 7 years since my diagnosis. And I can’t stop talking about my mental health. It pours out of me.

Because over the years I've learned what was never taught to me in school -

Mental illness is normal; it isn’t something to be ashamed of.

I want to change the way we view, discuss and represent mental illness so that no one ever has to feel as alone as I did.

Find out more about the Green Ribbon campaign taking place all this month at SeeChange.ie.

The 8th amendment is a mental health issue

Tomorrow, I'll begin work on a mental health awareness campaign for another year. The aim is to wear a symbol of support and hope; show a willingness to talk about mental health and end the stigma around mental illness. But this May the message could easily be lost amongst terms like '1 in 5', 'My Body My Choice' and 'Repeal the 8th'.

You see May is also about another huge issue in Ireland – Repealing the 8th amendment of the Irish Constitution to allow for legislation to be brought forward for access to abortion. At the moment, a woman in Ireland can only access an abortion if there medical practitioners agree that their is an immediate risk to her health. As a result, roughly 9 women travel from Ireland to the UK for an abortion EVERY DAY, and another 3 women order pills online each day.

Both issues will be competing for national attention during the month of May. But to me both issues are inextricably linked.

You cannot support a woman’s mental health by forcing her to travel abroad for help and support.

You are not protecting a woman’s mental health by forcing her to take abortion pills alone, in secret.

Support for mental health includes promoting a person’s autonomy. Allowing them to make the decisions they need to make for both their physical and mental health with help, care and support. You hear a lot about self care in the field of mental health, but by restricting a person’s choices, you’re not supporting them.

By forcing someone to remain pregnant against their will, you’re detrimentally damaging their mental health and causing emotional distress. By calling them criminals, you’re chipping away at their mind and sense of self.

If you are someone who is already struggling with a mental illness, the 8th amendment means your only option is to keep the baby, or seek illegal help. At a time when your number one focus should be looking after yourself and recovering, you now have the added pressure of pregnancy with no choices or other options freely available.

The lack of safe and accessible abortion has been linked to increased risk of suicide. By denying them a choice, girls and women can feel left without options or without hope.

• PS. There is no correlation between abortion and increased mental health problems.
• Research stating abortion damages a person’s mental health or causes mental illness has been proven to be unfounded and inaccurate.
• Research actually proves no link between having an abortion and developing mental health difficulties. (Source) 
• This one’s been fact checked by enough journos thanks very much. 

Keeping the 8th means forcing women to try to access the care and support they need in secret and in fear. For those who can afford to travel, it comes with a huge price tag - one that could take weeks of saving to get to, or growing debt to repay after. Debt is a well-known contributor to mental health problems.

From Chris Noone

Keeping the 8th means forcing women to carry a fatal foetal abnormality to term, despite the heartache and severe mental toll it entails to know your baby isn’t going to survive. These are much wanted babies, but rather than allowing women to try again, they're forced to stay pregnant.

Keeping the 8th means forcing rape victims to carry the product of their rape for nine months. Pro-lifers call this ‘healing’, I call it traumatic mental torture.

Keeping the 8th means forcing a woman to remain pregnant unless a number of medical professionals agree that her life is at immediate risk (e.g. when a woman is about to take her own life). Keeping the 8th often means forcing a woman to suicide.

Abortion is a reality for Irish women – it’s happening both on our shores and abroad. But keeping it illegal means that you don’t value a woman’s physical or mental health. It means that you're denying her proper and safe medical supervision, aftercare and support. It means you’d rather see a woman suffer than make a decision you don't personally agree with.

But because she suffers in silence, you can pretend that it’s not happening. You can pretend that you don’t know a woman this has affected. That her forced pregnancy ‘helped her’. That she's okay now. That there are no mental effects of this. But she aches and she hurts.

Beibhinn Farrell, a psychotherapist, says this all much better than I ever could in her post 11 reasons why saving the 8th does not protect women or babies based on scientific facts.

The referendum on repealing the 8th amendment is taking place on 25 May. Make sure you're eligible to vote by 8 May at Check the Register.

Find out more about the campaign to repeal the 8th from Together for Yes.

Find out more about how the 8th amendment affects mental health from Psychologists for Choice.

When being a mental health activist gets hard

The first year after my diagnosis with depression was hard. I had expected a quick-fix, but it was six months and five different drugs later and I still didn’t want to live. I struggled to get by day-to-day. I continued to withdraw and lost friends. I acted out self-destructively. I felt lost, and what I needed was to find a purpose for my depression.

I found meaning in mental health campaigns and activism. I got involved in local college groups that promoted the message “Talking is a sign of strength.” It was an easy thing to throw my weight behind – talking had literally saved my life. And I never wanted anyone to feel as alone and without help as I had.

We ran awareness campaigns of the supports available to students, hosted talks on eating disorders and CBT and tried to reach those who needed help. We held regular tea and coffee mornings to promote talking. And people would talk. I’d be taken aside to chat to someone vulnerable. To tell them that it’s okay not to feel okay, but sometimes we need help. They’d tell me about their battles, their hardships, their attempts.

And I was ever so grateful, don’t get me wrong. How much I would have loved to have someone listen to me and chat to me about my illness after my diagnosis. I had needed like-minded people with their experiences of mental illness to talk to. And that’s what I’d found through activism.
 But I went home feeling these people’s pain. Often their stories were triggering to me. It brought me back to exactly how I’d felt and how I'd hurt. And when we lost a life, I took that personally. “If only my activism had reached them”, I’d think. “If I’d done more, could I have saved them?”

My activism found a national stage through the Green Ribbon campaign. I was interviewed in national newspapers and on TV. People I didn’t know, people I used to know reached out to me to say they could relate. They’d been through something similar. They had lost a friend to a similar battle.

But then the questions started:

What medication are you on? What brand works for you?
When are you going to stop taking medication? Aren’t you worried you’ll get addicted?
But how serious actually was your depression?
Don't you think you should go back to counselling?  

When I left university and entered the workplace, I lost contact with like-minded people. I have always been the youngest person on my team in any place I’ve worked over the past three years. I quickly became aware of how much stigma still exists. I didn’t know how to react to office lunchtime conversations, or even if I should react?

 “There’s definitely something mentally wrong with him.” 

"Terrorists are all mentally ill. There's no other excuse." 

"I always thought depression wasn't real; it's just something in your head."

If I speak up I’ll probably get upset. How will people treat me if I do admit that I have depression?

I started my blog. I started sharing more indepth the daily struggles of depression and anxiety. I joined mental health chats on Twitter and met more like-minded activists through the Internet. But when life got in the way and I started to miss those chats, when I couldn't keep up or commit my time, I lost a lot of support.

You start to become the 'mental health' person in your social groups. Someone uses the word 'mental' or 'depressing' in a conversation and all eyes turn to you to see how you're going to react.

I remember when my boyfriend and I first started dating. We had mutual friends in common and I was fearful that someone may have already told him about my mental illness before I was ready to myself (they did). I was scared he’d find my blog; an open chronicle of seven years of mental illness. I had made myself open and vulnerable by being so public.

It came up on our second date. He told me a friend had already mentioned the blog to him. I looked down at the table and tugged at my sleeves as I explained my mental illness to him. I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. But thanks to my activism, I was forced to.

You make yourself vulnerable when you speak up about your mental health. Some days you get support and feel empowered.

Other times it feels like you’re constantly being attacked. Sometimes even media articles feel like a personal attack. They tell you not to take it personally, but it is personal. After years of relentlessly defending yourself, your own choices, your approach to activism and raising awareness, heck of even defending the fact that mental illness exists, you get exhausted. And I am tired. I am not always strong enough to be 'active'. Some days I have to put my own mental health first.
Some days are turning into most days.

Just like how I had hoped for a quick fix to my own mental illness, I thought there might be a quick fix to the stigma. I thought my activism would change things. But after fighting for so long, most of the time it feels like I haven't changed a thing.

As hard as it gets, as tired as it gets, you try to keep going. You don't want to give up, because there's a fight still ongoing. But boy is it draining. And one day there will a come a day when my own mental health will have to come first.

Until next time,

Mental health in the workplace

I'm a 24 year old professional who works 9-5 in an office-based job. Sounds pretty boring, right?

I actually love my job, and I know I'm one of the few lucky enough to say that. I enjoy the challenges, the mundane everyday tasks, and often not knowing a new day will bring.

As someone who usually has extreme anxiety when facing the unknown, I'm surprisingly okay with the fast pace and level of uncertainty that comes with my job. Yes, you see I am also mentally ill.

Mental illness can present challenges in any environment, but it's something that it commonly tricky in the workplace. I have both friends and acquaintances who have personally faced stigma and discrimination at work due to their mental health. Some have been bullied and harassed due to their illness.

A study published today found that almost half of all people in Ireland's capital city would not want to work with someone who has a mental illness.Half of people surveyed would not want to work with ME. And let me tell you, they're missing out because I am darn good at my job.

Today I want to talk about me experiences with mental health in the workplace, and why I'm now succumbing to stigma and keeping my mental illness under wraps.

Over the past four years, I've been in a number of unpaid or low-paid internships, and part-time jobs. Mental health was a topic that would come up naturally. My CV and past experience is littered with mental health awareness campaigns and events, and I am proud to have been Chairperson of a mental health committee in my university. As a result, I've had job interviews where I told prospective line managers about my mental health mid-interview.

"What inspired you to gt involved in mental health campaigns?" "Well, I ended up getting involved in mental health awareness after my own mental breakdown..."

The topic was on the table. And if I felt that I needed to, I knew the way for paved for me to talk to my line manager about my mental health.

That's not to say I haven't faced stigma. I've sat around the lunch table with colleagues where I've had to listen to:
"Terrorists are all mentally ill. There's no other excuse."
"I always thought depression wasn't real; it's just something in your head."
"Donald Trump has to have a mental illness. All the signs are there."

There have been times where I felt confident enough to rebuff a throwaway comment about mental illness with fact and logic. But there have been other times where I've kept my head down and my mouth shut. Or where my personal experience of mental illness has been dismissed with some pseudo-science someone has read online.

But now that I'm in a 9-5 full-time job? I've kept my mental health relatively under wraps.
As an online advocate and offline mental health ambassador, I know I'm being a hypocrite. I know that I should wear my badge with pride and start the conversations required to end stigma. But life's not that simple. And stigma is real, and sometimes fear of this barrier is too high for me to breakdown. Sometimes remembering what people I know have faced and been put through for revealing their mental health in work causes me to fear the same stigma that I may have to deal with.

Like when filling out forms on my medical history before I could start my job. I sat staring at that form for at least ten minutes trying to decide whether I would admit my own diagnoses or current medication.
Where would this files live? Would my colleagues have access to this data? Could someone in HR look up my medical history and discuss it over lunch with another colleague? Would it be passed on to my managers?

Or when faced with another form for declaring your disability. Was my illness currently debilitating enough to be classified as a disability? What if it's not today but is tomorrow?

Here I am staring at paper and inflicting stigma on myself.
I have no reason to presume my workplace would be unsupportive. But I choose to hide. I feel safer this way. This is how I protect myself any possible future hurt.

This way, I don't have to have a comeback when someone makes a stupid, inaccurate comment about mental illness.
This way, I don't have to be the one explaining why not all terrorists are mentally ill.
This way, I don't have to defend my very diagnosis.

But here's what I will do. I will put some Green Ribbon posters up in my office and stick some green ribbons in the canteen. Because maybe someday I will feel ready to tell a co-worker why I got into this line of work. And I want them to be ready.

This May is Green Ribbon month. Wear a green ribbon and show that you are willing to talk about mental health and end the stigma.
Visit www.greenribbon.ie to find out more.

Why I'm Wearing a Green Ribbon this month

This month, you may spot people wearing a simple green ribbon.

The idea is simple, by wearing the green ribbon, thousands of people are showing their support for ending the silence around mental health.

This year is the fifth year of the Green Ribbon campaign organised by See Change, national programme to change minds about mental health problems in Ireland and end stigma. Half a million green ribbons are being given out for free throughout the country for the whole month of May.

See Change say: "You don’t need to be an expert to start talking about mental health or have all the answers. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to let someone know that you are there for them and simply listen."

Here's why I am choosing to wear my green ribbon again this May.

I am an ambassador for ending the silence around mental health.
It's a symbol of support for a worthy campaign.
It helps create awareness.

I want people to see the ribbon and ask me why I'm wearing it.
I want people to see the ribbon and know that they can talk to me about mental health.
I want people to see the ribbon and without having to say anything, they know that they are not alone.
I want to end the silence and stigma around mental health for me, for those closest to me, for my friends with mental health issues, and for the people I haven't had the privilege of meeting yet.
I want everyone and anyone who is struggling with their mental health to know that they are not alone, and that talking about mental health is a sign of strength.

Whatever your reason for wearing it, you can pick up green ribbons at train stations, all Boots stores and at events in your local areas.

You can find out more about the Green Ribbon project and the events taking place in your community at www.greenribbon.ie.

Mental Illness Is Real

Lately I've become very aware that there is still a stigma around mental illness. Throw-away comments have opened my eyes to a world that up until recently I liked to think we no longer lived in. A world where people don't understand mental illness.

And I say this in the most basic sense. Mental Illness is almost impossible to understand without a lived experience. I can only imagine the reality of life for people who experience anorexia or schizophrenia. But that doesn't mean you can't be sympathetic and supportive. 

What I mean by 'people who don't understand mental illness', is that there are people who doubt whether mental illness is real. Here's a sample of the quotes I heard:

I always thought depression was just because you had too much time to think.

Monday was meant to be the most depressing day of year. well if we all survived, I guess none of us committed.

And because of the context of these comments and where they took place, I didn't have the courage to speak up and challenge them.

UCD Talks

To mark Mental Health May the PleaseTalk Committee in University College Dublin released a video titled UCD Talks. In it, 9 students, including myself, speak about our experiences with mental health and share our stories. They were all touching and gut-wrenchingly honest. I still cannot watch it through without my eyes welling up.

The video received a tremendous amount of positive attention and reactions. Within a weekend we had hit almost 4,000 views.

As Chairperson of the PleaseTalk Committee in UCD I could not have been prouder, both of the brave students involved and the huge reaching impact of the PleaseTalk message; that 'Talking is a sign of strength'.
It wasn't an easy decision for anyone involved to sit down in front of a camera and speak about their journey, their battle, their struggle, each one unique. Even I found it difficult. When it came to the night before the release I had knots in my stomach. But I believe it is needed to put a face on mental illness. The only way we can end the stigma around mental health is to normalize it. To make it a topic that we are able to bring up without fear of discrimination.
I have never thought of myself as 'brave' for sharing my story. Partly, I think that's because I haven't really experienced a lot of stigma personally. Yes, I lost a few friends over my mental health a couple of years ago. But I've had it easy compared to a lot of the stories I've heard. Making this video was a big step for me. My story, my diagnosis would be public and I couldn't ever take it back. Hence the nerves.

But any nerves, any doubts I had about releasing the video were quickly put at ease with the feedback we received. The messages of support and thanks were overwhelming. In fact, they touched me so much that I decided to collect them. Everything from public comments, to tweets, shares and personal messages. I gathered them and I printed them out. Together with some broader messages about the good work that Please Talk UCD does, they make this collage. It's something that I can keep forever, to look at anytime when I'm feeling down. To see the underlying support for what we as a committee achieved this past year brings me hope; hope that there won't always be a stigma around mental illness.  It serves as a reminder of the power of that simple message; 'Talking is a sign of strength'.

You can watch the video here: UCD Talks