World Mental Health Day

Or Give Me A Fucking Break.

I feel the phrase “mental health” is followed up by an unconscious, inner eye roll. I’m just as guilty of it. I’m so fucking sick of “mental health”. It’s like a corporate brand that has its mitts on everything. It’s the Coca Cola of ailments.

I have mental health. But so do you. Everyone does. In the same way I have ‘heart health’ or ‘foot health’… if your heart is hurting or beating irregularly, you aren’t “brave” for going to a doctor about it. If your foot is turning black and starting to feel numb, you’re not a “warrior” for telling someone that you need help and quick intervention.

Everyone’s mental health ebbs and flows. Change in circumstance and environment can impact you deeply when previously you’ve enjoyed constant and resilient mental stability. Things happen around you or to you. You react to those things thus disrupting the norm. Then there are genetic markers that you can’t possibly begin to factor in. Are you more prone to addiction or clinical depression or schizophrenia simply via your DNA?

I like to think that, postnatally, I achieved the Holy Trinity of mental health factors. Get ready for some proper millennial terminology. My family history is littered with severe anxiety, depression, OCD and autism. My lived experience (ugh) as a teenager was challenging and difficult (to put it diplomatically). I had the mother of all triggers with a hugely traumatic birth and postpartum period (pun intended).

Boom. Boom. Boom.

I would have needed to be put in a lab and studied if I HADN’T had a huge postnatal mental breakdown. It’s entirely natural that my mind would want to go into overdrive to protect itself. I should be thanking it, rather than the constant berating I’ve sent it’s way over the past two years. I have an OCD brain. In times of intense stress, it reverted to factory settings and turned it up to 11. It was the only way it knew to behave in the face of unrelenting fight-or-flight. My amygdala switch was broken. I had constant alarms going off that my baby and I were in danger and when I’d thoroughly and completely checked those “dangers” with no let up of the red flags, it decided that it was an inside job and that I was the danger. Possibly. Maybe. Probably not. But it could be…

It was meta beyond belief. It was like one of those needlessly complex, confusing and utterly shit Netflix sci-fi films that my husband insists on watching at one in the morning, instead of coming to bed.

I joke. But it’s not funny when you’re in the grip of a darkness that is so all consuming that you can’t breathe. You can’t think or see clearly. Your world has ended and cruelly, the actual world seems to carry on around you, blissfully unaware.

As I write this, the conductor on the train has had to make an impromptu announcement. We’ll be stuck here for the foreseeable future as “further down the track someone has been struck by a train”. Everyone in the carriage knows what that means. Or we assume we do. There were the beginnings of a rumbling whinge when he first started talking that swiftly turned to silence and resolution that we’re happy to wait. Like a collective “that poor fucker, rather them than me”.

People struggling and seeing their only way out as suicide is all around but we choose not to see it.

I’ve always been an A* student. Recovering from Postnatal OCD didn’t entirely change my personality. I wanted to be the best at getting better. I wanted to win at overcoming postnatal mental illness!

What a bell-end.

Having said that, I was the perfect candidate for treatment and recovery. I was having an understandable - given my OCD - reaction to a traumatic event. I had oodles of support from my husband, friends and family. I WANTED to get better more than anything. It was my only goal. The only reason I could get out of bed. I was engaging with the medical profession and being profoundly honest about my symptoms, experiences and fears. I did everything they asked of me and more besides. I must have spoken, intimately, to at least 25 different people, which is traumatising in itself. The shame and self-loathing you feel every time you have to verbalise, what to you are, deeply embarrassing failures and weaknesses. All while caring for a tiny new baby and everything that throws up in the normal course of events.

The help I received back from the NHS was at its worst, dangerous and at it’s best, good-hearted people up against an impossible system. I eventually had to go private, which I was in the fortunate position to do but as a freelancer it has drained and depleted the nest egg I had spent 10 years growing. You don’t get maternity pay as an actor. Add a dash of pandemic and you are broke.

I had perinatal mental health people promise they would call me and they didn’t. I was asked if I was suicidal, “yes” I replied shamefully but honestly. “Are you going to do anything this weekend?” (It was 4.30pm on a Friday and they were clocking out). “No, I would never do that to my husband and baby, I just feel so hopeless”. “Ok, great. Someone will be in touch on Monday morning but in the meantime I’ll pop some leaflets in the post for you”.

No-one called on Monday or for the next three weeks.

The leaflets arrived six weeks later.

Summoning every morsel of survivor’s spirit and then receiving no help is one of the most painful parts of this whole process.

I was told by a perinatal psychiatrist to “bake a cake” or “get a self-help book from the library”. You couldn’t get flour and libraries were closed due to lockdown. I had that particular call (it’s never face-to-face) on speaker with my husband as I hadn’t slept in days and needed an extra pair of ears for the nuggets of life-saving gold that were about to be bestowed upon my awaiting, desperate lugholes. I’m so glad my husband was there. He’s admitted since that he would never have believed me if I’d simply relayed it to him. That CAN’T have been what he said.

Different departments giving you, not just different advice but differing medical treatment, is overwhelming and dangerous when they chop and change your medication. Nothing ever seemed to be written down as I had to start from scratch with each new person. Taking months to get referred then being discharged from their service without being seen through paperwork error. Thinking you’re losing your mind and having it, seemingly, reenforced by strangers who were guessing and only had a one-time, forty minute slot with you. If they were excellent at their job, you’d never see them again. But ditto if they were crap, so swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The current system for dealing with mental health in the NHS DOES. NOT. WORK. You’d have better success taking a ticket at a deli counter and someone giving you a leaflet and any old SSRI, when your number’s up. It wouldn’t help any more but it wouldn’t be so drawn out and heart wrenching either.

Things need to change. People need to change how they speak about their and other people’s mental health. It so clandestine and shameful. It’s so full of whispers and pitying looks. It needs to be full of correct treatment at the correct time. It’s not about money. It’s the process. You don’t get where you need to be and, for some, that has devastating consequences.

If, after my birth, the c-section scar had split open and become infected, making me very poorly for the next two years, no-one would question me having treatment for it and I certainly wouldn’t be judged for it.

I’ve found out the hard way that it’s not the same for illnesses that we can’t see.

Mental Health is a lot like the air we breathe. Everything, everywhere, all at once but entirely invisible.

Without a stable and balanced mind, living is impossible. If living is impossible, what are your options?

Answers on a postcard.

Just don’t use the NHS postal system.

Kim x